A chance discovery of an old biography at The Strand inspired journalist Alix Christie's debut novel, Gutenberg's Apprentice, which tells the story of the invention of moveable type and the printing of the Gutenberg Bible. In this essay, Christie explains how her lifelong love of letterpress printing left her uniquely suited to fictionalize this remarkable true story.

I set my first line of metal type in the mid-1970s, under the watchful eye of my grandfather, who had just retired from running America's foremost hot type foundry in San Francisco. For the next 20 years or so we printed books by hand together. There's something incredibly satisfying about making something from nothing, forming letters into words, inking them and stamping them into paper. I was mainly a hobbyist, though: my interest seemed to lie more with the words themselves. My life led away from letterpress toward writing, first as a journalist and then as a writer of fiction. Still, I never really thought that this early love of printing would lead me to tackle the immense subject of its invention in medieval Germany 560 years ago.

Alix Christie and her 1910 Chandler & Price printing press

Like so many stories, Gutenberg's Apprentice began with a chance item I read in the paper: Scholars at Princeton suspected that the world's first printing types were not as sophisticated as they had thought. As an occasional practitioner of the "darkest art", I was intrigued, and squirreled this tidbit away.

A few years later, in New York's venerable used bookstore, The Strand, I stumbled across a forgotten biography of a printer named Peter Schoeffer, who had worked with Johann Gutenberg, and started looking more deeply into the history of the Gutenberg Bible. Very quickly I discovered that there was vastly more to this story than met the eye.

Printing with moveable type, the most important invention since the wheel, had not been the work of just one lone genius. It was a huge undertaking, a collaboration between the inventor, his financial backer and that little-known scribe-turned-printer, Schoeffer. Even more dramatically, this historic partnership had blown up spectacularly, ending in an acrimonious lawsuit in which Gutenberg lost his workshop.

Printing with moveable type, the most important invention since the wheel, had not been the work of just one lone genius. 

This invention was an event of such importance, and what happened to those partners so compelling, that I felt it simply had to be told—not as biography or nonfiction, but as a narrative of human ingenuity and passion. I felt incredibly lucky to have the background to understand this technology, which ended the Middle Ages and ushered in the Renaissance, transforming society through mass literacy and ultimately enabling free thought and democracy.

Nobody really knows what went on in that workshop in Mainz, nor exactly how the first metal letters were forged. But I tried very hard to respect the few known facts, and the evidence of the surviving printed books, while imagining the kind of drives and motivations that might explain the tragic ending to this partnership that changed the world. Fiction grants us access to people who, though living in a different age, nonetheless felt much the same emotions as we do; it allows us to subtly investigate the reasons why people do the things they do.

From the start I felt a great affinity for Peter Schoeffer, Gutenberg's apprentice, through whom we hear the tale. I saw his story as deeply moving, torn as he was between two father figures: a brilliant master and the financier who had placed him in that Bible workshop. The deeper layers of the novel came with time, as I began imagining the feelings of that young and gifted scribe as he watched his way of life destroyed by new technology. For Peter Schoeffer lived at a time much like our own: he stood on the unsettling edge beween the old ways and the radically new. Five hundred and sixty years later, we are experiencing similarly rapid and profound change. Digital technology is transforming everything we once held sacred, bringing new rhythms, relationships and ways of communicating into our lives. It's both exciting and terrifying, and leads, for me at least, to feelings of ambivalence toward these new magical devices. I hoped that Peter's story would help us to think our own way forward, balanced as he was between the wonder of the truly new and rejection of those "crude words crudely wrought" of metal type. 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of this book.

Priya Parmar is a former freelance editor whose first novel, Exit the Actress, was based on the 17th-century actress (and royal mistress) Ellen "Nell" Gwyn. Her second novel, Vanessa and Her Sister, is based on the life of the artist Vanessa Bell. In this behind-the-book essay, Parmar explains how important—and how personal—choosing a historical fiction subject can be.

For me, choosing a subject for a historical novel is a tricky thing. Historical fiction is a guess, a hat tossed into the ring. But it is a guess that is based upon a real life. Choosing the historical figure is a bit like choosing a roommate for my brain. I have to want to see this person first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I have to not mind if she does things that might irritate me. Things like leaving dishes in the sink or singing in the shower. I have to feel an immediate kinship, a recognition that this is a person I could spend an enormous amount of time with. Because it can take years to write the novel.

"Choosing the historical figure is a bit like choosing a roommate for my brain."

