The Book-Makers:

A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives by Adam Smyth (Bodley Head, £25)

For many years now, biographers have been interested in the marginal figures of history, people whose lives had not been told before. The latest book of this sort is Adam Smyth’s The Book-Makers, which relates the history of book-printing through the lives of significant, though relatively underappreciated, printers. You know Gutenberg, probably Franklin, but do you know who printed Shakespeare’s First Folio or the man who invented the modern method of producing paper? Smyth also gives us insights into the lives of forgotten readers, such as the Tudors who literally cut the Pope out of their prayer books, or the members of the religious community at Little Gidding who made composite editions of the gospels for themselves, literally cut and pasted.

Smyth’s book is a fun and informative account of what it takes to make a book—there used to be 66 steps in the process, far more than the anticipated folding, beating, pressing, threading and gluing. It is also a repository of the people involved in those makings: the printers and their apprentices. The Book-Makers gives you a lively sense of the way in which books have been made and unmade, crafted, handled and spliced down the centuries; it tells you what a printer’s workshop smelled like, the tools at use; you will hear about the invention of typefaces, but also about the way readers have ornamented their books, in what is known as “extra-illustration”, by adding engravings.

The paper inventor, by the way, was Nicolas Louis Robert. Without his method of making continuous sheets of paper that are produced on a rotating roller, we would likely not have had newspapers or periodicals. He achieved no financial success in his lifetime, nor widespread recognition, and has been largely ignored by bibliographers. But, in many ways, he is one of the most significant inventors in history. Henry Oliver