Around 1400, in the city of Mainz, a man was born whose invention of moveable metal type was to change the written word for ever and alter the course of history itself. Johann Gutenberg died 60 years later, robbed of his business, his printing presses and, so he thought, of his immortality.

Through the words he puts into the mouth of this endearing, maddening, touching creation Morrison conjures up a noisy, colourful, plague-ridden fifteenth-century world in the rival cities of Mainz and Strasbourg, as well as in the wider European world beyond, from the flourishing cities of the Rhine to the lowland plains in the North.