Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Gutenberg's Apprentice

Author: Alix Christie

Narrator: Robert Petkoff

Format: Unabridged

Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-23-14

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

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 worlds most famous book: the Gutenberg Bible.

The year is 1450. Peter Schoeffer, an ambitious young scribe, returns from Paris to Mainz, his home town 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 Peters 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, 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.

Members Reviews:

Inkstained Wretches, Rejoice!

Whether you're a fan of typography, history or a well-turned phrase, this novel rooted in historical research will grip you tight until you finish, and linger long afterward.

This story is grand and sprawling in all the right ways. Alix Christie demythologizes the icon we know as Johannes Gutenberg and humanizes him with a portrayal of a gifted, driven, high-strung, imperfect, visionary man. Receiving almost equal billing is Peter Schoeffer, a young man who becomes Gutenberg's apprentice.

Characters, setting, dialog, and pacing all are competent and keep a story this vast moving without getting muddled. However, whereGutenberg's Apprenticeexcels is Christie's adept descriptions of minute details, such as the crafting of the punches, and the casting of pieces of type. She comes by this knowledge not only academically but with ink under her fingernails. She apprenticed beginning at age 16 with master letterpress printers and as an adult, as she puts it, "kept a hand in the `darkest art.'" It is fitting that someone with ink in her veins came across documentation of others involved in Gutenberg's mighty achievement and recognized that this was a story worth researching and telling.

Any top-notch historical biographer could have done a serviceable job describing the years of intrigue, perseverance, and privation that went into the development of movable, metal type.