Everyone knows that Johannes Gutenberg, he of the Gutenberg Bible , invented the movable-type printing press, suddenly making the mass production of books possible and, therefore, books themselves affordable for nearly all. But hardly anyone thinks about all the technological developments and all the stages of human inventiveness that made possible those 180-odd copies of the Good Book that Gutenberg churned out from his Mainz workshop in 1455, setting a revolution in motion.
And that human element of the story of books is the subject of The Book-Makers by Adam Smyth, a professor of English literature at Oxford's Balliol College and also the owner of 39 Step Press, an unabashedly eccentric print shop in Oxford specializing in minuscule runs of single poems by Shakespeare and others. The "History of the Book" part of Smyth's subtitle is misleading. He has no interest in the first 1,400-odd years of the codex book form per se, pages bound together inside covers, that started to displace rolled scrolls as a reading medium during the early years of the Roman Empire. Smyth's focus is strictly on the printed book that Gutenberg invented and nearly as strictly on the handset type that Gutenberg pioneered. He devotes only a page or two to the mechanized "hot metal" and "hot lead" typesetting methods (such as the Linotype machine) that largely supplanted labor-intensive handsetting of individual letters during the late 19th century and were, in turn, supplanted by computerized typesetting during the second half of the 20th century.
Smyth also focuses special attention on English figures, with two exceptions. One is Benjamin Franklin , who made his fortune in Philadelphia , starting at age 23, as editor and publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette newspaper, a leading voice of opposition to British colonial rule, and the vastly successful Poor Richard's Almanack. The other is Nicolas-Louis Robert (1761-1828), a Frenchman who patented a cylindrical machine that turned out paper in continuous rolls, replacing the hitherto laborious practice of manufacturing paper one sheet at a time on a mesh screen dipped into a vat of pulp. Robert's machine, with numerous subsequent refinements, became the basis of every sort of paper manufacture to this day, from wallpaper to toilet paper. Robert himself profited little from his invention, however. He quarreled with his business partner, got embroiled in lawsuits, and sold his patent but never got paid for it. He ended his life as a country schoolmaster, almost forgotten.
As a printer himself, Smyth is fascinated by the sheer physicality of book production. Paper alone, based on vegetable fibers such as rags or wood pulp and thus vastly cheaper than the animal skins that formed the pages of medieval books, was a momentous invention, probably first developed in China during the first century A.D. Paper-making technology spread westward to the Islamic world by the eighth century and then to Europe by the 11th, via Islamic Spain. As Smyth points out, there is no Whig history of upward progress for paper manufacture. "The paper used by Gutenberg in the first printed Bible, with its brilliantly clear bunch-of-grapes watermark, is of a time-defeating quality unsurpassed by modern industrial processes," he writes.
Then there was the printing press, which Gutenberg invented by adapting the screw press used to crush grapes for wine-making to pressing sheets of paper over beds of ink-covered type. Typography, the design and manufacture of typefaces, quickly became a skilled art. The precision craft of cutting type "punches," steel prototypes of letters that were driven into softer brass or copper matrices into which the molten alloy of the type itself was poured, was a "closely guarded secret" handed down from master to apprentice, Smyth writes.
But Smyth's real interest is in the people of the printing world. And here, he has selected a motley crew of them over the centuries, chosen as much for their peculiar personalities and tastes as for their contributions to book-publishing history. For example, he skips over William Caxton, the very first English printer (he put Chaucer's Canterbury Tales into print for the first time), to focus on Caxton's protege Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534/5), whose publishing appetite was more lowbrow: jest books, self-improvement tracts, ballads, and saints' lives, often illustrated with crude and bizarre woodcuts. John Baskerville (1707-1775), the Birmingham businessman who devised the elegant Baskerville-type font, was also a militant secularist. He specified in his will that he be buried under a cone in his backyard in defiance of the religious "superstition" that required a churchyard interment. But the cone disappeared after his death, and Baskerville's coffin bounced around Birmingham for years, to be occasionally opened by admirers. Finally, during the 1890s, he was buried in sacred ground after all.
Some of Smyth's subjects have only a tangential relationship with bookmaking. Benjamin Franklin, for example, made most of his money with the Gazette, Poor Richard, and an endless round of pamphlets, sermons, and government jobs. But the tireless Franklin, with his countless side-schemes and inventions (swimming fins, bifocal glasses, and a chair that could be converted into a stepladder), was undoubtedly the most colorful figure in publishing history. His stock in trade wasn't simply his virtues of industriousness and thrift but making sure everyone knew about his industriousness and thrift, which enabled him to push aside lazier co-workers as he hoisted himself upward. As he wrote in one of the Almanacks, "The sleeping fox catches no poultry."
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Others among Smyth's subjects include Mary and Anna Collett, two pious 17th-century sisters who cut up Bibles and repasted the pages onto folios to create "Biblical Harmonies" that, for example, refashioned the four Gospels into one continuous life of Christ. During the 18th and 19th centuries, a similar fad prevailed for "Grangerising," named after its clergyman-pioneer, James Granger (1723-1776). This involved cutting open the bindings of books to insert illustrations of their historical or fictional subjects. Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), the wild-living shipping heiress, took a break from her usual hobbies of drinking, leftism, writing avant-garde poetry, and having affairs with famous writers (Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, and James Joyce) to run the Hours Press in France briefly. There, she set the type herself, printed works by Ezra Pound and Norman Douglas, and "discovered" Samuel Beckett, then 24, by publishing his poem Whoroscope in 1930.
Smyth's lively account trails off only in our own century, when the best he can come up with in our digitized time is an obscure collection of publishers of "zines" (do-it-yourself mini magazines). This may be a metaphor for the fate of the printed book itself, with its ever-declining readership. But Smyth believes nonetheless that "books will endure" — and so might we hope as well.
Charlotte Allen is a Washington writer. Her articles have appeared in Quillette, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times.
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