Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives

The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives

By Adam Smyth

"A celebration of 550 years of the printed book told through the lives of eighteen extraordinary men and women who took the book in radical new directions: printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders. This is a story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error"--.

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Book Information

Publisher: Basic Books
Publish Date: 05/28/2024
Pages: 400
ISBN-13: 9781541605640
ISBN-10: 1541605640
Language: English

Full Description

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.

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.

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