First comes the research. After the initial honeymoon period, the wrong historical figure could start to grate. If her choices feel illogical or her decisions poor, or her laughter shrill, she can quickly fall off her pedestal. But the right person from history will only grow more dear, more beloved and more real.

After the honeymoon, comes the immersion, the falling down a rabbit hole period. It is the part where I become completely absorbed in a character’s life and time. This is the fun part. This is when I am committed, devoted and off and running. This is also the time when the history blurs and fiction gallops in. The facts are cemented in truth, but the moral, emotional reasoning is an educated guess. The figure becomes a character and the engine of the novel turns over.

My research for Vanessa and Her Sister began with a letter. In the summer of 1906, Clive Bell proposed to Vanessa Stephen. No. She would not marry him. But she strayed from the usual, demure sort of letter a young woman of her social class was expected to write. She told the truth. She told the whole truth. She sort of liked him but was not truly mad about him and had no idea if this would change in the future. She began this letter at home but finished the postscript in pencil at the dentist’s office. She apologized and explained that she was in a hurry and was off on holiday the next day. The letter reads like an email written circa last week.

Reading this letter roughly a century later, I was astonished by her frank, self-deprecating tone and her modern, uncompromising words. She was absolutely the person I wanted to write about. The character stepped off the page fully formed, like a woman alighting from a railway carriage. But Vanessa Bell came as a package deal with her better-known sister, the writer who would eventually become Virginia Woolf. And their collection of eccentric, intellectual, artistic friends would also tag along into the story: the bohemian crowd who would be remembered as The Bloomsbury Group. They are quirky and brilliant and difficult and gifted and daunting but I loved them all, and so I fell down the rabbit hole.

I began to read their letters. I started with their volumes of collected and selected published letters: Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Roger Fry. After the published works, I moved on to the unpublished. I got to know Vanessa’s sloping uphill handwriting and Virginia’s outsized Vs in her signature. I read about Roger Fry’s exhibitions and Leonard Woolf’s cattle problems. Then the circle widened. Like a complicated spider web, the correspondence took me round and round in larger and larger circles. Vanessa’s art world, E.M. Forster’s publishers, Virginia’s teeth and Roger Fry’s building projects. I spent time in archives and museums. I moved back to London and lived in Bloomsbury. I walked their bus routes and photographed train stations. And at each turn along the way, Vanessa Bell did not disappoint. She was exactly the person I hoped she was and more. It was wonderful to have her in my brain. She was such a lovely roommate and I miss her dreadfully now that she has gone. 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Vanessa and Her Sister.

For me, the first act of writing historical fiction is resistance. There are tropes within the American imagination that pop up readily; it takes a slapping of your own hand to not reach for these tropes and recycle them. 

When I began working on Jam on the Vine, I did not want to write about a dysfunctional black family. Nor would I put a black woman protagonist into a role I have seen too often—maid, prostitute, junkie . . . unloved, uneducated, uninspired. Luckily, mining black history, which I have done scholastically and creatively for 20 years, brings you face-to-face with so many wonderful characters that it is easy to resist the tropes.

I wanted to attempt what I believe the best historical writing—both scholarly and fictive—can do: shed light on the seed of a social problem that cripples its current society. I had no idea what the “problem” might be when I set out to write; however, I knew that any articulation of said problem would be found in the newspaper.

More than any institution in black America, including the black church, African-American newspapers have held the government accountable: demanding rights for its black citizenry and disseminating life-sustaining information. I knew my protagonist was an editor and journalist who, realistically, would not find employment at a white newspaper and therefore would have to launch her own.

Two trailblazing black women journalists inspired Ivoe Williams, the heroine of Jam on the Vine: Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) and Charlotta Bass (1874-1969). Driven by the murder by lynching of black male friends, Wells, who wrote for the New York Age newspaper, began to document lynchings and their causes, most notably in her monographs Southern Horrors (1892) and The Red Record (1895). Bass was a suffragist and the first black woman to own and operate a newspaper, the California Eagle.

Like both women, Ivoe is a bookish girl who goes to college. (Ninety-four black colleges and universities thrived in the first decade of the 20th century, yet we don’t encounter their stories in Progressive-era narratives. Ever.) Like Bass, I wanted Ivoe to launch her own newspaper. Like Wells, I wanted Ivoe’s journalism to have purpose, but felt I could not write about lynching for my own mental health.

