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

by Adam Smyth

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. 

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Books About Books, Audiobook, Biography, Writing, Historical

364 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 18, 2024

About the author

Adam Smyth is Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford University. His most recent books are 13 March 1911 (2019) and Material Texts in Early Modern England (2018), and he is co-editor with Dennis Duncan of Book Parts (2019). He is currently editing Pericles, and writes regularly for the London Review of Books.

Reviews

[Marquise · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn't a history of bookmaking from the dawn of time to our day, so readers shouldn't expect it from this book. Instead, this is a short history of bookmakers, that is: the people who contributed to the evolution, transformation, and betterment of books since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century that made books possible in the form we know them now: printed words on paper.

It's been a very storied and dramatic evolution from Johannes Gutenberg's press to our e-zines, and much more rich and broad and diverse than this book will probably make you think. In fact, I'd say this book's major shortcoming is that it's very Anglo-centric: it merely covers a few innovators in Britain and the United States. Nobody else in Europe is included, which is surprising, not even Gutenberg has a chapter here and he's the one that would most merit it. I'm not sure if the author intended this to be a limited-scope overview or if the limitations come from his own expertise not extending to the history of bookmaking at large, but this omission isn't helpful. It can give a skewed impression that the Anglo-American contribution to bookmaking is larger than it really is, when this lion's share is truer for recent times more than for the past. I'm not advocating for the inclusion of bookmakers the world over, but I am concerned that the European bookmakers of German, Dutch, French, and yes, Spanish too, origins were overlooked.

That said, the eleven chapters in this book present a fair and succinct overview of the contributions of eighteen bookmakers from the 1500s to the 2000s, from Wynkyn de Worde (what a name!) who innovated on Gutenberg's existing printing methods to the five creative youths born from 1973 to 1987 that were responsible for the appearance of zines, e-zines, do-it-youself indie publications, book boxes, and artist books. Very different people, all united by the common desire to print books in new and never-seen-before ways.

All of the eighteen people are interesting in their own way, which you can glimpse from the little biographical tidbits included, some get a more extensive mini-biography than others due to source availability. That was a bit of a problem, too, because the bookmakers I found the most interesting didn't have much in terms of sources about their lives. Like the Collett sisters, Mary and Anna, who created books by the "cut and paste" method when there was no variety in fonts and illustrations (is this where "collage" comes from, the sisters' surname?). That sounds so simple to do, even toddlers do it nowadays, but back then, it was unheard of, hard to do right, and a surprise innovation.

Of course, without demerit to the excellent gentlemen bookmakers talked about in the book, it was the women bookmakers that had me most intrigued. There are so few of them and so little information about these few it's frustrating not to know more as one would like. Besides the Colletts, there was Sarah Eaves, who contributed to typography, Charlotte Sutherland, who contributed to the creation of extra illustrations in books, Lady Nancy Cunard and her small press revolution, and Laura Grace Ford with her zines. So few, yet such meaningful contributions they made that I believe they should've got their own separate book. Maybe someone will write a book on the history of women in bookmaking, because what I got from The Bookmakers was that their role in bookmaking and publishing is much bigger than we suspect. There were female scribes, copyist nuns, typographers, bookbinders, printers, publishers, book illustrators, etc., that I see mentioned in passing in other history books that aren't in this one that would be wonderful to learn more about in a dedicated book.

I received an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Melindam · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC provided by the Publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Considering how much I love books and reading, it is a shame that I haven't really read that much about the non-fiction (historical, social and technical) aspects of "book-making".

But this book has been a very nice remedy to counterbalance this shortcoming.

Author Adam Smyth's book is truly a worthy celebration of the BOOK/BOOKS and offers you historical, social and technical overview from the 1500s into the 2000s and treats the topics with joy and respect that really resonated with me as a booklover.

There are 11 chapters on the topics:

- Printing
- Binding
- Cut and Paste
- Typography
- Non-Books
- Paper
- Extra-Illustration
- Circulation
- Anachronistic Books
- Small Presses
- Zines, Do-it-yourself, Boxes, Artists' Books

Now this may sound dry, but the topics combined with the human element through it all makes it very interesting. The stories he chose of people (Wynkyn de Worde, Mary and Anna Collett, Benjamin Franklin & Charlotte and Alexander Sutherland - just to name a few) who were all big in the book-making department in their own ways are very intriguing.

There is a somewhat limiting factor as the author concentrates mostly on the England-US part of the world with honorary mentions outside that territory, though he acknowledges the profound debt to "immigrants from other lands". Of course, this does not takes away from the enjoyment or the validity of the information we are offered, but it left me wanting more on a wider scale.


Highly recommended.

[heptagrammaton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compulsevely, contagiously enthusiastic, manically erudate, loving book. By my rough perusal, they are a number of reviews which seem dissapointed that The Book-Makers is not either a more expansive, classically received history of the printed book nor a more thorough work a biography; this I'd judge to be a somewhat silly complaint, as the title and table of contents transparently offer no such thing.
   Instead, head-hoppingly, by now and then laying out material artefacts, often scant and surviving the chance, Adam Smyth offers up a view of what the printed codex has and will mean: as it had to be first, at point of contact, at point of production, a material technology, a thing to be assembled, to be grasped, to be written in, cut, sewn, bound, impressed; meticoulous, makeshift, make-do, half-manustript, mechanised, spendtrift, monumental, collaged, basterderdized, grangerized, commercialized, boutique-commodiefied, object d'art, of the moment, of no moments, frankestein´d basted, punked.

