The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives

ISBN: 1541605640

Author: Smyth, Adam

Condition: New

A scholar and bookmaker breathes both books-as-objects and their creators back into life (Financial Times) in this five-hundred-year history of printed books, told through the people who created themBooks 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 cultures 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 Wordes printing of fifteenth-century bestsellers to Nancy Cunards avant-garde pamphlets produced on her small press in Normandy, this is a celebration of the book with the people put back in.