Gutenberg's Apprentice - Softcover

Christie, Alix

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1443433837 ISBN 13: 9781443433839

Verlag: HarperCollins Publishers, 2014

Über diesen Titel

Revue de presse:

“In this deeply researched historical novel dramatizing the biggest invention since the wheel Christie...explores the intricacies surrounding the breakthrough of movable type and the first print run of Gutenberg Bibles in medieval Germany...Christie deftly imbues its telling with the drama and intensity it demands.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

“This ambitious but beautifully executed historical novel captures the life and times of half a millennium ago, and with the above parallels, draws us closer to today’s publishing revolution.” (New York Journal of Books)

“Finely atmospheric...a haunting elegy to the culture of print... One thinks of Donna Tartt’s THE GOLDFINCH or Philip Roth’s AMERICAN PASTORAL. Such novels of craft and specialization take a writerly delight in the most intricate details of a particular trade while spinning rich prose out of its mysterious threads.” (Washington Post)

“I loved this novel! Alix Christie’s debut is intensely observed, so much so that I felt myself in the dark rooms of history with the people laboring over the metal and words to bring us print, but also laboring over their own lives and love and survival.” (Susan Straight, author of HIGHWIRE MOON, National Book Award Finalist)

“As beautifully written as the printed pages it describes, this is an intelligent, masterful novel that immerses the reader in a fascinating historical time and place.” (Rosamund Lupton, bestelling author of SISTER and AFTERWARDS)

“Christie masterfully depicts the time and energy required to print the first Bibles...A bravura debut.” (Kirkus Reviews (starred review))

“Enthralling...Christie demonstrates a printer’s precision...in her account of quattrocentro innovation, technology, politics, art and commerce.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review))

“An imaginative recounting of history that, despite a 15th-century setting, reflects many of today’s chief matters of concern...a must-read for anyone interested in the ever-changing art of publishing.” (BookPage)

“Christie has created a rich, masterful tale of “the darkest art” and its powerful effect on the written word.” (Katie Noah Gibson, Shelf Awareness)

“By juxtaposing the lexicon of traditional printing with references to modern concepts like intellectual property theft, Christie spotlights intriguing parallels between 15th-century Europe and the digital media of the 21st-century world.” (New York Times Book Review)

Présentation de l'éditeur:

The untold story of the world's first technology start-up.

Alix Christie's rich and enthralling debut novel reveals the explosive human drama behind the world-changing invention of the printing press and the creation of the world's most famous book: the Gutenberg Bible.

The year is 1450. Peter Schoeffer, an ambitious young scribe, returns from Paris to Mainz, his hometown on the Rhine, at the behest of his foster father, a forward-thinking merchant and bookseller. There he is unwillingly thrown into a workshop that his father has financed, a strange, dark place run by a driven, caustic master named Johann Gutenberg. Its purpose is the manufacture of books in a new-and according to some, blasphemous-way: with a secret invention known as a printing press.

Gutenberg's Apprentice is the story of Peter's journey from reluctant apprentice to overseer of the most important book ever made, and all that he seeks and is forced to understand along the way. It is the tale of a young man torn between two fathers, his resentment and grudging love for a man both brilliant and stormy, and their battle to prevail against seemingly insurmountable obstacles, including struggles within the workshop and against the crushing power of the Catholic Church. Each step they take awakens age-old conflicts between art and commerce, tradition bristling against technological progress, and fate versus human agency. This is the untold story of the last great communications revolution, with all the wonder and doubt the digital world provokes today vividly experienced half a millennium ago, in the workshop that produced the world's first printed book.

Writing with a rare sense of authenticity, Alix Christie has created in her debut novel a richly imagined, emotionally powerful and spectacularly convincing account of one of the most important events in Western history. Gutenberg's Apprentice is a profoundly moving story that will change forever your perception of what a book-handwritten, printed, or electronic-is or can be.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: HarperCollins Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1443433837
• ISBN 13: 9781443433839
• Einband: Broché
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416