These Ink-Stained Dreamers Didn’t Need Permission to Make Books. They Just Did.

I have been passionate about books my entire life. In grade school, my teacher assigned a series of reports on the provinces of Canada. Each week, I wrote one report, and by the end of the term, I gathered them all, added a table of contents and a title page, and bound them with yarn. No one instructed me to do this; I simply felt compelled. In high school, a friend and I self-published a novelty humor book and sold hundreds of copies to friends and family. This was decades before self-publishing became mainstream. It’s no wonder that when I joined the editorial staff of InterVarsity Press 50 years ago, I felt like the town drunk given charge of the local distillery. Naturally, I was deeply engrossed in Adam Smyth’s “The Book-Makers,” which celebrates the individuals who have crafted books over the past half millennium.

Through the stories of 18 lives, Smyth, a professor at Balliol College, Oxford, provides not a comprehensive history of the physical aspects of bookmaking but a representative and very human narrative centered in England. We encounter dedicated bookbinders, ambitious entrepreneurs, clever (and often impoverished) inventors, innovative distributors, pioneering typographers, obsessed artisans, and dreamers—always some dreamers. They dream of creating art, making money, and making a difference.

Smyth’s narrative begins in 1501 with Wynkyn de Worde, one of the first and most prominent printers on London’s Fleet Street, which soon became the heart of British publishing. De Worde, an immigrant from Germany, arrived shortly after Gutenberg’s revolutionary printing press had been developed. In the early days of printing, much of England’s publishing industry relied on skilled workers from the continent. However, this reliance sparked resistance, leading to laws limiting foreign workers. Despite these restrictions, “significant numbers of skilled bookmen continued to arrive from abroad, particularly during times of crisis,” writes Smyth. De Worde received some patronage from the aristocracy but focused on serving a broader audience. He combined business acumen with a keen understanding of his readers, printing both religious texts and popular works like Sebastian Brant’s 1494 satire, “The Ship of Fools.”

Smyth vividly describes the physical nature of bookmaking, transporting readers back 500 years to de Worde’s workshop. The space is cramped and likely dark, overheated in summer. Candles flicker, and freshly printed sheets hang from high ropes like drying laundry. The windows are paper, not glass, a cheap method to block sunlight from the printed pages. But in winter, it is freezing. Scraps of paper lie around—old proof pages, torn sheets—ready for reuse as makeshift window covers, wrappers, or to fill gaps between letters. Everything is thrifty, embodying a spirit of maximum efficiency. The workshop stinks from the bodies of workers printing 250 sheets an hour for twelve-hour days, the strongly alkali lye used to clean the lead type, spilled beer brought in by apprentices, boiling linseed oil for ink, and buckets of urine where the inking balls’ leather covers soak and soften overnight.

Smyth enjoys his subject matter, and readers share his enthusiasm. For example, he recounts the story of William Wildgoose, a prominent bookbinder of the era. “We might think it’s unlikely,” he writes, “that there were dozens of individuals named William Wildgoose honking around Oxford, but records suggest an extended family in the Oxfordshire area in the seventeenth century.” Wildgoose worked at a time when printers sold books as unbound stacks of paper, allowing customers to choose their preferred bookbinder. The Bodleian Library at Oxford (founded in 1602) often turned to Wildgoose in its early years.

Typography also receives attention in Smyth’s portrayal of John Baskerville, a Birmingham-based printer, and his wife and business partner, Sarah Eaves, who brought stability and expertise to their joint venture. Beyond creating an elegant mid-18th-century typeface, Baskerville immersed himself in every aspect of the book—the paper, the ink, the page design, and the printing process. Baskerville’s books were crafted objects to be admired in their own right.

In Baskerville’s time, the world’s most famous American was a multifaceted figure: a scientist, an inventor, a political activist, a diplomat, and a writer. But he most often identified himself as a printer. Benjamin Franklin learned the trade in Boston, Philadelphia, and London. (The recent Apple TV+ series “Franklin” depicts him using this training to illegally print pamphlets in France supporting the American Revolution.) Consistent with centuries-old trends in his trade, the bulk of Franklin’s printing was transient and ephemeral. He made his fortune and reputation through job printing, producing pamphlets, sermons, lottery tickets, paper currency, newspapers, and government documents. The major exception was his yearly almanac, which, despite its book form, was also temporary.

