The Book-Makers

<b>Adam Smyth</b> is Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College University of Oxford. He presents the <i>LitBits</i> podcast and is a regular contributor to the <i>London Review of Books</i> and the <i>TLS. </i>He also runs the 39 Steps Press a small printing press which he keeps in his barn in Oxfordshire. <p><i>The Book-Makers</i> is a celebration of the printed book from the late fifteenth century to the early twenty-first told through the lives of eighteenth extraordinary men and women who made the book as we know it - printers and typesetters publishers and illustrators paper-makers and library founders as well as eccentrics and artists who continued to re-invent it.<br><br>Some of these names are familiar. We meet the jobbing printer Benjamin Franklin who preferred to produce popular almanacs to canonical literature. We witness how William Morris made books as if they were medieval manuscripts even though that age had long passed. And we encounter the socialite Nancy Cunard running a small press printing avantgarde titles from a farmhouse in France.<br><br>Others have been forgotten even written out of history. We don't remember Sarah Eaves wife of John Baskerville and her crucial contribution to the famous typeface named after her husband. Not to speak of Charles Edward Mudie - perhaps the most influential figure in book publishing before Jeff Bezos - the populariser of the circulating library who created both the 'general reader' and set the standards for literary taste.<br><br>The history of the book is the story of the men and women who made it. <i>The</i> <i>Book-Makers</i> puts people back into that story: it's not a determinist account of technological change nor a chronology of inventions but a narrative teeming with lives and a history that is full of the contingencies and quirks the successes and failures the routes forward and the paths not taken of eighteen remarkable individuals.</p> A brilliant time-machine of a book. Each chapter feels like a party packed with old friends and new and Smyth plays the gregarious host with aplomb Fascinating ... Should teach even serious book-nerds a heap of forgotten and precious information about the making of books. Adam Smyth’s lively prose and human touch puts to rest the idea that book-talk has to be dry and dull. On the contrary! The development of printing paper-making and book distribution for example are told through the exploits of Wynkyn de Worde Fourdrinier and Mudie in chapters as full of surprises as any novel