   The story of the physical book is a storz made bz people, not algorithms, individuals with messy lives, and ideals, and talents, and non-infinite resources, and with other things to do. One of the things physical books do is carrysomething of the lives, or the personalities of their makers, throuh their sheer weight-in-the-world presence. Books are expressive objects which themselves possess an emotional range and which covey, in their material dorms, in ways that are sometimes legible, the texture of what it meant for a particular book-maker to be alive. . .

[Christina O. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Book-Makers" is a good overview of the history of books, structured by the lives of different book makers: binders, printers, papermakers, etc. It's not a biography because there isn't much information on many of the people Smyth is focusing on--Benjamin Franklin being one of the exceptions--but he is able to explore their lives through their work and the way that work influenced the book as a form and culture as a whole.

The book can be a little dry at times. You really should be interested in the topic before you start reading it. But there are pure golden moments throughout the book that reflect on the history of books, of book-makers, and the life of a single book. If you like reflecting on any of these things, I would recommend "The Book-Makers" to you.

[Regine · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The story of the physical book is a story made by people, not algorithms, individuals with messy lives, and ideals, and talents, and non-infinite resources, and with other things to do. One of the things physical books do is carry something of the lives, or the personalities, of their makers, through their sheer weight-in-the-world presence.”

I thoroughly enjoyed the granular details from which the life of each book-maker was constructed. I could feel the author’s joy of discovery, of absorbing every nuance from a sometimes-minimal written record.

I always prefer the knobbly view that arises from interestingly-arrayed facts, not the detail-erasing generalization that may seem bold but is lazily missing the many points that matter.

[Rory McG · Rating 4 out of 5]

will be thinking about this (again) for ages

[Leanne Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

**Audible** I really enjoyed this, it wasn't exclusively about books as much as I initially hoped - but I think it's a fascinating way to look at them (through the lens of the people involved in creating them). I think I enjoyed the first 8 chapters, and then got a little lost/ disinterested in the final chapters because they concerned modern day. I also liked that the author of the book read this work on Audible.

[مروة الجزائري · Rating 4 out of 5]

صانعو الكتب يعرض لمحة تاريخية واجتماعية وفنية عن صناعة الكتاب من خلال سرد سيرة مختصرة للأشخاص الذين كانوا روّادًا في مجالهم وساهموا في تطور الكتب وتحويلها وتحسينها منذ اختراع الطباعة التي جعلت الكتب (كلمات مطبوعة على الورق) في القرن الخامس عشر إلى يومنا هذا.
من المطبوعات المبكرة للمهاجر الهولندي وينكين دي وورد إلى مجلة بلاك ماس في نيويورك وما بينهما، ستقرأ عن صناعة الورق والتجليد والخط والقص واللصق والكولاج والمكتبات والمطابع الصغيرة والكتب الكبيرة والقصص التجارية، وستقرأ عن جامعي الكتب المهووسين وناشرين ينشرون كتابًا كل أسبوع. ستقرأ عن شخصيات غير معروفة نسبيًا عرّفنا عليهم المؤلف من خلال أعمالهم وتأثير هذهِ الأعمال على الكتاب شكلًا ومضمونًا، والمصاعب التي واجهوها، والخيارات التي اتخذوها.
ولعل مثلبة الكتاب الوحيدة هو تركيز آدم سميث على اختيار شخصيات من أمريكا وبريطانيا إلى حدٍ كبير ولم يتطرق إلى الشخصيات الاستثنائية في باقي أنحاء العالم التي ساهمت في صناعة الكتاب، وقد تعزو محدودية طرحه إلى افتقاره للمصادر أو المعرفة بالشخصيات الأخرى أو لغاية في نفسه والله أعلم.

تطرق الكاتب إلى ثُنائيتي (الكتاب والناس، والكتاب الوقت) في كتابه وقال: "للكتب علاقة عميقة ومعقدة مع الزمنية، فالكتاب الذي بين يدي الآن كان موجودًا منذ عام ١٦٦٤ وسيظل فترة طويلة بعد أن أرحل عن العالم، والعلامات التي تركها القرّاء من هوامش وملاحظات وتأشيرات هي دليل حيّ على هذهِ الرحلة".

كما أشار سميث في مقدمة كتابه إلى سخافة فكرة كون الثقافة الرقمية قد حلّت محل الكتب المطبوعة مقارنًا إياها بالتحول من المخطوطات إلى الكلمة المطبوعة في القرن السادس عشر ذاكرًا أن الكتب المطبوعة حاولت محاكاة خط اليد في بواكيرها، لتكتسب المصداقية جزئيًا ولأن المخطوطات كانت الشكل المتاح عمومًا. وقال: "يمكن النظر إلى الثقافة الرقمية والطباعة كنوع من التبادلية بدل الصراع الدارويني أو الموت، وحافزًا لإثارة تطورات جديدة في عالم الكتاب كما نلاحظ في الوقت الراهن".