When Smyth delves into the history of paper, he highlights the human tendency toward prejudice. The Chinese invented papermaking 2,000 years ago, and their methods spread to the Arab world 800 years later. These techniques reached Europe around the 11th century. Initially, Europeans distrusted paper because it was introduced by Jews and Arabs. Once they recognized its value, “they set about systematically forgetting its Arabic, Chinese past, appropriating paper as their own, and refashioning its history into a story of European ingenuity,” writes Smyth.

The story of Nicholas-Louis Robert further illustrates the darker side of human nature. Although the Frenchman gained a patent in 1799 for the first papermaking machine, he suffered from the greed of those who blatantly stole his designs, robbing him of recognition and remuneration.

The case of Charles Edward Mudie also demonstrates that there is nothing new under the book-publishing sun. A century and a half before Jeff Bezos and Amazon, Mudie dominated book distribution. This 19th-century purveyor of British culture “found a very cheap way for hundreds of thousands of new readers, including women, those far from London, and those scattered across the globe, to access books they could otherwise not afford.” His scheme involved loaning books for an annual subscription price that cost less than three novels. For London residents, he even provided free delivery. Sound familiar?

Books have not been solely the domain of entrepreneurs. They have also been objects of devotion and obsession. One trend spanning the 18th and 19th centuries was epitomized by collectors Charlotte and Alexander Sutherland. They, along with many others, would take a volume of, say, British history and augment it with hundreds of separate portraits and illustrations. This could transform a single book into dozens of oversized, beautifully bound volumes, all for personal enjoyment rather than public consumption. Another monument to obsessive book artistry was the career of English bookbinder Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, who produced a landmark five-volume Bible in 1904, followed by deluxe editions of Shakespeare’s plays. Cobden-Sanderson had commissioned a new, meticulously crafted metal-type font modeled after 15th-century designs. However, his devotion turned monomaniacal in his later years, as he feared that second-rate mechanical printing outfits would use his handiwork without honoring his care and craftsmanship. In 1916, over several months, he secretly dumped hundreds of pounds of precious type and tools into the River Thames.

Smyth brings us into the last hundred years by highlighting the literary efforts of two small British presses—Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press and Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Their community of authors included Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, E.M. Forster, Gertrude Stein, Sigmund Freud, and John Maynard Keynes. Emphasizing the manual (rather than mechanical) press and catering to specialized tastes, this movement sought “to uncouple publishing from the restrictions of the market.” In this, Cunard succeeded admirably, as her Hours Press lasted only three years before being sold off.

“The Book-Makers” compels us to ask, from the perspective of our digital world: Is reviewing the history of print merely an exercise in nostalgia or irrelevance? We may recall apocalyptic predictions from 20 years ago that print books were doomed. Yet they have survived. Today, according to Association of American Publishers data, about three print books are sold for every digital book (ebook or audio), a ratio that has remained stable in recent years. Combined sales within the US have also remained steady, hovering around a billion units annually. This is challenging in an economic system that often relies on growth for survival, but it is remarkably strong in the face of literacy trends, entertainment options, and the flood of news and social media.

As readers and citizens, we are drowning in information yet starved for wisdom. That is why, among all the activities described in “The Book-Makers,” the gravitational center for me lies in chapter 3, where the book slows to a meditative pace. In the 1600s, there was a religious community at Little Gidding, 30 miles northwest of Cambridge, England. Over decades, Mary and Anna Collett labored with great care and craftsmanship, cutting and pasting personal editions of the Bible to create a single harmony of the Scriptures. While this may seem like an act of destruction, it embodied a posture of deep reading—of emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually engaging with the text, all enhanced by physically interacting with the printed page. Though Smyth exhibits no overt religious commitments, he shows rare sensitivity. He does not treat the Colletts with cynicism or ridicule, as would be easy. Instead, he accepts them for who they are, much as they saw themselves: two people in community, seeking to grapple with the Word, to meditate on it deeply, and to let it change them.

Andrew T. Le Peau headed the editorial department at InterVarsity Press for three decades. He is the author of “Write Better” and “Mark Through Old Testament Eyes,” and he blogs regularly at Andy Unedited.