The Book-Makers
A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives
Will be published approx. on 20. October 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
400 pages
978-1-5416-0916-7 (ISBN)
Description
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.
“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.
More details
Person
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 Times Literary Supplement and runs the 39 Steps Press, a small printing press that he keeps in a barn. Smyth lives in Oxford, England.