Adam Smyth

A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives

The Book-Makers

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. This is the first history of the world's most important object, told through thirteen dynamic portraits of the individuals who helped to define it. Books have undergone a remarkable evolution in production, commerce and style, ultimately serving to challenge the way we think about life and the world around us. They have transformed humankind from primates to thinkers, scholars and storytellers by enabling the creation of documentation and entertainment, and encouraging the democratisation of learning. 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 Caxton's first printings of The Canterbury Tales to Nancy Cunard's avant-garde pamphlets produced on her small press in Normandy, Adam Smyth explores the lives of these early innovators in order to understand how books have been introduced to new readers, bought, sold and borrowed, and the invention of new technologies which transformed the landscape of the printing press.

A Story in Thirteen Extraordinary Lives

A scholar and bookmaker “breathes both books-as-objects and their creators back into life” (Financial Times) in this 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.

A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives

Studies of the representation and understanding of drink and conviviality in diverse social contexts.

Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-century England

A Pleasing Sinne

This History explores the genealogy of autobiographical writing in England from the medieval period to the digital era.

A History of English Autobiography

A History of English Autobiography explores the genealogy of autobiographical writing in England from the medieval period to the digital era. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes wide-ranging essays that illuminate the legacy of English autobiography. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered writings of such diverse authors as Chaucer, Bunyan, Carlyle, Newman, Wilde and Woolf. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History is the definitive, single-volume collection on English autobiography and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.

Explores life-writing forms - almanacs, financial accounts, commonplace books and parish registers - which emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Autobiography in Early Modern England

This book combines book history and literary criticism to explore how early modern books were richer things than previously imagined.

Material Texts in Early Modern England

Dennis Duncan

Book Parts tells the histories of the parts of a book that are not the main text: chapter heads, page numbers, introductions, indexes . . . Each of these elements emerged at a certain time and developed in a particular way. The book is arranged into twenty two chapters, covering topics from front matter (title page, frontispiece, etc.) to back (errata list, endleaves, etc.), and each written by an expert on the subject but with an emphasis on lightness,so that its presentation is authoritative but not ponderous.

Adam Smyth

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