"عندما تصادف كتابًا قديما تعاقبت عليه الأجيال، ستلمح حركة الكتاب عبر الأزمان… لمحة بسيطة على قائمة الاسماء التي مرّ كتاب ما بين أيديها تريك افتقار ادعائنا بملكيتها".

"قصة الكتاب الورقي هي قصة كتبها أشخاص، لا خوارزميات، أفراد لديهم حيواتهم الفوضوية ومُثلهم العُليا ومواهبهم ومصادرهم المحدودة ومشاغل أخرى يقومون بها. الكتب الورقية تحمل بعضًا من حياة أو شخصيات صانعيها. وهي أشياء مُعبرة تمتلك في حد ذاتها نطاقًا عاطفيًا وتنقل، في أشكالها المادية، ما يعنيه أن يكون صانع الكتب على قيد الحياة، يصب فيها الاهتمام أو التردد أو التسرع أو التحدي أو الغضب أو الحب اذي كان يسكنه ساعة مرور الكتاب بين يديه. وما الكتب التي تراها في كل مكان إلا نتاج عمل المصممين والمحررين وكل من مرَّ به الكتاب في أثناء صناعته".

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not your mainstream 'history of the book' story. You won't find much about Gutenberg, the Bay Psalm Book, Incunabula, or the development of modern publishing. The important part of the subtitle is 'in Eighteen Lives'. Eighteen lives of people who had idiosyncratic relationships with books.

Honesty, how many of these people do you know? Wynkyn de Worde, William Wildgoose, Mary and Anna Collett, Ben Franklin, Nicholas-Louis Robert, John Baskerville and Sarah Eaves, Charlotte and Alexander Sutherland, Charles Mudie, Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, Nancy Cunard, and a raft of zine and art book makers.

One, right? Franklin. William Morris is also in there, but he's not the featured person.

Some of these people made books (as in, printers, like Franklin, although he made few books other than the almanac and much more ephemeral material – advertisements, broadsides, etc.). Some of them took books and cut them up to remake them. A few didn't make them but influenced the field (Mudie, the Jeff Bezos of his day). Others made things that might or might not be called books (the zine makers, and box makers).

The author is intrigued by people who took books and re-purposed them, either by adding illustrations or otherwise rearranging text (like conflating books of the Bible). Or by making zines or other 'book-like' objects. It's a fun part of the story of the book, but a lot of it could be described as curiosities of the trade, and not an influential part of book history.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it. It's a book that peers into the nooks and crannies of the book making field, not the main part of publishing books.

In describing the oddities of the book field, this book is a bit of an oddity in itself. But fun.

[Erika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, Basic Books, for the opportunity to start reading this early for an honest review.

I must be in my non-fiction era, because I’ve been devouring non-fiction lately. The world of book binding has always interested me and this book was an excellent look into the history of bookmaking including: printing, binding, typography, paper, and other things I’ve never heard of like cut and paste, and extra-illustrations. Instead of dry facts, each chapter focuses on the life of a person or people that were pioneers in their field.

I’d recommend this story to anyone that’s interested in the minutiae and history of books and book binding.

[McKenna Deem · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25⭐️

I thoroughly enjoyed this exploration of bookmaking! There were times where the choice of bookmakers felt aggressively euro-centric, though many of their backstories included the rich, global origins of the craft.

Smyth fleshes out peoples lives with care and compassion, bringing attention to how womens’ roles were often underestimated or overshadowed.

It would be a 5 for me if we had a consistently more global structure!

[JXR · Rating 5 out of 5]

awesome book about the people who built our idea of the books. tyssm for the arc. favorite passages are near the beginning and the end.

[Robin Wright Gunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I plan to dig deeper into some of the people that he features in some chapters.

[Evelyn Petschek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating! The author chronicles the development of the book by highlighting the lives and efforts of 18 individuals who had a big impact - printers, binders, paper-makers and more. Lots of quirky, interesting and intriguing facts, perhaps a bit pedantic at times but overall this held my interest and I found it hard to put down! If you like books and history, I recommend this! Great audio narration.

[Elizabeth]

I shall never procrastinate a book report again. Mark. My. Words. 🤘

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a fingerprint in the margins of a book printed in 1664. It is not meant to be there. It is not a flourish, not an authorial signature, not a printer’s device carefully engraved to announce identity and authority. It is a smudge: a blurred whorl of ink left behind by a pressman in William Wilson’s shop as he lifted a damp sheet of Margaret Cavendish’s ‘Poems, and Phancies’ from the press.

Three hundred and fifty-nine years later, in the Bodleian Library, Adam Smyth leans closer and sees it. And in that instant, the history of the book is not abstract, not technological, not chronological—it is human.

That fingerprint is the governing metaphor of ‘The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives’. Not the perfection of the page, but the accident. Not the machine, but the hand that hesitated, slipped, pressed too soon.

Smyth’s project is to restore that hand to view. To insist that books are not inevitabilities but outcomes: of decisions, collaborations, quarrels, misjudgements, obsessions, vanities, stubbornness, poverty, taste. People make books.

And if we look carefully—at the binding waste, the printer’s device, the lower-case ‘g’, the stitched spine, the staple through cheap paper—we can see them.

