Bendy's older brother Matthew was furious when he learned that their father, an honored scribe, had apprenticed Bendy to William Caxton, the master printer. Matthew had planned to put Bendy to work in his own thriving scrivener shop, laboriously copying small books by hand to sell at a cheap price; and he hated the very word "printing." To him, Caxton's press—the first in England—was unfair competition. It was no secret to Bendy that his surly, unyielding older brother had even gone so far as to make arrangements with Tom Twist, the peddler, to intercept Caxton's shipments of Unicorn paper for his press.

But to Bendy, the smell of printer's ink, the heavy thud of the ponderous press, and the maddening complexities of a composing stick opened a whole new world. When he learned that his new master doted on tales of chivalry and stories of the knights of old, Bendy was even more pleased. Wasn't his own most prized possession a tattered roll of incomplete, handwritten stories about King Arthur written by an unknown knight named Sir Thomas Malory? So Bendy plotted cheerfully to outwit Matthew, until the eventful day when an unexpected discovery propelled Bendy and young Dick Pynson into a dangerous mission that ended in broken heads and a dramatic victory.

Cynthia Harnett is one of England's finest writers of historical fiction for young readers. In this fast-moving wholly believable novel based on meticulous research she has unforgettably dramatized a significant period of English history.

From the dust jacket of the U.S. edition