The Book-Makers

The five-hundred-year history of printed books, told through the people who created them.

“Smyth breathes both books-as-objects and their creators back into life.” —Financial Times

An Economist Book of the Year

Books have transformed humankind, yet we know little about the individuals who brought these fascinating objects into existence. Who were these renegade book-makers who changed the course of history through their experiments in the arts of printing, paper making, type designing, binding, advertising, and selling?

The Book-Makers offers a new way to understand the story of Western culture’s most important object through a series of dynamic portraits of eighteen men and women who helped to define the book. From Wynkyn de Worde’s cheap bestsellers produced in fifteenth-century London, to Nancy Cunard’s avant-garde pamphlets made on her small press in Normandy; from Benjamin Franklin’s inky entrepreneurialism, to the radical culture of contemporary zines, this is a celebration of the book with the people put back in.

• “Bibliophiles will savor this sprightly walk down the book’s memory lane.”
  Kirkus
• “Erudite, insightful and hugely enjoyable, The Book-Makers features an eclectic cast of oddballs, eccentrics and visionaries who have shaped the printed book. A fabulous, first-class read.”
  Giles Milton, author of Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
• “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
• “Evocative and fascinating… 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.”
  Emma Smith, author of This Is Shakespeare
• “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
• “Fascinating... Should teach even serious book-nerds a heap of forgotten and precious information about the making of books … As full of surprises as any novel.”
  David Bellos, author of The Novel of the Century