Written by: admin on January 26, 2015 @ 7:18 pm
Peter Shoeffer, a name recognized by my brethren in the Black Art, was an apprentice and heir to the invention of Johann Gutenberg. Shoeffer became the first major printer, producing nearly 300 books in his career. This evening, I finished a novel, Gutenberg’s Apprentice; earlier today, I installed a new digital press. I drew a contrast between the new technology and a craft struggling for relevance in a digital world.
The contrast would be recognizable to my grandfather’s grandfather and his sons, which learned to set type in a stick and set a forme, similar to printers of the incunabla, for they felt the same way when they saw the Linotype. My grandfather and uncle felt the same as they witnessed the advent of offset. Each generation embraced changes, each maintained an undeniable beauty in their work. And, each generation of craftsmen in The Art maintained the heritage of language, skill and brotherhood passed directly from Gutenberg.
But the magic of Christie’s novel is writing the story as she imagined it occurred. It is in her supposition of what young Peter felt as he was given to apprenticeship after realizing his own accomplishment as a scribe; the telling of his realization of the calling to produce the Word of God by mechanical process; the realization that the beauty and perfection of a printed page would exceed anything produced by scribe’s hand, and his understanding that a message could be distributed to the masses, that Peter came to grasp what Gutenberg knew: the power the press held.
Books are my passion, for they live for generations. Books contain concepts, hopes and dreams, or fears of the writer; thoughts worth preserving. The personality of the writer’s content must be captured not only by the words, but in the arrangement of the letters and page. I love the letterforms; setting the rows and columns into pages that capture and communicate the words that another has written, and placing my mark upon each page in how I arrange those letters. The choice of font, kerning, leading, proportions and flourishes make the page in itself pleasing to the eye and easy for the eye to follow. A well-set book is as much a thing of beauty as the knowledge contained within. Christie captured my passion in a way as no other I have read.
Though the craft may appear to die with the digital revolution, as letterpress did with offset, as hand-set did with hot-type, each a thing of beauty and respects the tradition –and the craft– that preceded it. All owe everything to the Master, and to his apprentice Shoeffer. Guttenberg’s Apprentice gives due credit to both, and to what they wrought: not a Bible, not moveable type, rather a craft that will forever record the hope of all mankind in the only form so perfectly beautiful as to adequately reproduce the very Word of God.
Only through Divine Providence have I been chosen to be a part of such a legacy!
