Justification of Johann Gutenberg Poster
by Blake Morrison
Category: Fiction

Around 1400, in the city of Mainz, a man was born whose heretical invention was to change history. Some sixty years later he died — robbed of his business, his printing presses, and, so he thought, his immortality. In his dazzling first novel, Morrison gives us Gutenberg’s “testament” — his justification, dictated to one of the young scribes his invention will soon put out of work. Thus Morrison conjures up the 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.