Description

A celebration of the printed book, told through the lives of 18 people who took it in radical new directions.

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 20th and 15th 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

Publisher Review

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, papermaking, and book distribution, for example, are told in chapters as full of surprises as any novel * David Bellos, author of The Novel of the Century * 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 * Joseph Hone, author of The Book Forger * I relished Adam Smyth’s The Book-Makers: bursting with fascinating details and vividly-drawn characters, its stories will delight any book lover, and Smyth delivers them with an erudite brio * Roland Allen, author of The Notebook * Amazing. From typeface to papermaking to a whole new-to-me democratic world of book interaction like commonplacing and zines, this book is a soul-expanding celebration of the human spirit * Martin Latham, author of The Bookseller’s Tale * Adam Smyth brings to life in delightful detail eighteen fascinating book makers, women and men, and their often-surprising books. Taking us from Wynkyn de Worde’s early printed books in 1490s London to the zine creators of today, Smyth’s wonderful book never ceases to captivate and enthrall the reader * Sarah Ogilvie, author of The Dictionary People * Explores in compelling fashion the lives of these fascinating individuals and their roles in making the most powerful objects in human history – books * Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the Books * In Adam Smyth’s evocative prose, the stuff of print – type-punches, paper, presses, and fonts – all become newly fascinating. Come for the Gutenberg bible, stay for the cut-and-paste of seventeenth century women, Benjamin Franklin’s print adverts for a lost dog, and the revolutionary zines of the late twentieth-century. We tend to think about books from the point of view of readers: Smyth has written a new, personal history recovering and respecting those who got their hands dirty making them * Emma Smith, author of This is Shakespeare * Adam Smyth’s The Book-Makers is every bibliophile’s dream. Erudite, insightful and hugely enjoyable, it features an eclectic cast of oddballs, eccentrics and visionaries who have shaped the printed book. A fabulous, first-class read * Giles Milton, author of The Riddle and the Knight *