The Book of Secrets

LXXIV

Mainz

All that winter we worked like dogs. While October rains flooded the fields and turned the roads to bog, we were stuck in our own mire of ink and lead. I watched carters bruise their shoulders trying to heave their heavy wagons out of the mud, and felt a kinship.

Snow fell in December. As Fust would not allow fires in the Humbrechthof, we froze. I had to send the crews back to the Gutenberghof in shifts, to thaw beside the forge where we boiled ink and recast the old types. It made the short, dark days shorter still. One morning we found the piles of damp paper frozen solid. The presses jammed, and ink would not to stick to the page.

Yet even more fragile was the human machinery. I was making more books than perhaps any man in history, but my fingers rarely touched paper or ink. The whole house had become a mechanism, as intricate as anything Saspach ever built. I was the screw that drove it. Too much pressure and the mechanism would snap; too little, and we would not make an impression. I had to know how many pages the compositors should set each hour, each day, each week, and how many men the task would need, so that the press men neither sat idle nor rushed their work. I had to see which apprentices were quarrel some or placid, sloppy or over-meticulous, and match them accordingly. I had to make sure that it was impossible for a form to reach the press unless it had been approved, and I had to decide how to order the finished quires in the storeroom so that we could divide them correctly when we assembled them into books. These were invisible mechanisms – systems of thought, order and imagination – but they were as necessary to our art as any invention of wood or iron.

And there was Kaspar. At first I tried to put him in charge of a press, but after three days he disappeared. The press sat idle all morning while we searched for him, and Fust was furious. When we found him, in an alehouse, he told me he did not want the job. I told him I would give it to Schoeffer, which angered him so much he agreed to stay on. But I quickly regretted it. He arrived late, quarrelled with his assistants and in short order offended half the men in the Humbrechthof. Sometimes he insisted on re-pressing for the least blemish; at other times, he waved through the most horrendous errors, and I would spend an afternoon digging through the store house to locate them.

Too late, I admitted he was not suited to the work. He delighted in novelty, in the wild freedom of invention. But our task was a discipline as much as an art, novel only in its absolute routine.

One evening, I tried to explain it to him. ‘In this house we are a brotherhood, serving God, our art and each other. The books we make are not mine or yours or Fust’s. They are of God. The more perfect they are, the closer to God they advance.’

‘And will God take the profits when you sell them?’

I shook my head in frustration. ‘You’ve missed the point. The work is boring and repetitive -’

‘Like a hammer banging nails.’

‘- but what matters is that we do it. Like monks saying their services, the unchanging cycle holds a mirror to God.’

‘And a fine monk you’d have made, no doubt,’ said Kaspar cruelly. ‘If I wanted to live a flat and repetitious life I’d have become a farmer: plough, sow, reap; plough, sow, reap; ploughing the same old rut until it furrowed my grave.’ The scars on his face throbbed. ‘But I can do more, and so can you. More than pulling a lever to make another copy of your book, like a miller grinding flour.’

The next time he quit his post, as inevitably he did, I let him go. To avoid making the situation worse I gave the job to Keffer, but this only embarrassed him and offended Schoeffer, for both knew that Schoeffer was the better candidate. I paid Kaspar’s wages, but he had no place in the Humbrechthof. Sometimes – rarely – he would visit, drifting around the house and setting me on edge until he left. I think he enjoyed inflicting disorder on our work. The rest of the time he stayed in the Gutenberghof, taking work as an illuminator to occupy himself.

I was sad, though it had become inevitable. Somewhere in our journey, it had stopped being our art and become mine.

In April, things began to change. Longer days relieved the pressure to use every scrap of daylight; men saw their tasks with fresh eyes not wearied from squinting through the gloom. Shivering hands that had flinched to pick up the icy metal types now plucked them nimbly and set them in their rows. A rhythm established itself, beaten out every day by the clack of types in their racks, the creak of the press, the rattle of hand-carts bringing fresh ink. When Fust greeted me with, ‘How many pages?’ the answers no longer made him scowl.

I had told Kaspar we were like monks, and it was true. Like a monastery, we were locked away from the world. Men in the street could hear the sounds from within and wonder, but they never saw what passed behind our gates. The work of the books was our monastic rule. The fetching of paper and ink in the morning was our prime; the morning assembly, where we gathered in the print room to allocate the day’s tasks, our chapter – and so through to vespers, when we washed the ink off the forms and the presses, unscrewed the frames and returned the letters to the type room, to be sorted for the next day. We worked together, we ate together, we argued and laughed together: we were a brotherhood.

Most of my days were occupied far from the press: answering questions, solving disputes, settling payments and accounts. But there were moments of peace, times when the whole house turned in ordered motion, like the orbit of the planets around the earth. Those were the hours I was most happy. I walked through the house, observing the world I had brought into being and marvelling at the daily acts of creation under its roof.

Of course it was not all sunshine. Men quarrelled; presses broke; errors emerged, usually just after we had broken apart the offending page and scattered its type. Stores went missing, occasioning furious arguments with Fust. As time passed, the burden of our enterprise began to tell on me. I lay awake in my bed, alone, obsessively counting the pages printed, pages set, pages yet to come. No longer flush with the adventure’s promise, instead I longed for it to end. Each time I crossed the threshold of the Gutenberghof I glanced up at the stone pilgrim, bent double under his invisible burden, and felt a twinge of sympathy.

But I cannot complain. After all that had come before, and what happened after, these were good days.