THE BOOKMAKERS: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives by Adam Smyth (The Bodley Head, $75 hb, ebook, audio)
It’s long ago and far away – early 17th-century England, say – and you’ve just bought a book. But what you’ve got isn’t really a book, not in the modern sense. All you’ve bought are some printed sheets of paper, maybe stacked up, maybe rolled, maybe not even cut into individual pages.
So it’s off to find a bookbinder, perhaps the splendidly named William Wildgoose of Oxford, a tradesman whose name is remembered today only because he happened to bind
