TY  - BOOK
AU  - Smyth,Adam
TI  - The book-makers: a history of the book in eighteen lives 
SN  - 1541605640
PY  - 2024///
CY  - New York, NY
PB  - Basic Books
KW  - Printers
KW  - Biography
KW  - Book industries and trade
KW  - History
KW  - Bookbinding
KW  - Publishers and publishing
KW  - Biographies
KW  - lcgft
N1  - "Originally published in 2024 by The Bodley Head in Great Britain" -- title page verso; Includes bibliographical references (pages 342-352) and index
N2  - "The Book-Makers is a celebration of 550 years of the printed book, told through the lives of eighteen 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. Some of these names we know. We meet jobbing printer (and American founding father) Benjamin Franklin. We watch Thomas Cobden-Sanderson conjure books that flicker between the early twentieth century and the fifteenth. Others have been forgotten. We don't remember 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 book publishing before Jeff Bezos. Nor William Wildgoose, who meticulously bound Shakespeare's First Folio and then disappeared from history. The Book-Makers puts people back into the story of the book. It takes you inside the print-shop as the deadline looms and the adrenaline flows--from 1942 Fleet Street to 2023 New York. It's a story of contingencies and quirks, of successes and failures, of routes forward and paths not taken. The Book-Makers is a history of book-making that leaves ink on your fingers, and it shows why the printed book will continue to flourish" --; "Books tell all kinds of stories--romances, tragedies, comedies--but if we learn to read the signs correctly, they can tell us the story of their own making too. The Book-Makers offers a new way into the story of Western culture's most important object, the book, through dynamic portraits of eighteen individuals who helped to define it.    Books have transformed humankind by enabling authors to create, document, and entertain. Yet we know little about the individuals who brought these fascinating objects into existence and of those who first experimented in the art of printing, design, and binding. Who were the renegade book-makers who changed the course of history?    From Wynkyn de Worde's printing of fifteenth-century bestsellers to Nancy Cunard's avant-garde pamphlets produced on her small press in Normandy, this is a celebration of the book with the people put back in."--Amazon
ER  -