1In the days when the books of the lamp-keepers had come west over the mountains, a book was still one candle. One hand wrote it. One room held it. When that room burned, the book was gone from the earth, and no one could say what had been in it.
2There was a boy in the city of Mainz, on the great river Rhine, whose name was Jost. His father had been a copier of books. In three years the father made one Bible, letter by letter, with a goose quill, at a north window. Then his eyes clouded, and after his eyes his chest, and he went through the Last Door owing money for ink.
3Jost was eleven. He could read, which was rare in a poor boy, and he had nothing else. His mother took him by the wrist to a house near the church of Saint Christopher, where a goldsmith was hiring hands, and she said, "He knows his letters. He eats little."
4The goldsmith was a man past fifty named Johann, of the house called Gutenberg. He had a long beard and burned fingers, and he looked at Jost the way he looked at metal, to see what was in it.
5"Can you keep your mouth shut?" he said.
6"Yes, master."
7"We shall see. Every boy says yes."
8Before Jost was let past the inner door he was made to swear, with his hand on a relic, that he would tell no one what was done in that house. Not his mother. Not the priest. He swore. He thought they must be making false coin.
9They were not making coin. Listen, and hear what they made.
10In the first room a man sat cutting the shape of a single letter on the end of a steel rod, backward, as small as a grain of barley. It took him a day to cut one letter. When it was hard he struck it into a slip of soft copper, and the letter stayed there, hollow, like a footprint in mud.
11In the second room stood the mould. It was the goldsmith's own thought, and it was the heart of the secret. It was two pieces of iron in a wooden jacket that slid to fit the copper footprint, wide for an M, narrow for an I. A man poured into it a ladle of hot metal, which was lead and tin and a grey stuff the smiths call antimony. He gave the mould one shake. He opened it, and out fell a letter, bright and standing, with a foot to stand on.
12Then he did it again. And the second letter was the same as the first. And the hundredth was the same as the second. One man could cast letters all day, as fast as breathing, and never was one of them tired, or crooked, or wrong.
13In the third room men stood at slanted cases and picked the letters up one at a time and set them in rows, a line, a page. In the fourth room was a press, such as the wine-makers use on grapes. They locked the page of metal on its bed. They beat it with leather balls full of black ink that was made with oil and soot. They laid a damp sheet on it, and a strong man pulled the bar.
14Jost's work was to beat the ink, and to hang the wet sheets on lines like washing.
15On his third day he took down a dry sheet and read it. In the beginning God created heaven and earth. It was the first page of the Bible. The letters were black and square and even, as if written by the best scribe in the world on the best day of his life.
16He took down the next sheet. It was the same page. He laid one on the other and held them up to the window, and the letters of the one lay upon the letters of the other, stroke on stroke, with no light between.
17He took down a third, and a tenth. They were all the same page.
18Jost sat down on the floor. He was thinking of a north window, and three years, and a man's eyes.
19The master found him there. He did not strike him. He looked at the sheets in the boy's hands, and then at the boy's face, and he seemed to know what was in it.
20"How many are you making?" Jost asked.
21"Nine score. A hundred and eighty."
22"How long?"
23"Two years. Three, if the money holds." The master rubbed his burned fingers. "The money will not hold. But that is not your trouble, boy. Beat the ink."
24Now the money was this. The master had sold what he owned and it was not enough. So he had gone to a rich man of the city named Johann Fust, and borrowed eight hundred guilders, and then eight hundred more. Every sheet of paper, every skin of vellum, every pound of metal in that house was bought with Fust's gold, and Fust came often to look at what his gold was doing.
25With Fust came a young man named Peter Schoeffer, who had been a fine scribe in Paris and now was the best hand in the shop. He was to marry Fust's daughter. Jost saw the two of them, the rich man and the clever one, standing together by the press, speaking low.
26For three years the house near Saint Christopher's did its secret work. Six men set the pages. Two presses and then more ran from first light. The sheets rose in stacks to Jost's shoulder, and then over his head. He grew, and was given a case of letters, and learned to set a line faster than a man can write one.
27In the autumn of the third year the last sheets were on the lines. The Bibles lay in the storeroom in their hundred and eighty heaps, waiting only for the painters who would add the red letters by hand. In a month they would be sold, and the debt paid, and the goldsmith a made man.
28In that month Fust went to law.
29He asked for all his money back at once, with the interest on it, two thousand guilders and more. He knew the master could not pay until the books were sold. He knew it very well. That was why he chose that month and not the next.
30The court met in the dining hall of the Barefoot Friars. The master did not go. He sent his priest and two of his workmen to hear what would be sworn, and Jost walked behind them because no one told him not to.
31He stood at the back among the benches and saw Fust lay his hand on the holy book and swear to his sums. It did not take long. A notary wrote it down. Then the men of the law said what the law said, and it was this: the goldsmith must pay, and if he could not pay, then the things bought with the money were the lender's.