The book begins, as all good origin myths should, in noise. Chapter 1, “Printing: Wynkyn de Worde (d.1534/5),” opens in a multilingual London of the 1490s. A Dutch immigrant walks into a tavern in 1492. It sounds like a joke, Smyth suggests, but it is history. Wynkyn de Worde, successor to William Caxton, is one of those figures who hover in footnotes until someone bothers to tilt the page toward the light. Smyth does that tilting.

Through images like ‘A Lytyll Treatyse Called the Booke of Curtesye’ (1492), Wynkyn’s printer’s device, three versions of ‘The Ship of Fools’ (1517), John Fisher’s sermon, and ‘The Descrypcyon of Englonde’ (1502), we watch print establish itself not as triumphant conqueror of manuscript but as an anxious imitator.

Early print disguised its novelty. Gutenberg’s 1454–55 ‘Biblia Latina’—represented later in the book—was designed to look like a manuscript, complete with hand-coloured initials. What else could print look like? Manuscript was the only available model.

The idea that print obliterated handwriting is a fantasy of clean replacement. In truth, as the book historian Peter Stallybrass has argued, print was a “revolutionary incitement to writing by hand.” Almanacs like ‘Poor Richard, 1737’ actively invited readers to annotate. One 1566 almanac offered itself to anyone “that will make & keepe notes of any actes, deedes, or thinges that passeth from time to time.” Print did not silence scribes; it multiplied them.

Smyth is careful to resist what he calls a Whiggish narrative of improvement. Books do not get better in a straight line. The paper used by Gutenberg—its watermark a brilliantly clear bunch of grapes—remains of a time-defeating quality unsurpassed by modern industrial processes. Those pages look today as they did on a summer’s morning in 1455.

The fantasy of technological refinement dissolves when confronted with the stubborn endurance of good rag paper.

If Chapter 1 is about the birth of print in England, Chapter 2, “Binding: William Wildgoose (fl. 1617–26),” reminds us that books are also sewn, glued, repurposed. The Bodleian Library Day Book of 1623, scraps of printed Latin waste, pages from Hans Sachs’s ‘Eygentliche Beschreibung aller Stände auff Erden’ (1568), a leaf of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ from Shakespeare’s First Folio, and William Wildgoose’s own signature tell a story of recycling and repair.

Bindings are archives of what was discarded. Printed sheets become endpapers; fragments survive because they were convenient stuffing.

Wildgoose is harder to grasp than Wynkyn. We see him in glimpses, as Smyth puts it, arriving in the room just after he has left. But his books stand in a pile on the desk.

The romance of authorship gives way to the labour of stitching and pressing. The binder’s work is both humble and decisive: without it, pages scatter. In restoring Wildgoose, Smyth restores the quiet artisans whose names rarely make title pages.

Chapter 3, “Cut and Paste: Mary (1603–80) and Anna Collett (1605–39),” explodes any lingering idea of the book as fixed object. The Collett sisters’ ‘Gospel Harmony’ (1635), their rearranged ‘Whole Law of God’, images of St Matthew writing, and collaged “Last Judgement” after Marten de Vos demonstrate that readers were editors, too.

They cut printed Bibles apart and reassembled them into new configurations. Chronological adjacency, Smyth insists, is not always the best basis for comparison. Laura Grace Ford’s ‘Savage Messiah’ (early 2000s), battling the gentrification of London through cut-and-paste collage, finds a natural interlocutor in the Collett sisters.

The 17th century and the 21st speak across time through scissors and glue.

This refusal of linearity is one of the book’s quiet radicalisms. It is organised chronologically—from Wynkyn to Yusuf Hassan—but it is full of loops. William Morris’s ‘Works of Geoffrey Chaucer’ (1896) at the Kelmscott Press (Chapter 9) deliberately imitates medieval manuscripts. Thomas Cobden-Sanderson’s Doves Press (Chapter 9) designed type to resemble Nicolas Jenson’s 1476 ‘Historia naturale di Caio Plinio Secondo’.

The Doves Press ‘Paradise Lost’, its punch and matrix lovingly crafted, looks backward to refuse the industrial present. These are purposeful anachronisms. They flicker between historical periods, belonging to several at once.

Chapter 4, “Typography: John Baskerville (1707–75) and Sarah Eaves (1708–88),” might have been a familiar story of typographic genius, but Smyth refuses to isolate Baskerville from the woman beside him. Baskerville’s ‘Publii Virgilii Maronis Bucolica, Georgica, et Æneis’ (1757), his specimen sheets with their elegant italic ‘Q’ and lower-case ‘g’, the reproduction of his slate—these are triumphs of clarity and calm.

An observing historian wrote that Baskerville’s volumes sailed forth “to astonish all the librarians of Europe.” But Sarah Eaves was there, partner and wife, present in the archive yet long overlooked. Smyth’s history is as much about the blindness of historians as it is about the brilliance of printers.

Chapter 5, “Non-Books: Benjamin Franklin (1706–90),” destabilises the very category of the book. Franklin’s Philadelphia lottery papers (1748) and ‘Poor Richard’ almanacs complicate the idea that the book is a bounded codex. Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s “The Librarian” (1566?)—a portrait composed of books—reminds us that books can form bodies, identities, caricatures.

