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Alix Christie was born in California, spent her childhood summers in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, and has lived in Paris, San Francisco, and Berlin. She has been a widely published journalist for thirty years, with work featured in the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, Salon, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her short fiction has been published by Southwest Review and Other Voices. A letterpress printer since her youth, Alix Christie currently lives in London, where she reviews books and the arts for The Economist.
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How did the idea for your novel originate?
My grandfather taught me how to print when I was a teenager, and I've been a devotee of letterpress ever since. I own a wonderful old cast-iron press that currently resides in San Francisco. Then one day in in 2001 I read a story in the New York Times that turned out to be the spark that set me going on this novel. Scholars at Princeton had made a big splash in the book history world, reporting that Gutenberg's first types might not have been as advanced as people thought. I tucked that scrap away, and when I moved to Berlin, Germany, a few years later, I started looking into the history of this incredible book, the Gutenberg Bible, the first major volume made with metal type. What I discovered blew my mind—a whole new picture of this earth-shaking invention that hardly anyone knew about.
Most people think of Gutenberg as a lone genius, but you tell a different story – of collaboration between three essential people. Where did you find this radical new theory?
As Hilary Mantel says, writers of historical fiction stand on the shoulders of giants – the scholars who actually excavate the past. What I learned was that over the past 25 years, experts in early printing have ...
Vanora Bennett became a journalist almost by accident. Having learned Russian and been hired after university by Reuters, she was catapulted out of the classical-music life of her family and straight into the adrenaline-... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Gutenberg's Apprentice
Try:
Portrait of an Unknown Woman
by Vanora Bennett
Jessie Burton studied at the University of Oxford and then went on to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She is the author of three novels for adults, The Miniaturist (2014), The Muse (2016) and The Confession (... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Gutenberg's Apprentice
Try:
The Miniaturist
by Jessie Burton
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