The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives by Smyth, Adam

A scholar and bookmaker "breathes both books-as-objects and their creators back into life" (Financial Times) in this five-hundred-year history of printed books, told through the people who created them

Books tell all kinds of stories--romances, tragedies, comedies--but if we learn to read the signs correctly, they can tell us the story of their own making too. The Book-Makers offers a new way into the story of Western culture's most important object, the book, through dynamic portraits of eighteen individuals who helped to define it.

Books have transformed humankind by enabling authors to create, document, and entertain. Yet we know little about the individuals who brought these fascinating objects into existence and of those who first experimented in the art of printing, design, and binding. Who were the renegade book-makers who changed the course of history?

From Wynkyn de Worde's printing of fifteenth-century bestsellers to Nancy Cunard's avant-garde pamphlets produced on her small press in Normandy, this is a celebration of the book with the people put back in.

Author: Adam Smyth
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 05/28/2024
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.30w x 1.50d
ISBN: 9781541605640

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 03/01/2024
Booklist 04/01/2024 pg. 11
Library Journal 05/01/2024 pg. 103

About the Author
Adam Smyth is professor of English literature and the history of the book at Balliol College, University of Oxford. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the TLS. He also runs the 39 Steps Press, a small printing press, which he keeps in a barn in Oxfordshire, England.