Franklin produced a new publication every week. Ephemera, pamphlets, lottery tickets: these too shape print culture.

Paper itself becomes protagonist in Chapter 6, “Paper: Nicolas-Louis Robert (1761–1828).” The invention of the continuous paper-making machine alters scale and speed. Yet Smyth’s eye lingers not on mechanisation alone but on what paper enables: the village lawyer in Peter Brueghel the Younger’s painting (c.1620), Hans Sachs’s printed worlds. Paper is the substrate of imagination and bureaucracy alike.

By the time we reach Chapter 7, “Extra-Illustration: Charlotte (1782–1852) and Alexander (1753–1820) Sutherland,” the book has become almost baroque in its self-awareness. James Granger’s ‘Biographical History of England’ (1769) inspired readers to “Grangerise”—to insert extra prints and illustrations into books.

Carrie and Sophie Lawrence at work, Irving Brown’s Grangerising, and Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s 2013 ‘Holy Bible’ (which overlays the biblical text with contemporary images) extend the practice into modern art. Books become palimpsests. Readers become co-creators.

Chapter 8, “Circulation: Charles Edward Mudie (1818–90),” shifts from making to moving. Mudie’s Great Hall inauguration guest list, the image of “Mr. Mudie’s New Hall,” and Florence Nightingale’s letter to Mudie reveal the power of distribution.

Mudie’s circulating library shaped Victorian reading habits, determining which novels flourished. Circulation is curation. Access is influence.

Then come the small presses and the avant-garde. Chapter 10, “Small Presses: Nancy Cunard (1896–1965),” brings us to rural France in the 1920s and 1930s, where Cunard printed Samuel Beckett’s ‘Whoroscope’ (1930). Barbara Ker-Seymer’s photograph of Cunard printing captures a woman at the press, sleeves rolled, modern and defiant.

Chapter 11 gathers zines and DIY culture: Laura Grace Ford’s ‘Savage Messiah’, Craig Atkinson, Phyllis Johnson, George Maciunas, Yusuf Hassan. Images of Chris Killip’s ‘Shipbuilding on Tyneside’ (1975–76), Brian David Stevens’s ‘Notting Hill Sound Systems’, a 2022 artwork beginning “I roped, threw, tied, bridled, saddled …,” and even ‘The London Prodigall’ (1605) remind us that stapled pamphlets and Fluxus boxes belong in the same lineage as folio Bibles.

Throughout, Smyth writes in a contemporary culture increasingly online. He chooses not to devote a full chapter to e-books, but the digital hovers like a shadow. Printing today is altered by the presence of another medium. To publish a punk zine in 1977 was one thing; to publish one in 2009, in the age of blogs, is another. The printed book acquires new connotations in the digital age: endurance, slowness, depth, cost, history. It becomes radical in the Latin sense of radix—rooted.

The relationship between digital and print, Smyth argues, is not Darwinian struggle but mutuality. Just as manuscript and print coexisted in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so do digital and print now. Early print scrambled for credibility by imitating manuscript; today, print gains aura by existing alongside the ephemeral screen.

Sales of printed titles increase even as online publishing proliferates. The academic study of physical books grows in tandem with our immersion in pixels. The older medium is changed by the presence of the new.

What makes ‘The Book-Makers’ feel postmodern is not irony but layering. The book is conscious of its own belatedness. It knows that the codex in our hands has existed at every moment between its printing and now, accumulating annotations, ticks, crosses, ownership inscriptions.

Time is not linear but sedimentary. The marginalia are the book’s memory of itself.

And then there is that fingerprint again. It anchors everything. In the Bodleian, halfway through Cavendish’s ‘Poems, and Phancies’, Smyth sees the smudge and imagines the noise and stink of William Wilson’s print shop in 1664: paper windows, wet sheets hung on strings, a pressman’s inky finger. The fingerprint does not resurrect the man’s name. It does not grant him biography. But it reveals the book as event. Production is illuminated like lightning across centuries.

I found myself reading this history not as scholar ticking off familiar milestones but as a reader newly alert to the object in my hands. The spine glue, the typeface, the feel of the paper: each became charged. The book insists that if we learn to read material signs correctly, books can tell us the story of their own making.

In a sense, Smyth’s project mirrors the extra-illustrators he describes. He inserts people back into the margins of technological history. He Grangerises the narrative of print with lives that do not fit neatly into triumphal arcs. Some loom in three dimensions, like Nancy Cunard. Others flicker in fragments, like William Wildgoose. But together they form a chorus.

It is also a celebration. Not a nostalgic lament for a dying form, but an affirmation that the printed book remains central to human culture precisely because it is adaptable, collaborative, rooted.

The history stretches back to China in the second century and the Islamic world in the eighth, even as its spine runs through England, France, and North America. It ends not with closure but with Yusuf Hassan and BlackMass Publishing in 2024, stapling and circulating in a world of screens.

A Dutchman walking into a tavern in 1492 begins the story. A zine-maker in New York in 2024 continues it. Between them lie folio Bibles, printer’s devices, bindings stuffed with waste, cut-and-paste scriptures, typographic revolutions, lottery tickets, paper machines, Grangerised volumes, circulating libraries, socialist societies, Kelmscott Chaucer proofs, Doves Press Bibles, Beckett pamphlets, Fluxus boxes, and stapled manifestos. It is less a straight road than a river with eddies and returns.

