The year is 1450. Peter Schoeffer, an ambitious young scribe, returns home at the behest of his foster father, a forward-thinking merchant and bookseller. There he is unwillingly thrown into a workshop that his father has financed, a strange, dark place run by a driven, caustic master named Johann Gutenberg. Its purpose is the manufacture of books in a new - and according to some, blasphemous - way.