Untitled on the Book Makers

Adam Smyth traces the physical history of the book through eighteen figures who shaped it, from jobbing printer Benjamin Franklin to Sarah Eaves, an overlooked contributor to typeface history, to William Wildgoose, who bound Shakespeare's First Folio before vanishing from the record entirely. Organized around themes like printing, binding, typography, and cut-and-paste, the book moves chronologically while foregrounding the people, not just the technology.

Smyth, a book historian who runs his own hand press, treats the physical book as a five-century-long collaborative invention rather than a fixed object, celebrated here as Economist and Financial Times Book of the Year.