When I closed the book, I looked again at the margins of my own copy. No fingerprints yet. But I am tempted to leave one. Not out of vandalism, but in homage. Because what Smyth makes clear is that books are never just texts. They are encounters. They are the residue of labour and imagination. They are objects that outlive us, carrying our marks forward.

And somewhere, centuries from now, someone might tilt a page toward the light and see where I once held it.

Standing in 2026, I can safely confirm that this book will find its place in the top five books ‘on books’. Most recommended.

[Abigail Moreshead · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read on the history of the book. The fact that different facets of the book/its history are narrated through individuals' lives makes it very accessible and memorable.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This got a bit dry at times, but I enjoyed the history.

[Jessica M · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such an interesting book. I love how the author found specific people through history and did his best to really flesh out what their life would have been like. For example, in one spot, there's a fingerprint, an accident of whoever was making the book brushing the page with his hand--I mean, how cool is that? This was a much needed book and would be a great gift to a book lover!

[Cal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Admittedly I lost interest multiple times. Usually happens with audiobooks for me, this one even easier to just drift away as it was dry at times but I expected this to happen given the content! No worries, I’m glad I listened to it for sure. Some really cool historical facts that were enjoyable to hear about if you like books or just think about the history of spreading information.

[Adrianne]

6/2024 Thank you Ashland Public Library MA for hosting the author talk via Zoom: https://youtu.be/n5HCf9ZqJSg?si=peflw...

[Kevin Crowe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adam Smyth's "The Book Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives" provides an unusual but crucial perspective. Unlike most books about books, it isn't concerned with authors, nor is it concerned primarily with the content of books, though all this is present. Smyth's primary concern is the process by which book are made; in part the technology, but primarily the people who used and developed technology and insights into their motivations.

The chapters are both thematic (Printing, Binding, Cut and Paste, Typography, etc) and chronological. So, for example, the first chapter on Printing concentrates on the 15th-16th century printer Wynkyn de Worde and the way he developed techniques that future printers and publishers took up.

Within each chapter he looks at the life and achievements of the particular person under discussion and how (and if) they have influenced the development of the book. He also raises questions about what we mean by the word "book" - a key topic in his final chapter on zines and other 20th century developments. He makes it clear that, whatever we mean by "book", it is a physical object, which he distinguishes from electronic texts. In doing this, he isn't dismissing e-books or reading online or on a computer, merely suggesting that they are different and are read differently.

Most of the 18 individuals are little known yet have played a crucial part in the development of the book as we know it, with the one major exception being Benjamin Franklin who is the main subject in the chapter Non-Books. Long before he became a famous politician, Franklin was a printer and publisher, not just of books but of newspapers, pamphlets, lottery tickets and even currency. He claimed the moral high ground yet his newspapers contained adverts offering slaves for sale.

One of the most interesting chapters is Paper, which features the 18th-19th century printer and inventor Nicolas-Louis Robert. He is credited with inventing the technology that enabled paper to be created in large loops that could be cut to size rather than the tortuous process of creating single sheets. This transformed printing and publishing. But what is also particularly interesting in this chapter is what he tells us about the history of paper. In the west, we sometimes think we created paper, and that before that there were just things like papyrus and other expensive surfaces to write on.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Paper was invented in China in by Ts'ai Lun, who was a courtier in the Han dynasty, in the first century CE, and the paper the Chinese created came from wood bark. This technology spread west and by the 8th century CE reached the Islamic world. Meanwhile, the paper that we invented in the west came from clothing fibre, a much messier and more expensive way of producing it, and one dependent on there being enough discarded clothing to make it. It was to be the 19th century before the west learned how to create paper from wood pulp - almost two millennia after the Chinese and a millennia after the Islamic world.

This is a fascinating book that provides insight into the various ways books have been made and the achievements of some relatively unknown figures in its history, as well as correcting some of the myths associated with that history.

[Eustacia Tan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am obviously not going to pass on a book about books, so I was very excited to read The Book Makers and quite determined to share my review with my fellow book lovers!

Through 11 chapters, The Book Makers explores the lives of 18 individuals and the various facets connected to a book, including:

Binding
Paper
Printing
Illustrations
Circulation (i.e. the Lending Library)
Zines
And more!

It was honestly fun to learn more about the different aspects of a book. Because Smyth focuses on one or two lives in one chapter, we only get a snapshot of the history (granted, normally a pivotal moment in the history of that part). But that is enough to develop an appreciate of how much went into making the book the way we know it today.

My three favourite chapters were the ones on:

1. Cut and Paste – how Mary and Anna Collett wielded their scissors to rearrange the Bible and create a new work from it. I was surprised by how books have been changed since the 17th century, a good reminder that books are not signs of stasis but can still be manipulated after publishing

2. Extra Illustration – looking at the trend of augmenting books with relevant illustrations, thus adding depth or perhaps introducing certain interpretations. This chapter somewhat overlapped with the one on Zines (though I felt the Zine chapter, with three people featured, felt a little too rushed) and also the one on Cut and Paste, which again shows how people have always changed and personalised the books that they bought.

