Surveying the Making of Books Over the Years
Lest you misunderstand the title and think this is a history involving gambling and odds-makers, this is, as the author impresses on readers right up front, a book about books and the people who made them. We get figurative wide-angle surveys about types of printing and snapshots of printers, with close-ups of 18 such individuals.
As one major English newspaper has put it — this title was originally published by The Bodley Head in Great Britain — this volume is far from your standard Gutenberg-to-Google history. (That comment is on target, though a bit more on Gutenberg might have helped set the stage better.) Still, the stage is a long one, covering some 530 years; there’s a British focus, but some of the players come from other corners of the globe. This story — canvassing the physical nature of books — has “an English, French, and North American spine, but any history of the book is sprawlingly international, and we’ll take in China from the second century, and the Islamic world from the eighth,” the introduction assures readers.
Some of the books viewed may be dusty, but we will bet that you’ll find the associated tales about their creators to be vigorous. Our bibliophilic guide for The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives is Adam Smyth, a professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, University of Oxford. Smyth is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. He is also a bookmaker, running a small printing press (39 Steps Press) in Oxfordshire, England. This volume was named a Best Book of 2024 by the London-based Economist.
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