‘The Book-Makers’ review: Bound to please

This striking image is reproduced in “The Book-Makers," Adam Smyth’s crowded prismatic history of book creation. “Death touches the printers," Mr. Smyth remarks, “but it does not touch the printed books, and if this is an allegory of human mortality, it is also an early statement of the capacity of print to live on."

About the time Huss was publishing the scene with the skeletons, an Alsatian-born printer named Wynkyn de Worde was establishing himself in London. De Worde begins Mr. Smyth’s narrative, which the author tells through the lives of mostly lesser-known men and women. De Worde would become one of the most prolific printers of his age.

By the time de Worde was cranking out books on Fleet Street—in the 16th century a rising center of the printed word—it had been about 50 years since Johannes Gutenberg, in Mainz, had invented the mechanical movable-type printing press and sparked a bibliographic revolution. Machine-manufacture has connotations of easy productivity, almost a kind of sterile bloodlessness, but Mr. Smyth’s account reminds us that making books was both laborious and noisome.

To conjure the atmosphere of de Worde’s printing room, Mr. Smyth describes a terrific stink: “from bodies printing 250 sheets an hour for twelve-hour days; from the strongly alkali lye, bubbling in a tub, used to clean the lead type; . . . from the linseed oil boiling in a cauldron over logs, nearly ready to be mixed with carbon and amber resin to make ink; and from the buckets of urine in which the inking balls’ leather covers soak and soften overnight." (Inking balls were sheepskin-covered orbs of wool used to apply pigment to metal type.) Binding was almost as fragrant, with its “hot animal glue," and violent too: Binders flattened sheaves of paper by whacking them with hammers.

Mr. Smyth, a professor of history at Oxford University, clearly delights in his subject. He has a phenomenal amount to tell us about all manner of things: about printing and binding and typefaces and paper; about small presses and subversive presses; about people careless of aesthetic values and people who’ve striven to make books of exquisite beauty. Bibliophiles can hardly be indifferent to the gorgeous, clean look of pages from the 19th-century Doves Press, with the signature typeface that its founder, Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, modeled on letters from works printed in 15th-century Venice.

So enthusiastic is Mr. Smyth that the reader may on occasion be impressed to the point of stupefaction, like a shy guest at dinner with a bibulous raconteur. Almost every page—almost every paragraph—fizzes with facts, allusions, speculations, tidbits of etymology and gems of historical interest. To emphasize the importance of a rediscovered Shakespeare folio, Mr. Smyth writes: “The Wildgoose First Folio’s arrival is an occasion to be placed alongside the great theatrical revivals of Shakespeare’s plays after the reopening of the theatres closed between 1642 and 1660; the appearance of editions of Shakespeare’s works in the eighteenth century, beginning with Nicholas Rowe in 1709 and Lewis Theobald in 1733; and later cultural celebrations such as actor David Garrick’s 1769 Stratford Shakespeare Jubilee which, despite torrential rain on day two (the grand pageant called off), to a considerable degree invented the idea of Shakespeare as a tourist commodity, and of Stratford as a destination for the Bard-struck." You see how it is: Wonderful specificity, but a lot for a single sentence.

Yet the diligent reader will be rewarded. It is charming to learn of John Baskerville, who in the mid-18th century devised the elegant typeface that bears his name, and of his wife, Sarah Eaves, whose name graces a 20th-century digital font called “Mrs Eaves." Charming too is the disclosure that after Baskerville died in 1775 Eaves sold his type “punches," as the metal letter-holders were known, to the French playwright Beaumarchais, who used them to print “a celebrated 168-volume edition of Voltaire." It is interesting to learn that paper as we know it was probably invented early in second-century China by a court official named Ts’ai Lun. Arabs made paper too, the author relates (taking a moment to jab Europeans for “appropriating paper as their own"), but by the 18th century paper making had “diminished massively" in the Islamic world.

It is also somehow touching that a machine patented in France in 1799, which would revolutionize paper production, replicated small gestures of the human workers it replaced. Like a person, the machine dipped little buckets into a vat of liquid pulp and poured their contents onto a framed wire mesh to drain. Mr. Smyth writes: “And where the vatman or vatwoman, with a movement so often repeated that it became instinctual, shakes the frame forward-to-back and then left-to-right to make the fibres clasp together, [the] machine performed a side-to-side shake."

Having taken us into all sorts of odd corners of the history of the physical book, “The Book-Makers" ends with a handful of modern (mostly English, mostly leftist) creators of printed material, such as pamphlets and photocopied ’zines, who have challenged the traditional printed volume. The internet, of course, is doing the same thing, but Mr. Smyth, for one, is unworried: “Print and digital need not be placed in an antagonistic relation to one another." To borrow from the old Egyptian scribes: So let it be written, so let it be done.

Mrs. Gurdon, a Journal contributor, is the author of “The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction."