The Once Upon A Time Princess

The Princess And The Scribe

Once upon a time, there was a scribe named Gutenberg. He was a hard working scribe, very disciplined and very thorough. Being meticulous made him a great scribe and, at a relatively young age, he became the chief scribe, having the responsibility of watching over all the other scribes and training young boys who were to become scribes. His work was excellent and he was held in high regard by the scholars and holy men of the kingdom.

One of his duties was to teach the children of the King and Queen how to print letters, to write words and to attain to the highest degree possible the ability to scribe in the art of calligraphy. To this, he was very exacting.

One day, the King came to him.

“We would like you to teach our daughter, Princess Paige, to scribe in a manner befitting a queen,” said the King.

“Yes, your Highness. I would consider it an honour and a privilege to do so,” replied Gutenberg.

“We thank you,” said the King. He turned and left for he did not like the scribes' room. It was always too bright and sunny for him.

The next morning, the Princess arrived on time, wearing a beautiful, pink lace dress. Gutenberg took one look at the dress, saw all the hours of labour that the Palace's seamstresses had put into it and knew that he had a problem.

“Hello, Princess,” began Gutenberg, “what an exquisite dress you are wearing! It must be the most beautiful dress that I have ever seen. Unfortunately, the colour pink is not permitted in the scribes' room because it is too cheerful for grumpy old men like me. Perhaps you and I should pay a visit to the Royal Seamstress.”

Gutenberg took the Princess to visit the seamstress.

“I thought it best that she be wearing a simple white smock,” stated Gutenberg. “She should also have a black printer's sleeve so that her arms do not get covered in ink.”

The seamstress agreed and began making a sleeveless smock for the Princess.

The next day, when the Princess showed up wearing her smock, Gutenberg saw that he had another problem.

Princess Paige was tiny.

Girls are usually smaller than boys, but the Princess must have been the smallest child that had ever had to learn to scribe.

Gutenberg had to find the tallest stool in the room and put it next to the smallest drafting table. Then he had to find a stepping stool so that the Princess could get up onto the sitting stool.

He stepped back and he thought to himself, “This is an accident waiting to happen.”

The Princess put in a lot of effort learning how to take care of her quill, filling her ink bottle, and learning how to print, write and scribe while precariously perched on a stool much too tall for her. However careful she may have tried to be, the Princess was a bit of a dreamer and at times she would get distracted by her own thoughts.

One day, it happened: she wasn't paying enough attention to what she was doing and she didn't get her quill far enough out of the bottle and when she pulled back, the bottle tipped its contents down the front of her table. She reached out to catch the bottle, lost her balance, and put her hand on the table, right in the middle of the ink. She jumped off her stool the way she usually did, backed away from the table, and looked at her ink covered hand.

Gutenberg heard the ink bottle hit the floor and came running with a rag. When he saw the mess, he simply said, “Oh, my!” But he repeated it many times while wiping up the ink.

The Princess looked at her hands, back and forth. An idea crossed her mind. She carefully pressed her hands together so that the palms and fingers were equally covered in ink. Then she carefully pressed her hands onto her smock at her chest, belly and thighs, leaving three identical sets of hand prints. She wiped her hands off on another rag.

“Gutenberg,” she said quietly.

“I'm busy at the moment,” he replied patiently.

She waited a moment.

“Gutenberg.”

“In a minute, Princess.”

Again, she waited.

“Gutenberg.”

“Yes, Princess,” he looked up from what he was doing, turned to look at her, then said, “Oh, no.”

“Gutenberg,” the Princess asked quietly, “Can you press letters and pictures onto paper in the same way that I pressed my hands onto this smock?”

As he stared at her, a strange expression crossed his face. He looked puzzled, yet thoughtful.

“Possibly,” he finally admitted, slowly and thoughtfully.

After things had been tidied up, the Princess left to do her other lessons. Gutenberg went to the kitchen and asked for a raw potato. He cut it in half. On the flat cut, he carved away bits of potato until he was left with a raised letter 'A'. He dipped it in ink and pressed it onto a piece of paper.

“This will work,” he said, somewhat surprised.

He went to talk with his father who was a jeweller. They made many letters from metal and arranged them on a rack so that they could print a whole page at once. They printed many books and news sheets and people all over the kingdom learned to read.

The Princess had many more books to read so she lived happily ever after.

The End.