Used book – Le Maître de Garamond, Anne Cuneo

On December 24, 1534, in Place Maubert, while everyone was preparing to celebrate Christmas, a printer, suspected of heresy, was hanged. His body and books were burned.

A man of letters and a scholar, Antoine Augureau knew the most brilliant intellectuals of the early Renaissance, in Fontenay-le-Comte where he spent his childhood in the shadow of the convent that housed François Rabelais, in Poitiers during his apprenticeship, and finally, in Rue Saint-Jacques where he worked and then settled at a time when it housed several printers per house. It was there that he published François Villon and Clément Marot, there that he invented the use of accents and the cedilla, and there that he engraved and transmitted the typographic characters that shaped those we still use today.

How did this humanist manage to incur the wrath of the Sorbonne theologians? Was the publication of Marguerite de Navarre's (King Francis I's sister) Le Miroir de l'âme pécheresse (The Mirror of the Sinful Soul) the true cause of his downfall?

Because he is as indignant as he is keen to understand, Claude Garamond, his most famous disciple, undertakes to tell his story. It is the fascinating and moving story of a generous being, an enemy of all fanaticism, but ready to die to defend his ideas.

As in Le Trajet d’une rivière (The Journey of a River) (Prix des Libraires 1995), Anne Cuneo, in a dazzling novelistic staging, reveals an extraordinary character and does him justice.