Gutenberg's Apprentice

Starred review from July 14, 2014
This detailed historical novel takes readers into Gutenberg’s 15th-century Mainz workshop to experience the frustration and exhilaration of designing, typesetting, and rolling the first printed Bible off the press. Focusing on contributions made by Gutenberg’s associates, the story follows the apprenticeship of future publishing pioneer Peter Schoeffer from the day Peter’s adopted father, merchant-investor Johann Fust, tells him to give up life as a Parisian scribe in order to learn a new trade using Gutenberg’s secret technology and techniques. For unhappy Peter, printed texts seem less sacred, and certainly less artistic, than hand-copied manuscripts. Demanding and sometimes devious, Gutenberg proves a difficult boss; worst of all, the equipment still has bugs to work out. Only when Peter comes up with his own innovation does he appreciate print’s artistry and power. Despite obstacles posed by the Church, guilds, family, and friends, Fust, Gutenberg, and Schoeffer’s tenuous collaboration culminates in the Gutenberg Bible. Contemporary readers suspicious of digital texts will sympathize with Peter’s mixed feelings towards print. History buffs will savor the moment the inventor, the scribe, and the merchant make a decision that leads them out of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. Journalist Christie’s fiction debut descriptions of technical processes and medieval society are enthralling; the romance and personal melodrama are less compelling. At her best, she demonstrates a printer’s precision and a dogged researcher’s diligence in her painstakingly meticulous account of quattrocento innovation, technology, politics, art, and commerce.

August 1, 2014

The year is 1450, and Peter Schoeffer, who has been working as a scribe in Paris, is recalled to the German city of Mainz by his foster father, Johann Fust. A successful merchant, Fust is burning with excitement over an encounter with a "most amazing man." The man, known as Gutenberg, has invented a method of printing a book using a machine. Fust promises to fund Gutenberg's workshop, but only if Schoeffer is accepted as an apprentice. At first, Schoeffer finds the idea of a mechanically printed book to be blasphemous but feels he must look out for Fust's interests. Gutenberg and Schoeffer, needing more money and finding themselves in the middle of a power struggle between the merchants and the church, pursue the publication of a Bible. As the years-long process draws to a close, Gutenberg breaks rules and bullies his way to the production of a book that was thought by many to be a miracle. VERDICT Christie's slow-paced debut is rich in historical detail. Although the writing can be overblown, the story of the birth of the printing press is fascinating. Readers who enjoy historical fiction such as Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures will enjoy this admirable outing. [See Prepub Alert, 3/31/14.]--Terry Lucas, Rogers Memorial Lib., Southampton, NY

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2014
Christie debuts with a literary exploration of Gutenberg and his printing press, which sparked a technological revolution-as well as the other men involved who were left in history's shadows.Johann Fust, prosperous merchant of Mainz, Germany, gathered guilders and gold for Gutenberg. Peter Schoeffer, Fust's ward who was training in Paris as a scribe, was called home to become Gutenberg's apprentice-and watch over the mad genius. An orphaned peasant boy, cousin of Fust's first wife, Schoeffer resented being drawn away from intellectual circles but came to see his chance to "raise again the...lamp of learning." Schoeffer's the primary protagonist, his interior journey from frustration to reconciliation to obsession with Gutenberg's press deftly chronicled against the panorama of the 15th century-the jealous craft guilds, the iron hand and depraved greed of the church hierarchy, the free towns like Mainz controlled by the machinations of oligarchs called Elders. Schoeffer anchors the story, but Gutenberg flashes-megalomaniacal and duplicitous, with hair "wild and bristling to his shoulders...beard cascad[ing]...glinting here and there like twists of wire," and "glowing, canine eyes." Christie masterfully depicts the time and energy required to print the first Bibles, a yearslong process of trial and error, tinkering with ink and type, lines and paper, guilder after guilder spent without return, all against a catastrophic backdrop of plague, the fall of Constantinople, the violent superstitions of the peasantry, and a vested intelligentsia fearing the press would generate "crude words crudely wrought...smut and prophecy, the ranting of anarchists and antichrists." Bibles, 180 in all, are printed in the strictest secrecy lest the press be seized "as a threat to the scriptoria whose proceeds kept the landed cloisters fat." While rendered chronologically, with a second narrative thread about Schoeffer's courtship of his first wife, the narrative is given texture through intermittent chapters in which Schoeffer, years later-worried that Gutenberg's triumph was more corrupt than holy-relates his story to Trithemius, abbot of Sponheim. A bravura debut.

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Starred review from August 1, 2014
This gorgeously written debut, set in the cathedral city of fifteenth-century Mainz, dramatizes the creation of the Gutenberg Bible in a story that devotees of book history and authentic historical fiction will relish. When scribe Peter Schoeffer gets called home from Paris by his foster father, Johann Fust, to be trained by the headstrong, brilliant Johann Gutenberg in the groundbreaking art of movable-type printing, he is resentful and apprehensive. With a confident hand, Christie illuminates the daily life and religious mindset of late medieval Germany as Peter grapples with new ideas. In an era that sees manuscript copying as an act of spiritual communion, is the mass production of letters blasphemous or an efficient way of spreading God's word? As tensions flare between the wealthy archbishop and the reform-minded pope, and as local guilds rise in power, Gutenberg establishes a secret workshop where he, Peter, and Fust, his financial backer, become an unstoppable trio. Readers are offered a captivating view of early printing techniques and the obstacles encountered over the several years in which each successive line of the Bible is inked onto vellum and paper. An inspiring tale of ambition, camaraderie, betrayal, and cultural transformation based on actual events and people, this wonderful novel fully inhabits its age.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)