Did not finish...however:

The story of the invention of the printing press and the work behind the Gutenberg Bible told from the perspective of his apprentice. I found the subject matter genuinely fascinating and there’s some wonderful passages. Perhaps I was reading it at the wrong time (new job, trying to read on lunch breaks) and just didn’t get fully immersed. However the politics of the church and the situation in Mainz at the time is fairly relevant to the motivations and resulting history. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to be that interested in it. Coupled with the fact the characters are pretty unsympathetic (you can’t make real people nice or witty just to suit modern whims, I know) and a slow pace (this was the church’s fault for holding up progress!) I just kept putting the book down. Still I liked A LOT of what I read and there was plenty of little snippets that I took note of.

The world is flooded now with crude words crudely wrought, an overwhelming glut of pages pouring from the scores of presses springing up like mushrooms after rain. Churning out their smut and prophecy, the rantings of the anarchists and antichrists – the scholars of the classics are in uproar at how printing has defiled the book.

Review copy provided by publisher.