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.
The code is both complicated and simple. Complicated because an uppercase F is different from a lowercase f. Complicated because the ligature ff isn’t two lowercase f’s — it’s a completely different punch. Gerritszoon has tons of alternate glyphs — three P’s, two C’s, a truly epic Q—and those all mean something different. To crack this code, you need to think typographically.
But after that, it’s simple, because all you have to do is count the notches, which I did: carefully, under a magnifying glass, at my kitchen table, no data centers required. This is the kind of code you learn in a comic book: one number corresponds to one letter. It’s a simple substitution, and you can use it to decode Manutius’s codex vitae in no time.
SLIDE 8
You can also do something else. When you lay the punches out in order — the same order they’d use in a case in a fifteenth-century print shop — you get another message. It’s a message from Gerritszoon himself. His final words for the world have been hiding in plain sight for five hundred years.
It’s nothing spooky, nothing mystical. It’s just a message from a man who lived a long time ago. But here’s the part that is spooky: look around you.
(Everybody does. Lapin cranes her neck. She looks worried.)
See the signs on the shelves — where it says HISTORY and ANTHROPOLOGY and TEEN PARANORMAL ROMANCE? I noticed it earlier: those signs are all set in Gerritszoon.
The iPhone comes loaded with Gerritszoon. Every new Microsoft Word document defaults to Gerritszoon. The Guardian sets headlines in Gerritszoon; so do Le Monde and the Hindustan Times. The Encyclopædia Britannica used to be set in Gerritszoon; Wikipedia just switched last month. Think of the term papers, the curriculum vitae, the syllabi. Think of the résumés, the job offers, the resignation letters. The contracts and lawsuits. The condolences.
It’s everywhere around us. You see Gerritszoon every day. It’s been here all this time, staring us in the face for five hundred years. All of it — the novels, the newspapers, the new documents — it’s all been a carrier wave for this secret message, hidden in the colophon.
Gerritszoon figured it out: the key to immortality.
(Tyndall jumps up out of his seat, howling, “But what is it?” He tugs at his hair. “What is the message?”)
Well, it’s in Latin. The Google translation is rough. Keep in mind that Aldus Manutius was born with a different name: he was Teobaldo, and his friends all called him that.
So here it is. Here’s Gerritszoon’s message to eternity.
SLIDE 9
Thank you, Teobaldo
You are my greatest friend
This has been the key to everything
FELLOWSHIP
THE SHOW IS OVER and the audience is clearing out. Tyndall and Lapin are lined up for coffee in Pygmalion’s tiny café. Neel is still pitching Tabitha on the transcendent beauty of boobs in sweaters. Mat and Ashley are talking animatedly with Igor and the Japanese duo, all of them walking slowly toward the front door.
Kat is sitting alone, nibbling the very last vegan oat cookie. Her face is drawn. I wonder what she thinks of Gerritszoon’s immortal words.
“Sorry,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s not good enough.” Her eyes are dark and downcast. “He was so talented, and he still died.”
“Everybody dies—”
“This is enough for you? He left us a note, Clay. He left us a note.” She shouts it, and an oat crumb comes shooting off her lips. Oliver Grone glances over from the ANTHROPOLOGY shelves, eyebrows raised. Kat looks down at her shoes. Quietly, she says, “Don’t call that immortality.”
“But what if this is the best part of him?” I say. I’m composing this theory in real-time: “What if, you know — what if hanging out with Griffo Gerritszoon wasn’t always that great? What if he was weird and dreamy? What if the best part of him was the shapes he could make with metal? That part of him really is immortal. It’s as immortal as anything’s going to get.”
She shakes her head, sighs, and leans into me a little, pushing the last bits of the cookie into her mouth. I found the old knowledge, the OK, that we’d been looking for, but she doesn’t like what it has to say. Kat Potente will keep searching.
After a moment, she pulls back, takes a sharp breath, and lifts herself up. “Thanks for inviting me,” she says. “See you around.” She shrugs on her blazer, waves goodbye, and heads for the door.
Now Penumbra calls me over.
“It is amazing,” he cries, and he is himself again, with his bright eyes and wide smile. “All this time, we were playing Gerritszoon’s game. My boy, we had his letters on the front of the store!”