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The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives Audiobook
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Publisher Description
The five-hundred-year history of printed books, told through the people who created them
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.
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"It is refreshing to be reminded of the imagination and ingenuity of generations of men and women, many of them ignored by regular histories, who helped expand the potential of the printed book as form and object…Smyth breathes both books-as-objects and their creators back into life."
— Financial Times (London)
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“Vivid and often surprising.”
— Times Literary Supplement (London) -
“Fizzes with facts, allusions, speculations, tidbits of etymology, and gems of historical interest.”
— Wall Street Journal -
“Smyth’s voice is clear and mellow; his enthusiasm for the material is unflagging and contagious and, for those who care deeply about books, entertaining and informative.”
— AudioFile
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About Adam Smyth
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. He also runs the 39 Steps Press, a small printing press, which he keeps in a barn in Oxfordshire, England.