The Book-Makers

A celebration of the printed book, told through the lives of 18 people who took it in radical new directions. * AN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024 * A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE SUMMER 2024 * 'This really is the loveliest of books' I 'I cannot recommend it highly enough' SPECTATOR This is an extraordinary story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error. Of printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders. Some we know. We meet jobbing printer (and United States Founding Father) Benjamin Franklin, and watch Thomas Cobden-Sanderson conjure books that flicker between the 20 th and 15 th centuries. Others we’ve forgotten. We don't recall Sarah Eaves, wife of John Baskerville, and her crucial contribution to the history of type. Nor Charles Edward Mudie, populariser of the circulating library – and the most influential figure in publishing before Jeff Bezos. Nor William Wildgoose, who meticulously bound Shakespeare’s First Folio, then disappeared. The Book-Makers puts people back into the story of the book. It takes us inside the print-shop as the deadline looms and the adrenaline flows – from the Fleet Street of 1492 to present-day New York. It’s a tale of contingencies and quirks, of successes and failures, of routes forward and paths not taken. This is a history of book-making that leaves ink on your fingers, and shows why the printed book will continue to flourish. ‘Amazing. This book is a soul-expanding celebration of the human spirit’ MARTIN LATHAM, author of The Bookseller's Tale ‘A brilliant time machine of a book’ JOSEPH HONE, author of The Book Forger

A celebration of the printed book, told through the lives of 18 people who took it in radical new directions. * AN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024 * A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE SUMMER 2024 * 'This really is the loveliest of books' I 'I cannot recommend it highly enough' SPECTATOR This is an extraordinary story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error. Of printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders. Some we know. We meet jobbing printer (and United States Founding Father) Benjamin Franklin, and watch Thomas Cobden-Sanderson conjure books that flicker between the 20 th and 15 th centuries. Others we’ve forgotten. We don't recall Sarah Eaves, wife of John Baskerville, and her crucial contribution to the history of type. Nor Charles Edward Mudie, populariser of the circulating library – and the most influential figure in publishing before Jeff Bezos. Nor William Wildgoose, who meticulously bound Shakespeare’s First Folio, then disappeared. The Book-Makers puts people back into the story of the book. It takes us inside the print-shop as the deadline looms and the adrenaline flows – from the Fleet Street of 1492 to present-day New York. It’s a tale of contingencies and quirks, of successes and failures, of routes forward and paths not taken. This is a history of book-making that leaves ink on your fingers, and shows why the printed book will continue to flourish. ‘Amazing. This book is a soul-expanding celebration of the human spirit’ MARTIN LATHAM, author of The Bookseller's Tale ‘A brilliant time machine of a book’ JOSEPH HONE, author of The Book Forger

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. This is the first history of the world's most important object, told through thirteen dynamic portraits of the individuals who helped to define it. Books have undergone a remarkable evolution in production, commerce and style, ultimately serving to challenge the way we think about life and the world around us. They have transformed humankind from primates to thinkers, scholars and storytellers by enabling the creation of documentation and entertainment, and encouraging the democratisation of learning. 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 Caxton's first printings of The Canterbury Tales to Nancy Cunard's avant-garde pamphlets produced on her small press in Normandy, Adam Smyth explores the lives of these early innovators in order to understand how books have been introduced to new readers, bought, sold and borrowed, and the invention of new technologies which transformed the landscape of the printing press.

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. This is the first history of the world's most important object, told through thirteen dynamic portraits of the individuals who helped to define it. Books have undergone a remarkable evolution in production, commerce and style, ultimately serving to challenge the way we think about life and the world around us. They have transformed humankind from primates to thinkers, scholars and storytellers by enabling the creation of documentation and entertainment, and encouraging the democratisation of learning. 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 Caxton's first printings of The Canterbury Tales to Nancy Cunard's avant-garde pamphlets produced on her small press in Normandy, Adam Smyth explores the lives of these early innovators in order to understand how books have been introduced to new readers, bought, sold and borrowed, and the invention of new technologies which transformed the landscape of the printing press.