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

An Economist Book of the Year

A five-hundred-year history of printed books, told through the people who created them.

"Almost every page--almost every paragraph--fizzes with facts, allusions, speculations, tidbits of etymology and gems of historical interest." --Wall Street Journal

Books have transformed humankind, yet we know little about the individuals who brought these fascinating objects into existence. Who were these renegade book-makers who changed the course of history through their experiments in the arts of printing, paper making, type designing, binding, advertising, and selling?

The Book-Makers offers a new way to understand the story of Western culture's most important object through a series of dynamic portraits of eighteen men and women who helped to define the book. From Wynkyn de Worde's cheap bestsellers produced in fifteenth-century London, to Nancy Cunard's avant-garde pamphlets made on her small press in Normandy; from Benjamin Franklin's inky entrepreneurialism, to the radical culture of contemporary zines, this is a celebration of the book with the people put back in.

Author: Adam Smyth
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 10/20/2026
Pages: 416
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 8.27h x 5.60w x 0.98d
ISBN: 9781541609167

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 Times Literary Supplement and runs the 39 Steps Press, a small printing press that he keeps in a barn. Smyth lives in Oxford, England.