Book Review: "The Book Makers" by Adam Smyth

I have been waiting a long time to read this book. As we speak, I am typing this up on my iPad shortly after moving cities. So far, so good - thanks for asking. Anyways, I first heard about this book whilst in Waterstones and there was some sort of display featuring books about books and this was on it. After this, I couldn’t get the book out of my head, I kept seeing it everywhere and though I didn’t really have the funds to be getting it, I got it anyway. Going through this book has helped me learn about bookmaking and it’s almost 600 year history. But of course, that doesn’t mean everything was all sunshine and rainbows.

The book starts off just after the invention of the printing press by William Caxton. I studied some stuff about Caxton about ten years’s ago whilst doing my A-Levels and so there was nothing unfamiliar about his name. Nor was there very much unfamiliar about an immigrant named de Worde. It’s quite a name for a man who worked in book printing, yes, but it is what he did in his time that was quite fascinating. First and foremost you must know that this man printed over 800 books from his office on Fleet Street in London and secondly you should know that he is quite possibly one of the most famous names in the history of the book. This book goes through eighteen different lives of important people related to how we have come to know books today and this guy is by far, the one that everyone should know.

This text goes into incredible detail even teaching us about the methods that de Worde used to print books into other languages. Another section of this book details the life of a book binder named William Wildgoose who honestly, I had not actually heard of and there seems to be some reason as to why.

William Wildgoose worked for the Bodelian Library from the years 1621 to 1625, or perhaps those are the only years that are documented. One of the things I found remarkable about this book is that there was not a lot known or documented about his life and yet, we still have him in our historical realms and we still remember him as a book binder. One of the things I thought about whilst reading this chapter is whether Wildgoose ever thought he was going to be remembered after he died and how being included in a historical text about book making would make him feel. The book binding he did would not have earned him enough money to live and so, there is speculation about whether he was doing any more work to supplement his income. There is a lot of detail for a man we apparently know very little about.

One of the opinions I saw popping up about the book as I kept on going was that sometimes it could get a little dry and boring to read. I second this motion a bit because I understand that though the writer is enthusiastic about the topic, there should really be a limit as to how long he can drag out the story of a fingerprint or a bunch of guys working as librarians. Sometimes, it can just sound like the author is droning on about the same thing. But in the case of some other chapters, they are simply not long enough and so, there is a strange imbalance that you can feel when reading this text that you have to be aware of.

I did enjoy this text on the whole. The writer makes a clear distinction between physical books and ebooks without passing the latter off as worth less. This is done by a chapter on magazines in which the writer expresses the handling of physical literature as a kind of intimacy. It is true that this is the case and there will always be more value for physical literature than ebook. But for those of us tight on a budget, sometimes the ebook can be cheaper nowadays, but I do have to agree when the author expresses the opinion that there is nothing possibly like a good book.