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

An Economist Book of the Year

A five-hundred-year history of printed books, told through the people who created them.

“Almost every page—almost every paragraph—fizzes with facts, allusions, speculations, tidbits of etymology and gems of historical interest.” —Wall Street Journal

Books have transformed humankind, yet we know little about the individuals who brought these fascinating objects into existence. Who were these renegade book-makers who changed the course of history through their experiments in the arts of printing, paper making, type designing, binding, advertising, and selling?

The Book-Makers offers a new way to understand the story of Western culture’s most important object through a series of dynamic portraits of eighteen men and women who helped to define the book. From Wynkyn de Worde’s cheap bestsellers produced in fifteenth-century London, to Nancy Cunard’s avant-garde pamphlets made on her small press in Normandy; from Benjamin Franklin’s inky entrepreneurialism, to the radical culture of contemporary zines, this is a celebration of the book with the people put back in.