The Book of Secrets

HISTORICAL NOTE

For a man whose invention transformed the world, Johann Gutenberg left remarkably little of his own life imprinted on history: a few receipts, a couple of mentions in civic documents, and partial records of the four court cases referenced in this novel. Most of them raise more questions than they answer. The reality they reveal – industrial espionage, non-disclosure agreements, intellectual property rights, demand ing venture-capitalist investors, precarious financing, lawsuits – would be familiar to any Silicon Valley entrepreneur today. They remind us that printing was a uniquely complex and expensive undertaking, requiring vast sums of capital to be invested over many years, as well as management skills and a production-line organisation almost unknown in the Middle Ages. Gutenberg’s genius must have been for financial engineering and logistics, just as much as his technical mastery of inks, metals, mechanisms and paper. In this book, I have allowed my imagination free reign over Gutenberg’s early years. The later chapters, in Strassburg and Mainz, are more anchored to the few facts that are generally agreed.

But Gutenberg’s life is an open book compared to that of the Master of the Playing Cards. Nothing survives except for his work, a vague idea of the time and place where he lived, and the consensus that he was the first man to print images from copper engravings. Like other artistic breakthroughs, not least Gutenberg’s Bible, the cards are not just technologically innovative but genuine masterpieces.

The idea that these two giants of early printing could have met and collaborated is compelling, though unprovable. Both were active in the first half of the fifteenth century in the Rhineland; both used presses in some of the earliest examples of mechanised mass-production. As described in the novel, several of the Master’s images appear in an illuminated Gutenberg Bible now at Princeton University, while others appear in a giant handwritten Bible which must have been produced in Mainz at the same time as Gutenberg’s Bible was coming off the press.

If the ideal of the medieval artist was to leave no trace of himself on work that ultimately derived from God, then both Gutenberg and the Master of the Playing Cards succeeded almost too well. The Master’s name is lost to history; Gutenberg was equally forgotten for almost two hundred years, buried by Fust and Schoeffer’s propaganda. But for their passion to mass-produce text and images, the modern world is their monument.