The Book-Makers - Books.Infosec.Exchange

Hardcover, 400 pages

Published by Basic Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-5416-0564-0

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 …

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.

2 editions

Ben Waber reviewed The Book-Makers by Adam Smyth

An Individual-Focused History of Printed Books

3 stars

You can tell that Smyth is a printed book fanboy given how lovingly he writes about the evolution of printed books from the dawn of the printing press to the modern day. If you're similarly a fan of typography, there's loads of descriptions and pictures here to accompany the flowery prose and stories of some important/representative printers over history. There's very little macro context here, however, so if you're more interested in the economic, social, or political impact of printed books, other texts cover it in more detail. This is also extremely Western focused, which given the changes in printed books that I'm familiar with in East Asia alone is a huge oversight. There are still some excellent stories and insight on individual printers/styles here, so it is still a worthwhile read.

Ben Waber

rated it

July 20

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