The Book-Makers by Adam Smyth — a celebration of the printed book

The history of the book is often related via a catalogue of greatest hits. Scholars have traditionally focused their attention around milestones marking forward progress, pausing first at the Gutenberg Bible of 1455 and Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623); then continuing on to Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encylopédie (1751-66) before arriving at William Morris’s Kelmscott Press Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1896). Between them these volumes variously tell the story of the invention of moveable type, the development of an English literary canon, the book as repository for Enlightenment thought and the bibliographical marvels of 19th-century printing. 

This is a triumphant and seductive story; it is also one to which Adam Smyth’s absorbing The Book-Makers presents an alternative. The flipside, he writes, “is the world of jobbing printing: the production of cheap, everyday, usually ephemeral texts, the torrent of nonbook print that has circulated in the world since the 1450s”. The pink paper (or pink-tinged screen) on which you’re reading this now is a living part of that story: a testament to the way in which books have only ever formed a tiny part of the crowded landscape that is print culture.

With this reframed understanding of progress in mind, Book-Makers explores the lives of a handful of men and women who each contributed something distinctive to the history of the book. The story they collectively tell is not one of continuous technological improvement but rather a cyclical drama of making and remaking of the idea of the book itself.

The scene opens in the Fleet Street print shop of Wynkyn de Worde, a Dutchman who demonstrated the potential of the printing press in England, publishing virtually all surviving Middle English literature in the process. From de Worde’s workshop we move through the almost invisible history of Wildgoose the binder — a man whose character can only be seen in the nature of his sewing and his hatching — into the lives of Mary and Anna Collett, Jacobean sisters who cut up printed Bibles so that they could remake the words of the Gospels into new forms of religious narrative.

The story they collectively tell is . . . a cyclical drama of making and remaking of the idea of the book itself

The Colletts are the first of several among Smyth’s bookmakers who stand outside official histories of production and print. Others include those involved in 19-century ‘Grangerizations’ (another form of cutting-and-pasting-and-remaking named after James Granger, the clergyman who pioneered the form), and of the foundation of small imprints such as the Hogarth Press as well as the world of contemporary countercultural zine-making. The vivid accounts suggest that Smyth’s sympathies lie with artisanal versions of bookmaking, in which both method and purpose run counter to the forces of industrialisation. 

Thus he tells the story of Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, who was so determined his Doves Press editions should not be subsumed into a world of machine printing that in 1913 he threw all his type off Hammersmith Bridge into the Thames. Even a gesture on this scale could not protect Doves Press from the power of the online world. In 2014 an astonishing 148 pieces of type were recovered by a graphic designer with a mudlarker’s licence and the assistance of Port of London Authority divers. As a result the type has now been rendered digitally: “with modifications”, Smyth writes, “for the contemporary, web-accustomed eye.”

Book-Makers offers many delights for bibliographical mudlarkers. I did not know, for example, that the grain of paper used in UK and US bookmaking runs in different directions, nor that this is why American books lie flatter than their bulky English cousins.

And in a world where digital text shouts louder than ever 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. Their stories reside in the physical volumes they made. Through meticulous study of the material qualities of those volumes, Smyth breathes both books-as-objects and their creators back into life.

The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives by Adam Smyth Bodley Head £25, 400 pages

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