3. Circulation – looking at Charles Edward Mudie and his lending library and how it shaped not just taste (leading to protests when he did not include certain books in his library) but also the way people wrote novels (Mudie liked the three volume novel as it helped justify a subscription to his lending library). It’s vey much similar to how programmes like Kindle Unlimited or even how online bookstores used to rank books/recommend books that influenced the way authors write (write to market, writing in certain niches, etc).

As you can see, a book is more than just paper and ink. Every part of it has a rich history of its own and has been influenced by many individuals throughout time. The Bookmakers was a good reminder that books did not magically appear in its current form but was always changing and negotiating with the contemporary technology and needs of its day.

This review was first posted at Eustea Reads

[Stephen Power · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who's been in publishing for more than 30 years and as a bibliophile, I gravitate toward books on the history of the industry, and this one is really good. It gave me the same shiver I felt when, at an antiquarian bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., I was encouraged to pick up and leaf through the first edition of Spencer's FAERIE QUEEN I'd been gawking at. The shopkeeper said I shouldn't worry about hurting the book, it was built to last, and was he ever right. They made a book well back then, and THE BOOK-MAKERS celebrates this craft by showing how that proceeded through nearly a dozen fascinating milestones. While Smyth's book is a bit overpacked at times, perhaps because there aren't that many facts to pack in so nothing was left to waste, and a bit dry here and there, I nonetheless ended the book wanting to buy a handpress and start churning out pages.

And there's much of current relevance. Former head of Macmillan Don Weisberg said during the DOJ's case against the PRH merger with S&S that a subscription book service, a Netflix for books, would destroy publishing. Setting aside that he seems to have forgotten about the existence of libraries--which is fitting because Macmillan largely ignores this market, despite it being the same size as the indies--I was fascinated by the history of the subscription libraries that preceded civic ones and how they not only didn't put publishers out of business, they bought a ton of books. I was also amused by the literary writer getting shut out of the biggest subscription service for a reason that echoes the Trump trial about election interference; the author's novel being too louche for their subscribers just as David Pecker said that a story on Stormy Daniels wouldn't work for the National Enquirer because it would upset shoppers at their biggest customer, Walmart.

What I appreciated most, though, was being inspired by the artistic approaches of these bookmakers. I recently went to a performance of several experimental plays at the Cut Edge Collective in NYC, which made me want to try my hand at writing some experimental plays too, and there was a lot in this book to prompt approaches and ideas, especially the Harmonies of LIttle Gidding. I found myself highlighting much more than I normally do.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the early look.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first chapter of this book is about someone called Wynkyn de Worde. How can anyone not love a book that starts with that? As it turns out, de Worde is an important figure in the early history of printing in England, but at first I would not have cared if the author had made him up just for fun.

But in fact, this book is both scholarly and fun, and I commend the author for doing such a good job of balancing the two. As my Goodreads friends know, I love to learn from books, but at first I was a bit worried that I might have bit off more than I could chew. But no, the author keeps things moving and always in the direction of some new interesting topic. That said, if you are not interested in the origins and development of print culture and how folks have engaged with it, this is not going to be the book for you. But if you do have any interest, this book is full of fascinating facts that you might not have learned before. Sometimes utterly unfamiliar: Folks who carved up books in order to insert illustrations they collected elsewhere (sometimes from other books they cut up), which was not something I'd heard of. Other times, new perspectives on things we might think of as familiar, such as Benjamin Franklin. The chapter on Mudie's was fascinating, reasons, and I learned that Mudie was responsible both for the dominance of the 3-volume novel in Victorian times, and for the end of that dominance when it no longer worked for his business. The final chapter about zines, DIY, artists books, and a magazine that consisted of a box of contents of various media (killed by the post office when they decided that wasn't what a magazine was supposed to be) was a great way of ending the book by reminding us that we still have a lot of different ways of engaging with print culture. And the examples focused on were all very interesting in their various ways. So I highly recommend this book to my fellow print-lovers, and those of us who like a good story about what makes people tick.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adam Smyth offers a sweep of book making over the last five centuries by zeroing in on a dozen and a half practitioners of the trade. This gives us both a happy overview and delightful storytelling of many individuals and their times. My full review appears in the January-February 2025 edition of Christianity Today, which can also be found online. https://www.christianitytoday.com/202... Here are a couple parts of the review that the editors left on the cutting room floor.

The chapter on an early bookbinder, William Wildgoose (yes, that was really his name) begins and ends with the tale of a wayward volume that was first housed in the famous Bodleian Library in Oxford, only to return unexpectedly three centuries later. In 1905 a young man comes in wanting advice on rebinding his ancient folio. When the sub-librarian and assistant librarian inspect it closely—and then more closely!—they discover that this was once in the Bodleian’s collection, sold off as new printings became available. The book has been remarkably preserved through generations. And like someone who found a priceless pearl in a field, the Bodleian raises an enormous sum now equivalent to $300,000 to buy it back. The volume? Shakespeare’s First Folio, bound by William Wildgoose in 1623.

While zines go back a hundred years, Smyth features examples of the last few decades. The creators of these periodicals intentionally positioned them outside mainstream publishing in content and production values, often being photocopied and stapled. They knew that online existed, but they were committed to the tangibility, the physicality of their publications. They believed it provided a more multi-sensual experience that is not diluted by the digital.

