The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives
Brought to you by Penguin.
The Book-Makers is a celebration of the printed book, from the late fifteenth century to the early twenty-first, told through the lives of eighteenth extraordinary men and women who made the book as we know it - printers and typesetters, publishers and illustrators, paper-makers and library founders, as well as eccentrics and artists who continued to re-invent it.
Some of these names are familiar. We meet the jobbing printer Benjamin Franklin who preferred to produce popular almanacs to canonical literature. We witness how William Morris made books as if they were medieval manuscripts, even though that age had long passed. And we encounter the socialite Nancy Cunard, running a small press printing avantgarde titles from a farmhouse in France.
Others have been forgotten, even written out of history. We don't remember Sarah Eaves, wife of John Baskerville, and her crucial contribution to the famous typeface named after her husband. Not to speak of Charles Edward Mudie - perhaps the most influential figure in book publishing before Jeff Bezos - the populariser of the circulating library, who created both the 'general reader' and set the standards for literary taste.
The history of the book is the story of the men and women who made it. The Book-Makers puts people back into that story: it's not a determinist account of technological change, nor a chronology of inventions, but a narrative teeming with lives, and a history that is full of the contingencies and quirks, the successes and failures, the routes forward and the paths not taken, of eighteen remarkable individuals.
©2024 Adam Smyth (P)2024 Penguin Audiov
Adam Smyth (Author), Adam Smyth, TBD (Narrator)
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