Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

Really, Manutius’s codex vitae is just what it claims to be: it’s a book about his life. As a work of history, it’s a treasure. But it’s the part about Gerritszoon that I want to focus on.

I used Google to translate this from Latin, so bear with me if I get some of the details wrong.

Young Gerritszoon wandered through the Holy Land, doing metalwork to make a bit of money here and there. Manutius says he was meeting up with mystics—Kabbalists, Gnostics, and Sufis alike—and trying to figure out what to do with his life. He was also hearing rumors, through the goldsmiths’ grapevine, of some pretty interesting stuff happening up in Venice.

This is a map of Gerritszoon’s journey, as well as I can reconstruct it. He meandered around the Mediterranean—down through Constantinople, into Jerusalem, across to Egypt, back up through Greece, over to Italy.

Venice is where he met Aldus Manutius.

SLIDE 5

It was at Manutius’s printing house that Gerritszoon found his place in the world. Printing called on all of his skills as a metalsmith, but it bent them to new purposes. Printing wasn’t baubles and bracelets—it was words and ideas. Also, this was basically the internet of its day; it was exciting.

And just like the internet today, printing in the fifteenth century was all problems, all the time: How do you store the ink? How do you mix the metal? How do you mold the type? The answers changed every six months. In every great city of Europe, there were a dozen printing houses all trying to figure it out first. In Venice, the greatest of those printing houses belonged to Aldus Manutius, and that’s where Gerritszoon went to work.

Manutius recognized his talent immediately. He also says he recognized his spirit; he saw that Gerritszoon was a searcher, too. So he hired him, and they worked together for years. They became best friends. There was no one Manutius trusted more than Gerritszoon, and no one Gerritszoon respected more than Manutius.

SLIDE 6

So finally, after a few decades, after inventing a new industry and printing hundreds of volumes that we still think of as, like, the most beautiful books ever made, both of these guys were getting old. They decided to collaborate on a great final project, one that was going to take everything they’d experienced, everything they’d learned, and package it up for posterity.

Manutius wrote his codex vitae, and in it, he was honest: He explained how things really worked in Venice. He explained the shady deals he’d struck to secure his exclusive license to print the classics; he explained how all his rivals had tried to shut him down; he explained how he’d shut a few of them down instead. Precisely because he was so honest, and because if it was released immediately it would damage the business he was passing on to his son, he wanted to encrypt it. But how?

At the same time, Gerritszoon was cutting a typeface, his best ever—a bold new design that would sustain Manutius’s printing house after he was gone. He hit a home run, because those are the shapes that now bear his name. But in the process, he did something unexpected.

Aldus Manutius died in 1515, leaving behind a very revealing memoir. At this point, according to the lore of the Unbroken Spine, Manutius entrusted Gerritszoon with the key to this encrypted history. But something got lost in translation over five hundred years.

Gerritszoon didn’t get the key.

Gerritszoon is the key.

SLIDE 7

Here’s a picture of one of the Gerritszoon punches: the X.

Here it is closer.

And closer still.

Here it is through my friend Mat’s magnifying glass. Do you see the tiny notches in the edge of the letter? They look like the teeth of a gear, don’t they?—or the teeth of a key.

(There’s a loud, rattling gasp. It’s Tyndall. I can always count on him to get excited.)

Those tiny notches are not accidents, and they are not random. There are notches like that on all the punches, and all the molds made from the punches, and every piece of Gerritszoon type ever made. Now, I had to go to Nevada to figure this out; I had to hear Clark Moffat’s voice on tape to really get it. But if I’d known what I was looking for, I could have opened up my laptop, typed out some text in Gerritszoon, and blown it up 3,000 percent. The notches are in the computer version, too. Down in their library, the Unbroken Spine doesn’t deign to use computers … but up above, the Festina Lente Company hired some very diligent digitizers.

That’s the code, right there. Those tiny notches.

Nobody in the fellowship’s five-hundred-year history thought to look this closely. Neither did any of Google’s code-breakers. We were looking at digitized text in a different typeface entirely. We were looking at the sequence, not the shape.