The Justification of Johann Gutenberg

Blake Morrison

ISBN 10: 0099285290 / ISBN 13: 9780099285298

Published by Random House, 2001

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Bibliographic Details

Title: The Justification of Johann Gutenberg

Publisher: Random House

Publication Date: 2001

Binding: Soft cover

Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis:

Around 1400, in the city of Mainz, a man was born whose heretical invention was to change history. Sixty odd years later he died - robbed of his business, his printing presses, and, so he thought, his immortality. Johann Gutenberg, master printer, charmer, conman and visionary was the man who invented 'artificial writing' and printed the Gutenberg Bible.In his dazzling first novel Morrison gives us Gutenberg's 'testament' - his justification, dictated to one of the young scribes his invention has put out of work. Through the words of his endearing, exasperating creation Morrison conjures up the colourful, plague-ridden world of fifteenth-century Europe, the rich burghers, concupiscent daughters, wily apprentices, careless scribes - and the craftsmen who pioneered the art of print. But, above all, there is the exasperating, endearing and finally haunting figure of Gutenberg himself: a man who gambled everything - money, honour, friendship and a woman's love - on the greatest invention of the last millennium.

Review:

The Justification of Johann Gutenberg, Blake Morrison's first novel, a historical novel about the man who invented printing from metal type and thereby revolutionised the culture of the book in Christian Europe. His published output has been nothing if not varied: among his works are several volumes of poetry, the acclaimed memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father? and As If, a study of the Bulger case.

Born 600 years ago, Gutenberg here is portrayed as an old man looking back on the personal failures and scant professional successes of a life driven by the dream of a radical and democratising invention: the printing press. "What I fear is that death will rub out what I have done, till not a trace of me is left upon the earth." The irony of this early admission is obvious, for print is exactly what remains of him, but the deeper force of the book is marked by the need to "justify"--to himself, to posterity, to God. Morrison's Gutenberg is, in some ways, a recognisable modern figure: his difficult relationships with his parents, his problematic liaisons with women, the sacrifice of amorous happiness to ambition, the struggles with financial hardship, the scandalous aura imputed to homosociality. These are very much the concerns of modern biography, here recast into historical fictional narrative. Larger social and cultural forces are dutifully sketched by Morrison, but ultimately his interest is in the man who dreams of being a "volume in eternity" who will be "assembled in [God's] library". Fame was ever the spur, it seems. --Burhan Tufail