Drawing on the early 20th-century history of Texas, one cannot help but notice the birth and proliferation of prison farms—the roots of the incarceration crisis we now face. The moment I stumbled across this fact, I knew that Ivoe’s newspaper would call attention to shady police procedures involving the racist arrest and (often erroneous) imprisonment of black men. This crisis continues to plague America.

The last value I brought to Jam on the Vine hinged on sexual orientation. Much damage has been done to disconnect the social and political—not just artistic—contributions of homosexuals from the American narrative. Placing a black lesbian activist at the center of an early 20th-century story was a natural choice and also a political one.

In writing Jam on the Vine, my valentine to the black press, I’ve exercised my strong belief that historical fiction can go a long way in restoring marginalized groups  to their rightful places within a society’s past, present and future. Today, black newspapers continue to trumpet the age-old call for justice.

Missouri-born author LaShonda Katrice Barnett is also a playwright and editor. She now lives in Manhattan.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Having grown up in Wisconsin, I was surprised to learn that German prisoners captured during World War II were shipped across the Atlantic to my home state. They were housed in rural areas—vacated schools, fairgrounds, migrant worker camps—and were put to work in canneries and on local farms. Between 1942 and 1946, Wisconsin housed POWs in 39 camps across the state.

Thinking on this, a story began forming in my mind—a frightened family on one side of the gate, the enemy on the other. But as I looked into it, I learned that in many rural areas, the prisoners were needed more than feared. One such area was Door County, Wisconsin.

In 1944, when The Cherry Harvest opens, my fictional cherry orchard is threatened because there are no workers to pick the cherries. Nearly all the able-bodied men have left for war, and migrant workers have taken better jobs in the Army or at the shipyards. This would be the second year without a harvest and my family is about to lose their business.

In writing fiction, I typically write from a sense of place. I need to know the feel of it to better appreciate my characters’ relationship with their environment. With that in mind, in May 2011, I traveled to Door County with my daughter. To get a sense of the WWII era, I made numerous trips to the Door County Library and also interviewed people who remembered that time in Door County.

Door County is a lush peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan, a tourist destination dotted with summer cottages, cherry orchards, lighthouses, beaches, and state parks. It’s known as the Cape Cod of the Midwest.

But it wasn’t always so. The name comes from the many ships that crashed along the rocky coast of what was known as Death’s Door. Today you can hire a plane to glide along the coast and view the shipwrecks still resting on the rocks below.

Because The Cherry Harvest is a dramatic story, I wanted it to take place on the stormy side of the peninsula—the Lake Michigan side—and so we booked a stay at a home right on the beach. I later learned that very home was the site of a former orchard. That spot became the location of my family’s homestead, and there, my protagonist, Charlotte, a farmwife, began to come to life.

I woke early each morning and listened to the birds, monitored the weather, walked barefoot in the grass and along the shore as my characters might have done. My daughter and I visited blooming orchards, tasted cherry pies, and learned of the old harvesting processes. I interviewed people who had lived on cherry orchards back when they worked alongside German POWs.

Charlotte came to me strong and brave, insisting on bringing POWs to pick the summer’s harvest. But she has a son, Ben, fighting in Europe against the Nazis. How would bringing prisoners onto the land play into her relationship with her son? Would he come home to find POWs on the land?

Just north of the spot where my daughter and I stayed was a lighthouse. This became the lighthouse where my character Kate would visit her friend Josie. My daughter and I walked across the isthmus to the island and climbed to the top of the lighthouse, which became the perspective of many of my scenes.

Continuing north along the shore is an expansive summer home owned by a politician; this became the home of Kate’s Cinderella boyfriend, Clay.

Thomas was the last character to come clear to me. He flowed out of Kate’s intellectual desires to leave the farm and pursue a writing career. While Charlotte and Ben share a pragmatic, physical sense of purpose, Kate and her father have an intellectual connection through poems and stories. Once the Thomas character developed, I could give him a backstory as well.

By the time I left Door County, I had my story. All I had to do was write it.

Lucy Sanna is the author of two previous relationship books, but The Cherry Harvest is her first novel. She and her husband divide their time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Madison, Wisconsin. Find out more about Sanna and her debut novel on her website.

Author photo by Hope Maxwell Synder.

I almost didn’t write The Other Einstein. The little-known story of Mileva Marić, who made a heroic ascent from the misogynistic backwater of 19th-century Eastern Europe to become one of Europe’s first female physicists, kept calling to me, begging to be written. But the tale necessarily involved a depiction of Albert Einstein, the fellow Zurich Polytechnic student who wooed Mileva for years before their marriage in 1903—and who wanted to face that hurdle?

