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.