As I enter retirement I have started going to an actual bookshop for my non-fiction reading, The Book-Makers – A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives by Adam Smyth is the fruit of this approach.
My Goodreads account shows I have read 618 books since I started using the site about 10 years ago – it is fair to say I am a big fan of books.
Smyth’s book is about people who make or made books, divided across 11 thematic chapters. The chapters are ordered chronologically. Books are defined quite broadly, when he talks about Benjamin Franklin (under non-books) he includes newspapers, advertising and bank notes.
The chapters can be grouped into wider themes. The first of these are the technical aspects of printing: printing, binding. typography and paper. The Book Makers starts with Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534/5) who was an apprentice of William Caxton, who introduced the first printing press to England in 1476. de Worde’s contribution was the large number of titles he printed, and what he printed – literature for the masses. The thing that struck me about the printing and binding is that these were distinct process in the early years of print, a customer would buy the printed pages of a book and take them elsewhere for binding. This explains how the books in country houses often have such uniform appearance.
The metal type used to print is a recurring theme, it has its own chapter with John Baskerville (1707-75) and his wife, Sarah Eaves (1708-88) who took over his business after he died. Baskerville was late to printing – his first book was printed when he was 51. His goal was to produce the most beautiful books possible, drawing on his experience in calligraphy and “japanning”. You may be familiar with the Baskerville font which he created in 1752. Later we find Thomas Cobden-Sanderson throwing his type into the Thames so that his business partner wouldn’t get hold of it! Metal type is the heart of printing, and sets of metal type are shared and inherited between printers – this can be traced by the characteristic wear on individual letters which is revealed in the print they produce.
Also in this theme of the technical aspects of printing is the manufacture of paper, something Smyth describes as a neglected area for historical study. Paper production went from 55 tonnes per year in 1805 to 25,000 tonnes in 1835 as a result of the continuous paper production process that Nicolas-Louis Robert patented in 1799. He died a pauper since patent protection was not well-established and he didn’t have the means to defend what was clearly a lucrative idea. This huge increase in production of paper means that it finds more applications – in toilet paper, advertising and flyers. It becomes a throw-away commodity.
There are a group of chapters that talk about publishing beyond the book: cut and paste, non-books, extra-illustration and a variety of recent print innovations (zines, artist books and so forth). The “cut and paste” chapter visits Mary and Anna Collet two women at Little Giddings – a religious community near Cambridge – in the earlier part of the 17th century. Their great work was the “Harmony”, a biblical text which attempted to harmonise the five books of the Pentateuch. It was made by very literally cutting and pasting text (often at the word level) from copies of the bible, augmenting the text with illustrations similarly harvested. This was a work of sufficient quality that Charles II praised it.
Extra-illustration, also called Grangerism, is a similar practice found around the start of the 19th century. In extra-illustration enthusiastic amateurs produced enhanced versions of books by adding illustrations they had sourced elsewhere. The name is after James Granger’s Biographical History of England which helpfully lists all know images of each of the biographical characters it introduces – a book made for Grangerism. I am partial to a bit of a sort of extra-illustration of my own, coincidentally I labelled my post on this Obsession – Grangerism seems to have been an obsession in at least some cases.
There’s one chapter on lending libraries – in particular Charles Edward Mudie’s (1818-90) lending library which was massive in the later part of the 19th century – distributing books across the UK and the rest of the world. Authors not included in Mudie’s library were at a disadvantage in the commercial market. Commercial lending libraries largely disappeared with the arrival of public libraries from the 1920s. I was interested to learn that WH Smith had a lending library, rail users with the appropriate subscription could pick up a book at one station and leave it at another.
Finally, there are couple of chapters on small presses. William Morris had a small press (Kelmscott Press) – but the focus here is on Thomas Cobden-Sanderson and his Dove Press. Morris and Cobden-Sanderson focussed on the retro, printing high quality volumes in small print runs, harking back to the techniques and styles of early printing (and even manuscripts). Smyth notes that the quality of paper, ink and print does not increase massively over the long term but the efficiency with which it can be done increases greatly.
A chapter is devoted to Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press which was active a little later and focused on printing modernist works in small print runs. She attracted some high profile authors before they were famous, and engaged in political activism through her press. Virginia Woolf ran a similar press – Hogarth which still exists as an imprint of Penguin Random House. Both Woolf and Cunard appreciated their presses as a way of publishing their own work. It seems both of them enjoyed the sometimes messy and manual process of book making.
I must admit I found the final chapter on “Zones, Do-it-yourself, boxes, artist books” a bit anti-climatic perhaps because I don’t consider things happening in my lifetime as “history”!
This is an excellent book for people who love books, I found the parts about the early years of printing when the form of the book had not solidified most interesting.