The idea of writing about the so-called secular saint, who was chosen as the Person of the Century by Time magazine and galvanized not only science but also the cultural and political landscape with his genius, daunted me. Obviously. Not to mention that people hold many preconceptions about Albert Einstein, and I wasn’t certain that I wanted to challenge them with The Other Einstein. 

But then I realized that The Other Einstein wasn’t his story. It was her story. One that had been buried by time and prejudice and misconceptions. And I realized that I was honor-bound to excavate Mileva from the detritus of the past and share her with the world. 

So I faced my discomfort with writing about one of the world’s most famous figures head-on. I dove deep into the world of 19th-century science. I tried to immerse myself in whatever details I could cobble together about Mileva, a surprisingly challenging task given that she had been married to Einstein for 16 years. While countless tomes exist about him and his work, Mileva doesn’t figure prominently in many of them. 

Then I discovered Mileva’s letters. Written to family members, friends and, of course, Albert, those letters became my window into her life. They enabled me to imagine myself as the young Mileva. So tiny, her family joked that they needed to put stones in her pockets to keep the wind from blowing her away. So startlingly brilliant that her father fought against the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s laws preventing females from attending high school to secure her place in an all-male upper school. So different from all the other girls that she received the brunt of their youthful mockery. And so physically deformed in her hips that she believed no one would ever want to marry her.

In becoming Mileva, I began to see Albert Einstein through her eyes. He became a roguish, charismatic college student. He changed into a youthful, open-minded scientific partner and collaborator. He shined as a violinist who accompanied her singing with the gusto of a fellow musician. He transformed from a friend into a determined and ardent lover, who morphed again into a husband and father, bringing both tremendous joy and heartbreaking disappointment. 

No longer the wild-haired scientific icon, Albert Einstein became a person. Marvelous yet flawed, as all people are. This metamorphosis, achieved only after long months of research, freed me from my fears. And I was able to write about Albert as Mileva experienced him. 

But no matter how comfortable I became writing about Albert Einstein, The Other Einstein never became his story. It always remained hers.

Marie Benedict practiced law for more than 10 years before launching a career as a novelist. The Other Einstein is the first in a planned series telling the stories of women lost to history. Benedict, who has also published three thrillers as Heather Terrell, lives in Pittsburgh with her family.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Other Einstein.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With her new novel, I, Eliza Hamilton, bestselling author Susan Holloway Scott brings to life the story of Alexander Hamilton’s wife, Eliza. Readers will discover a novel of rich and fascinating details—and at its heart, an admirable woman of great devotion and courage.

If you visit the grave of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton (1757-1854) in New York City, you’ll see that her simple stone describes her only in terms of the two most important men in her life. She’s her father’s daughter, and her husband’s wife, and that is all.

True, she’s best remembered today as the wife of Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), a Revolutionary War hero, statesman, politician and abolitionist, the first Secretary of the Treasury, a signer of the Constitution, the founder of the American financial system and, perhaps most famously, the only Founding Father to die from a duel.

You might also have heard that Eliza’s husband inspired a certain award-winning Broadway musical that carries his name.

But like so many women of the past, Eliza’s own story has been overshadowed by that brilliant husband. She didn’t help her place in posterity by destroying (or permitting to be destroyed) most of her letters, and thereby virtually eliminating her own words from history. As a result, she’s too often been dismissed by historians, who variously describe her as shy and reclusive, a saint, a homebody and even a victim.

With my new historical novel, I, Eliza Hamilton, I’m determined to change that. I hunted for the “real” Eliza at the Schuyler Mansion, her family’s home in Albany, New York, and the Grange, the house she and Alexander built in New York City, and visited other places in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania that she would have known. I searched for clues to her in historical societies, libraries and museums, poring over the fading ink of 18th-century letters. I was even fortunate enough to see—and touch—the gold wedding ring that Alexander slipped on her finger when they married in 1780.

And I found Eliza, too, in the letters of others who knew and loved her, in portraits, in memoirs and in her charitable work. She was the mother of eight children, who recalled her perseverance and devotion through the most difficult of times. She was a trusted, affectionate daughter and sister in the large Schuyler family. A list of her acquaintances reads like a who’s-who of early American history, including Martha and George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Dolley and James Madison—and those are only a few of those who knew her.

Most poignantly, Eliza’s presence remains in the letters that Alexander wrote to her over the 24 years that covered their courtship and marriage. There’s no doubt that they loved one another dearly, and that that love supported Eliza not only throughout Alexander’s life, but in the long years afterwards.

