Short trials pointed out the necessity of making the marks mirror-image instead of right-way round. Then came the problem of fitting them together. Of making the ink adhesive enough to stick to the lead and not run once pressed on to the paper. The easiest thing of all was finding a device that would fit the letters now locked into a chase, something that would hold the entire page-sized mass of type rather than the mere signature which er-Rahman had used. Presses were familiar objects to the whole Mediterranean seaboard, with their diet heavily dependent on wine and on olive oil, both of them needing to be pressed out. Shef had simply taken over an olive-press, inserted a flat steel bed for the letters to rest on.
Now for the full-scale trial. The carefully-set blocks of lead letters rested on the bed of the press. A cloth pad soaked in ink was patted over their surface, a sheet of white paper placed gently on top of them. Shef nodded to Solomon, who had claimed the honor of first trial. Solomon put the block on top of the paper, then pulled on the arm that exerted pressure on the block. Shef held up a warning hand. Too much weight pressed the blanks down on to the paper as well, smearing the result. He cut his hand through the air, Solomon released the pressure and removed the pressure block and Svandis slid the printed sheet out. Shef ignored the cries of wonder, thrust another sheet in, signed to Solomon again. And again. And again. And again. Only after ten trials did he stop, and turn to Svandis.
“We don’t need to know, does it work?” he said. “We need to know, does it work faster? If it isn’t faster than a team of scribes, then there’s no point to all this. It isn’t faster so far, when you think of all the time we’ve wasted.”
Svandis passed him the sheet. He looked at it, passed it to Solomon, who examined it carefully. “It seems correct,” said the Jew thoughtfully. “As for speed… We have just printed ten pages in a hundred heartbeats. A practiced scribe can write, maybe, forty pages in a day. A hundred heartbeats, and three people, and we have two hours’ work from a skilled scribe. I cannot say…”
“I can,” said Shef, turning to the apparatus of beads and wire which stood not far away. He flicked beads this way and that with the skill of continuous practice. “Three thousand heartbeats in an hour,” he muttered. “Say twenty-five thousand in a day’s work. Twenty-five thousand divided by one hundred multiplied by ten…” He straightened. “Three people can do the work of sixty scribes. Once the blocks have been set up. The blocks, is that the word?”
“Call it the press,” said Svandis.
“Sixty scribes,” repeated Solomon, marveling. “It will mean, at the very least, that every child can have his own Talmud. Who would have believed it?”
More Talmuds may not mean more faith, thought Shef, but he did not say it.
As he walked through the streets of Septimania later that day, a mule laden with printed paper following him, Solomon met Moishe the learned. Anything like a book could not escape Moishe’s eye. He pulled one copy out, scanned it suspiciously. “This is not Hebrew writing,” he said. “And whoever wrote it was a bungler. The letters are ill-formed and straggle from each other like a schoolboy’s.” He sniffed the paper. “It smells of lamp-black too.”
Needed for adhesion, thought Solomon, but he made no reply.
“It is in the Romance tongue,” added Moishe accusingly. “I can make out the Roman script, but this is not even Latin!” Ingrained respect for the written word prevented him from throwing the offending object to the ground, but he waved it contemptuously. “What does it say?”
“It is a longer version of what the One King dictated to you and the others some weeks ago. The attack on the Nazarenes’ faith. I have five hundred of them here. Tomorrow I shall have five hundred more, in Latin, for the more educated believers.”
Moishe snorted, torn between agreeing with attacks on Christianity and disapproving of attacks on faith. In his heart he believed that all should stay in the faith of their births, those who held the correct one reaping their destined reward, those who held false ones taking the punishment due to them and to their ancestors. “Five hundred?” he replied. “There are not scribes enough in Septimania to write all those.”