A celebration of the printed book, told through the lives of 18 people who took it in radical new directions.<\/b><\/p>\n
‘Amazing. This book is a soul-expanding celebration of the human spirit’<\/b> MARTIN LATHAM, author of The Bookseller’s Tale<\/i><\/p>\n
‘Will delight any booklover’ <\/b>ROLAND ALLAN, author of The Notebook<\/i><\/p>\n
This is an extraordinary story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error. Of printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders.<\/p>\n
Some we know. We meet jobbing printer (and United States Founding Father) Benjamin Franklin, and watch Thomas Cobden-Sanderson conjure books that flicker between the 20th<\/sup> and 15th<\/sup> centuries. Others we’ve forgotten. We don’t recall Sarah Eaves, wife of John Baskerville, and her crucial contribution to the history of type. Nor Charles Edward Mudie, populariser of the circulating library – and the most influential figure in publishing before Jeff Bezos. Nor William Wildgoose, who meticulously bound Shakespeare’s First Folio, then disappeared.<\/p>\n The Book-Makers<\/i> puts people back into the story of the book. It takes us inside the print-shop as the deadline looms and the adrenaline flows – from the Fleet Street of 1492 to present-day New York. It’s a tale of contingencies and quirks, of successes and failures, of routes forward and paths not taken. This is a history of book-making that leaves ink on your fingers, and shows why the printed book will continue to flourish.<\/p>\n ‘Evocative and fascinating’<\/b> EMMA SMITH, author of Portable Magic<\/i><\/p>\n ‘A brilliant time machine of a book’<\/b> JOSEPH HONE, author of The Book Forger<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A celebration of 550 years of the printed book, told through the lives of 18 extraordinary men and women who took the book in radical new directions: printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders. This is a story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[75],"product_tag":[7746,852,349],"class_list":["post-103057","product","type-product","status-publish","product_cat-history","product_tag-biography-business-industry","product_tag-biography-literary","product_tag-social-cultural-history","pa_book_author-smyth-adam","pa_cover-hardback","pa_dewey-070-50922-edition23","pa_imprint-the-bodley-head","pa_language-english","pa_pages-8497","pa_publisher-the-bodley-head","pa_readership-general-trade-code-k","first","onbackorder","taxable","shipping-taxable","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"yoast_head":"\n