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The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives

Brains & Noble

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₦21,000.00 /

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About this item

Seller assumes all responsibility for this listing. Item number: 1708

Last updated on Jun 13, 2026 05:09 PM

Item specifics

Category Brains & Noble > Non-fiction

Condition new

SKU BN-107301

Item description from the seller

A celebration of the printed book, told through the lives of 18 people who took it in radical new directions.

* AN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024 * A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE SUMMER 2024 *

‘This really is the loveliest of books’ I
‘I cannot recommend it highly enough’ SPECTATOR

This is an extraordinary story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error. Of printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders.

Some we know. We meet jobbing printer (and United States Founding Father) Benjamin Franklin, and watch Thomas Cobden-Sanderson conjure books that flicker between the 20^th and 15^th centuries. Others we’ve forgotten. We don’t recall Sarah Eaves, wife of John Baskerville, and her crucial contribution to the history of type. Nor Charles Edward Mudie, populariser of the circulating library – and the most influential figure in publishing before Jeff Bezos. Nor William Wildgoose, who meticulously bound Shakespeare’s First Folio, then disappeared.

The Book-Makers puts people back into the story of the book. It takes us inside the print-shop as the deadline looms and the adrenaline flows – from the Fleet Street of 1492 to present-day New York. It’s a tale of contingencies and quirks, of successes and failures, of routes forward and paths not taken. This is a history of book-making that leaves ink on your fingers, and shows why the printed book will continue to flourish.