As a widow (she survived her husband by more than 50 years), Eliza continued a lifetime of kindness and generosity to become an advocate for the poor women and children of New York City. She helped found an orphanage whose mission continues to this day in the social service organization Graham Windham, and she served as the institution’s directress until she was 91.

But all that is only the beginning of what I discovered. Eliza Hamilton was intelligent and resourceful and strong, a woman who lived in the thick of some of the most turbulent and exciting times in American history. Her life and marriage were filled with love, passion, regard and devotion, but also were marred by public scandal and unimaginable tragedies that broke her heart, but not her spirit. I’m honored to tell her story.

Scott is the bestselling author of over 50 historical novels and historical romances. Learn more about her book—and Eliza Hamilton—on her website and blog: www.susanhollowayscott.com

Author photo by David Campli Studio

Immerse yourself in the milieu of 1700s South Carolina, where 16-year-old Eliza Lucas is left in charge of her family’s three plantations. With her new novel, The Indigo Girl, bestselling author Natasha Boyd draws from the true story of Eliza Lucas Pinckney for a story of ambition, betrayal and sacrifice—and at its core, the secret process of making indigo dye.

Boyd, the author of contemporary romantic Southern fiction and other novels of historical fiction, shares the inspiration behind The Indigo Girl.

People will tell you the Lowcountry begins a slow but irrevocable seduction on all those who venture within its boundaries. For me, it would take several visits, falling in love with a Lowcountry man and ultimately moving there, for the seduction to be complete.

Little did I know it would lead me to writing a book, The Indigo Girl, about Charleston’s beloved Eliza Lucas Pinckney. When you marry a man from Charleston, South Carolina, hearing the name Pinckney sort of settles into the general noise of life. It was a name I heard, but didn’t give too much thought to. I grew up in Europe, so I was used to being surrounded by history and, to my shame, probably took it for granted. Besides, we made our home in Atlanta, not Charleston, so unless we were visiting family I never thought much about it, beyond seeing the occasional sign for the Charles Pinckney historical site.

A move to Hilton Head Island in 2010 would change that forever. Lacking the beautiful architecture of Charleston, Hilton Head has a different sort of charm, predominantly nature-based. Every time you drive onto the island, you cross over Pinckney Island National Wildlife Refuge, an island formerly owned by, of course, the Pinckneys. But it was at a local gallery exhibit showcasing artists who work with indigo where I first truly heard Eliza’s story. A 16-year-old girl in the 1700s had been left in charge of her father’s plantations? I sidled closer. She was tricked and set up to fail in her attempt at growing lucrative indigo by a man her father sent to help her? I no longer pretended to eavesdrop. I was rapt. She taught her slaves to read in return for them helping her make the dye?

Well, it was a done deal. Almost.

Trying to get Eliza’s story right kept me up at night. There was a story between the pages of the texts and the letters she wrote. There were differences between what she wrote when she was young and how she looked back on her life. That shouldn’t be a surprise, obviously, as like most humans she had grown and matured over the course of her life. But I felt a little bit like an amateur sculptor chiseling away at a valuable block of marble, knowing that a statue of Venus could materialize if I could just work at the right angle. I saturated myself in her letters and all available mentions of her I could find, and then . . . I put them aside.

This will be where the hardcore historians wince. But here’s the thing: The story, her story, was in there, but the constraints of the available texts were like prison bars preventing the “story” from unfurling. There’s an underlying structure to most storytelling that any experienced genre fiction novelist or screenwriter will tell you. As humans we respond to this story structure. If it is done right, there’ll be a feeling of satisfaction upon completion of the story. We’ll sigh when we close the book, whether we’re happy about the ending or even if we’re sad.

We know the hero or heroine will be put upon to start a journey of some kind. There’ll be forces working against them. At some point, they’ll reach a reckoning to rise to their fullest potential, only to have the rug pulled out from under them, for the unthinkable to happen. Then there’ll be a final battle, a test, from which our hero or heroine will finally emerge victorious and be permanently changed into their new, stronger self.

The story of Eliza’s battle with indigo is such a story. And it was a battle. She was thwarted at every turn, either by her own or others’ ignorance, by nature or simply straight malice. She drew upon her inner strength to overcome these challenges. The end result being that her success with indigo overcame a challenge for South Carolina, and ultimately the United States of America. She is, quite simply, a woman history should never have forgotten.

I hope now they’ll remember her.