Alix Christie Releases GUTENBERG'S APPRENTICE Today

By: Sep. 25, 2014
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We are delighted to welcome Alix Christie back to California to celebrate her debut novel, Gutenberg's Apprentice. Now living in London, the Bay Area native writes on books and the arts for The Economist. Some of us knew Alix as a UC Berkeley journalism student, a reporter and editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland Tribune, and a fiction writing graduate student at St. Mary's College.

Alix Christie's ties to Arion Press's foundry (M & H Type) go back even further, to a youth imbued with the atmosphere of the Mackenzie & Harris typesetting operation. Alix is the granddaughter of Lester Lloyd, the respected foreman of Mackenzie & Harris in the heyday of hot metal in San Francisco, when everything from Safeway ads to Rolling Stone passed through our shop, and who, in retirement, hand set much of the Arion PressMoby-Dick. He nurtured her love of letterpress printing among the very machines we use today in the Presidio.

Alix drew on her unusual knowledge of typecasting and printing to create a fictional version of the struggles of tcchno-revolutionaries Peter Schoffer and Johann Gutenberg in 15th century Mainz. Alix's subject is of sudden interest, as today's readers realize they are living through an equally radical shift as print gives way to electronic reading devices. "Before there was Zuckerberg, there was Gutenberg," as her publisher puts it. Gutenberg's Apprentice has received advance praise as "an inspiring tale of ambition, camaraderie, betrayal and cultural transformation," from Booklist and "a bravura debut" from Kirkus Reviews.

On the eve of M&H's 100th anniversary in 2015, it is fitting to have Alix Christie and other veterans of the Les Lloyd era with us today, September 25th.

  • Alix Christie, discussing her roots in letterpress and reading from Gutenberg's Apprentice, September 25, reception at 6 p.m., program at 7 p.m. at The Arion Press, 1802 Hays Street, The Presidio, San Francisco.
    RSVP to Booksmith or Arion Press.

Free. With Support from the National Endowment for the Arts.


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