Perhaps the author chose to highlight them for this very reason, as Smyth’s volume is in many ways a celebration of the physical book in all its dimensions.

[Book Club of One · Rating 4 out of 5]

A highly readable history of the book through 18 individuals, The Book-Makers explores the varied world of those who create printed works across five centuries from the early days of printing with Wynkyn de Word, through the ephemeral focused Franklin to the small scale contemporary zine makers.

Adam Smyth is a historian, but writes a clear narrative with many an aside or reaction to the content. But Smyth also shares from the figures he portrays, reactions to their works, public perception, or after the fact understandings. 11 chapters are featured, each with a theme that mostly focuses on one person, movement, time period or ideal. These chapters use these thematic points to discuss the changing history of book making, noting key technological adaptations, adoptions or advancements. While Smyth is predominantly focused on the Western world, he is clear to show that the development of paper and printing globally, with credit to China for the development of paper and printing and it’s spread west through the Islamic Middle East.

While Book-Makers is arranged chronologically, as it is centered on people, it is not a straightforward historical narrative. Instead it follows the lives as they unfurled with all the pettiness, success, challenges and missed opportunities that could entail. Of the many themes, some of the centrals ones are the consideration of the book as both a vehicle for the diffusion of knowledge and the book as a physical object that was purposefully created telling something of all those involved in the creation and the life (/lives) of their owner(s).

Recommended to librarians, historians and those interested in the history of the book.

I received a free digital version of this book via NetGalley thanks to the publisher.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book was an constant exercise in frustration. Smyth chose to present his flawed history of the book as a series of sketches of 18 lives, a choice which is, at first glance, a brilliant idea, but is unfortunately very poorly executed.

Smyth's choices of subjects are such that at times an entire chapter may be written about a character for whom there is perhaps a page or two, at most, of relevant information available in the primary records, and he therefore has to fill in the rest of the chapter with page after page of irrelevant information and fanciful musings about what a person about whom almost nothing is known *could* have been thinking or *may* have been doing, based on little more than what more interesting people of the time were thinking or doing (people who have no connection to the primary character, mind you, but for whom actual primary sources are available). The result is a watered-down mess which leaves us with a scant idea of who the primary character was, and a whole lot of questions which are given only irrelevant answers.

Other chapters are about subjects who are deeply interesting and are riveting reads, but unfortunately due to the amount of fluff that is added to fill up space, any content of substance ends up being abbreviated, and this leaves us completely unsatisfied and wanting to know more. What is infuriating is how Smyth tries to force tenuous (at best) connections between the subjects of different chapters, and even spends pages musing about what one of them might have thought of the other, based on nothing more than vibes. It is that kind of pointless editorializing (if it can even be called that), which makes this book at times barely qualify as non-fiction.

I wish I could give this book a higher rating, because clearly a lot of time and research went into it, but it could have done with some serious editing and re-writes. In the end, this is an early draft of a much better book.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the title suggests, this is a history of the book, as told in a series of short biographical essays that concern individuals who, while they may also have been writers or poets, were linked by their roles in the physical production and distribution of book (in early modern England before industrialization took over). The author, on the faculty at Oxford, knows his subject well.

So there are chapters about printers and binders. There are chapters about efforts to construct high quality individualized and large books adapted with extra illustration or other curations for clients. There is material on “non-books” or what printers did in between producing their large masterpieces and still needed to pay the rent. There is even a chapter on a 19th century commercialization of a private lending library that shows hints of what Amazon would become in publishing more recently. There are modern effort at zines that provide much of the content of blogs and podcasts but with a physical and circulating product.

All of these efforts seem to be linked to how important individuals have come to interject themselves into publishing prior to the arrival of the corporation. At the same time, however, Smyth’s fine book concludes with a recognition that books can and do take on a meaning far beyond that intended by the individuals involved in their original production. Great books outlast that mortal makers.

This was a thought provoking book and is worth the time and effort of book lovers.

[Patrick Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Book-Makers is a clever and engaging collection of biographies and vignettes from the history of books, starting slightly before Gutenberg’s time and continuing to the 2010s. I appreciate that the publishers chose to distribute the British version in the United States, with some British idioms left intact and currency denominated in British terms.

In the account on binding (Chapter 2), told through the life and work of one William Wildgoose, Adam Smyth includes an excerpt from the poem “The Book” by Henry Vaughn, prefacing it with these words: “Addressing God, Vaughn imagines the prehistory of the physical components of a book—paper, once clothes worn by people with their own lives and thoughts, and leather covers, once a creature in a field eating grass.”

With such respect for book-makers shown in this book, it is humbling to think how dehumanizing the production of mass-market books and ebooks has become. The flip side, of course, is the democratizing effect of having so much literature available, much of it dreck but much of it beautiful, worthwhile, and even sometimes life changing.

The copy of The Book-Makers that I borrowed from the library is hard bound with the text printed on groundwood paper and a cloth cover. The type is set in 12/14.75 Baskerville MT Pro, Baskerville being one of my favorite typefaces from my days working in book production. Thanks to Adam Smyth and to Basic Books for producing this gem.