Johann Gutenberg: A Private Life

1465, Mainz

The room answers to me badly now, though I still arrange it as if order might continue to confer authority where possession no longer does. The table has been turned nearer the light, the papers stacked within reach, the small metal fragments kept together in a shallow tray to the left where my fingers may still find them without searching, and yet the room remains a concession rather than a workshop, an afterplace in which the labour of earlier years is reduced to recollection and scrutiny. The fingers are stiff until I have worked them a little against the cold. Outside, presses work in houses that are not mine, and the regularity of their output would be almost consoling if it did not also prove how completely the method has entered the hands of men whose confidence rests upon groundwork they did not themselves endure. I am old enough now to see that invention does not lose its force when its maker is displaced; it merely becomes less courteous about the displacement. If I do not set down what governed the thing from the beginning, then the city will preserve the product and neglect the discipline that made it possible, which is the ordinary theft by which success is made respectable.