32The presses were bought with the money. The metal was bought with the money. The paper and the skins were bought with the money, and the paper and the skins were now the Bibles.
33So in one morning the goldsmith lost the house of the presses, and the letters he had dreamed for twenty years, and the book. Fust took them all, and Peter Schoeffer went with Fust, and ran the shop, and married the daughter. The Bibles were sold. Not one coin of it came to the man who had found the way to make them.
34Jost carried the news back with the priest. He thought the master would shout, or weep. The master sat a while with his hands on his knees.
35"He has the presses," the master said at last. "He has the letters. He has not got what is in here." And he touched his own forehead with a black finger. "I will begin again, smaller. Will you come, boy?"
36Here is a hard thing, and it is told because it is true. Jost did not go with him. His mother was sick that winter, and the new shop of Fust and Schoeffer paid wages, and the old master could pay none. Jost stayed with the men who had taken the work. He set their pages and ate their bread. When he passed the old man in the street he looked at his shoes.
37The master did begin again, in a small way, with borrowed tools. And Fust and Schoeffer made fine books and grew rich, and they kept the secret closer than ever. Every new hand swore the oath. The art must not leave Mainz. If it stayed in one house, in one city, that house could ask what price it liked.
38Now hear how the door was broken.
39In those years two great lords quarrelled over who should be archbishop of Mainz. Each had his soldiers, and the city stood with the one who lost. On a night at the end of October the other lord's men came over the wall with ladders while the watch slept.
40Jost woke to bells and the smell of smoke. He was a man now, twenty-one, with a room above a cooper's yard. He ran toward the shop through streets full of people running the other way. He saw men he knew lying in the gutter, and he did not stop, and he was ashamed of that afterward.
41The shop was burning when he reached it. The roof was already in. Through the door he could see the presses standing in the fire like men, and the cases of letters sagging, and bright metal running across the floor in little streams.
42By the next evening it was over. Hundreds of the townsmen were dead. The new lord had the rest called to the market square, eight hundred men, and there he took their goods and their rights and drove them out through the gate with what they stood in. Jost went out with them. The old goldsmith was driven out too, somewhere in that crowd, a man of sixty with nothing in his hands.
43On the road south Jost fell in with four others from the shop. They sat that night in a barn with no fire, hungry, and for a long time no one spoke. Then one of them, a caster from Strasbourg, said, "I swore an oath to a house. There is no house."
44No one answered him. But each man looked at his own hands. Each of them had the whole art there: how to cut the punch, how to fit the mould, how to mix the metal, how to boil the ink. A shop can be burned. What the hand knows goes out through the gate with the hand.
45In the morning they did not stay together. There was not work for five in any one town. One went down the river to Cologne. One went west toward France. Two went over the high passes into Italy, and Jost was one of those, with his shoes tied up in rags, in the first snow.
46Where each man stopped, he found a smith and a carpenter and a merchant with a little money, and he built a press. He took boys in, as he had been taken in, and he showed them. No one made them swear.
47Think of a man who tries to stamp out a fire by kicking it, and sends the coals into every dry field. That lord wanted a city. What he did was scatter the making of books over all the lands of Europe. Within ten years there were presses in Rome and Venice and Paris. When Jost was an old man there were presses in more than two hundred towns, and they had made more books in fifty years than all the scribes of the west had made in a thousand.
48A book no longer cost a vineyard. A student could own one. A thing once printed could not be burned, for there was always another copy in another city, and another after that. A learned man in one country could say, "Open your copy to the tenth leaf," and a learned man in another could open his, and find the same words there, and the same mistake, and send back the mending of it.
49It was old knowledge, older than walls: a fire is not made smaller when another is lit from it. But it had never before been done with a thought.
50As for the goldsmith, he came back to Mainz when he was let. The very lord who had burned the city gave him, in his last years, a suit of court clothes each winter, and a measure of grain, and a measure of wine. He died about three years after. He was laid in the church of the Barefoot Friars, where the oath had been sworn against him, and that church is gone now, and no one knows where he lies.
51Jost thought of him every working day of his life, and never without the old shame. He had left the man for wages. He could not unmake that. What was in his Near Hand was the work, and he did the work, and he taught it to anyone who asked.
52He ended in Venice, an old journeyman with ink in the cracks of his hands, in the shop of a printer from Augsburg. There, in his last good year, he helped to set a book that had never been printed before, for it was full of lines and circles and no one had known how to print those. It was the book of Euclid, the measurer of Alexandria. It had gone from Greek into the tongue of Baghdad, and from that tongue into Latin, and now it went into lead.
53Hundreds of copies went out from Venice that year in barrels, by ship and cart and river. One of them came, in time, far to the north, into the cold country of the Poles. A student from the town of Toruń bought it and wrote his name in it. His name was Nicolaus.
54But before his story there is another, for in those same years men had begun to do with ships what the printers had done with books. Now hear what came after.