I am old fashioned; I admit it. I like a book to be a treasure that a man may hoard for life.
(The Load of Unicorn by Cynthia Harnett)
I can’t remember the first time my father read me “The Load of Unicorn”. Maybe it was too long ago! My parents read me books like “Swallows and Amazons” and “The Load of Unicorn” WAY before I was old enough to “understand” and they’re a part of my life – almost a part of my soul. Someone once said that “when you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your life does.” They’re right. And maybe that’s one reason why, when my father read “The Load of Unicorn” to my siblings last month, I was a happy bunny. The book is excellent, but – for me! – it’s familiar and comfortable and, therefore, altogether wonderful.
If you read “The Load of Unicorn”, you’ll feel like a traveller through time, whisked back to London, England, in the late 1400s. Bendy is a boy (between thirteen and fifteen years old) always up to his neck in trouble. But in “The Load of Unicorn” he’s in the most serious trouble of his life.
Bendy’s father is a scrivener – a man who writes books, writing each word on each page in ink on paper by hand, for a living. Bendy’s older brothers are also scriveners. They write and sell books in the family shop, “The Crowing Crock”, in one of the alleys in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral. They hate William Caxton who, after years of living and working for the mercer’s guild abroad, has come home to England with a printing press. He’s set up a shop in Westminster and he’s printing books. A printer can produce and sell more books than a scrivener. But a printer needs paper – preferably good paper, like that from Flanders, bearing the unicorn water mark.
Bendy’s trouble begins with a conversation between one of his brothers and a shady character, but it deepens with his father makes friends with William Caxton – and indentures Bendy to William Caxton as his apprentice. Bendy is going to be a printer, not a scrivener! At once, he’s swept into a fight for the Unicorn paper and a quest for a book written by a knight with a strange reputation for the highest ideals of chivalry and the wildest bursts of adventuring. What Bendy doesn’t know is that the fight for the paper and the quest for the book are connected to each other. And that both are tinged with danger – and treason.
Cynthia Harnett only wrote six books, but they’re all excellent. If you can get hold of a copy of “The Load of Unicorn”, do – and read it many times! It combines excellent story-telling with “real” characters and baffling mystery. Everything is explained in detail, so you feel at home in Bendy’s world – but it’s explained so beautifully and naturally that you never feel bored. At the end of book, you feel as if you know what it’s like to be the child of a scrivener and the apprentice of a printer, as well as a citizen of London in the days before the Reformation. Someday I’d very much like to write as beautifully as Cynthia Harnett.
As a new indie author, I was fascinated last month by the tension in “The Load of Unicorn” between the scriveners and the printers. In Bendy’s day, the world of books was changing – books were available in a quantity and quality never before imagined. In our day, traditional publishers are arguing that traditional publication is the only REAL option for publication and indie authors are arguing that times are changing and authors DO have choices – and CAN publish their own books. I think there’s room for traditionally-published and self-published books in our world AND on our bookshelves. But like William Caxton, those of us choosing the new path should pursue beauty and excellence with courage and humility in our writing AND our publishing.
I think Bendy’s father expresses it beautifully for all of us:
A book well written in a fair hand is a work to rejoice in and offer to God. But times are changing. One cannot halt them; and books are not only things of outward beauty, they are food for a man’s mind, and if these new ways supply that food as we cannot then we must treat them with due honour.
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