The Justification of Johann Gutenberg

The Story

In a first novel that is both dazzling in its artistry and pure enchantment for the reader, Blake Morrison has woven a stunning narrative around the few facts that are known about the life and work of Johann Gensfleisch of Gutenberg. Morrison gives us Gutenberg's testament - his justification and apologia - dictated, ironically enough, to the kind of young scribe whom his invention of movable metal type made redundant. Through the aging narrator, Morrison conjures up the noisy, colourful, plague-ridden fifteenth-century rival cities of Mainz and Strasbourg, and takes us beyond into the flourishing cities of Europe. Here are rich burghers and their lusty daughters, wily apprentices, suspicious abbots, careless scribes and, of course, the early printing presses, trays, blocks, and inks. With subtle brushstrokes he paints religious wars and civic politics, trade guilds and the Church. Above all, there is the exasperating, endearing and finally haunting figure of Gutenberg: a man who gambled everything on the greatest invention of the last millennium, and lost.