On his next visit to the Cathedral he came home with a big package under his arm. He unwrapped it, and showed Anna a large volume. “See,” said he, “this is the ‘History of St. John the Evangelist.’ The Abbot gave it to me in return for some more copies of my St. Christopher. It is written on vellum with a pen, and all the initial letters are illuminated. There are sixty-three pages, and some patient monk has spent months, aye, perhaps years, in making it. But I have a plan to engrave it all, just as I did the picture.”
“Engrave a whole book! That would be a miracle!”
“I believe I can do it. And when once the sixty-three blocks are cut, a block to a page, I can print a score of the books as easily as one copy.”
“Then thou canst sell books as well as the monks! And when the blocks are done it may not take more than a day to make a book, instead of months and years.”
So John Gutenburg set to work with new enthusiasm. He needed a very quiet place in which to carry out his scheme, and more room than he had at home. It is said he found such a place in the ruined cloisters of the Monastery of St. Arbogast in the suburbs of Strasburg. Thither he stole away whenever he could leave the shop, and not even Anna went with him, nor even to her did he tell what he was doing. At last he brought home the tools he had been making, and started to cut the letters of the first pages of the “History of St. John.” Night after night he worked at it, until a great pile of engraved blocks was done.
Then one evening there was a knock at the door of the living-room, and before he could answer it the door was opened, and the two apprentices, Dritzhn and Hielman, came in. They saw their master bending over wooden blocks, a pile of tools, and the open pages of the History. “What is this?” exclaimed Dritzhn. “Some new mystery?”
“I cannot explain now,” said the confused inventor.
“But thou promised to teach us all thy arts for the money we pay thee,” objected Hielman, who was of an avaricious turn of mind.