Book review: It’s long ago and far away – early 17th-century England, say – and you’ve just bought a book. But what you’ve got isn’t really a book, not in the modern sense. All you’ve bought are some printed sheets of paper, maybe stacked up, maybe rolled, maybe not even cut into individual pages.
So it’s off to find a bookbinder, perhaps the splendidly named William Wildgoose of Oxford, a tradesman whose name is remembered today only because he happened to bind a copy of Shakespeare’s “First Folio” – not such a big deal then as it is now.
Wildgoose sets to work. First, he checks your printed sheets to make sure there are no missing pages, inserts any prints or maps, folds the sheets into sections, taking care to keep everything in order, flattens each section with a few hefty hammer blows, puts everything into a press, adds end leaves, sews the block of text together, rubs in hot animal glue for reinforcement, delivers more whacks with the hammer to coax the spine into a rounded shape, adds pasteboards to create the front and back covers, puts the whole lot back in the press for a few hours, colours the edges of the closed pages with a spray of ink, wraps the covers in calfskin, presses a few decorative lines into the leather, adds two ties to keep the covers closed, wipes the leather with egg white and vinegar, gives it a polish – and finally, you have your book.
It sounds like hard work, and it was. One early description of bookbinding lists 66 separate actions required to assemble a single volume.
If there’s one thing this “book about books, and the people who made them” succeeds at, it’s conveying all the hard, sweaty, dirty graft that once went into making a book. Some of the “remarkable lives” that author Adam Smyth profiles could be described as aesthetes or intellectuals, but many are the tradies of their day, their names mostly forgotten, just people getting on with the job.
Even before you got to the bookbinding part, there was plenty of work to do. There was the printing, which meant assembling individual letters of type into words, then words into lines, arranging the lines into pages, mixing your own ink, rubbing it on to the type, putting it into a press with a fresh sheet of paper, giving the press a good squeeze – more hard work – removing and checking the freshly printed sheet, hanging it up to dry, then repeating the process over and over again.
“And the place stinks,” writes Smyth, “from bodies printing 250 sheets an hour for 12-hour days; from the strongly alkali lye, bubbling in a tub, used to clean the lead type; from the beer spilt on the floor, brought in every couple of hours by the young apprentice; 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.” Such was the glamour of the early world of book production.
And before the printing could start, someone had to make the paper. That meant cutting up old rags, beating and soaking them in water to make a pulp, plunging your hands into the mix over and over again to pick up some of the slurry on a metal mesh, shaking it one way and then the other, draining off the water, tipping out the soggy sheet and drying it between woollen blankets. In a day of that tedium, says Smyth, two skilled workers could turn out a whole 2000 sheets.
This isn’t a tour of the greatest hits of book production. Smyth does focus on some of the acknowledged great works of printing and binding, but he doesn’t avoid the everyday stuff that always accounted for a much bigger share of the trade. So in the chapter on Benjamin Franklin – printer as well as inventor, statesman, newspaper editor, diplomat etc, etc – we learn that he made a lot of his money not by printing grand volumes, but lottery tickets, licences for pedlars, advertisements, soap wrappers, bookplates, almanacs and anything else that could be got out the door as quickly and as cheaply as possible.
In choosing his subjects, Smyth has searched out female contributors to the history of printing and publishing. If you’re a typophile, you’ll have heard of John Baskerville – more than 250 years after it was created, the typeface named after him is still available in Microsoft Word. But you’re less likely to have heard of the woman he married, Sarah Eaves, who played a major role in the family business and carried on printing in her own right after her husband’s death. And in the 20th century, there’s Nancy Cunard – heiress, frantic socialite and supporter of left-wing causes – who moved to rural France, bought a printing press and set up her own one-woman publishing house, producing volumes by writers including Samuel Beckett and Ezra Pound.
In the modern era, at the other end of the time scale from Wildgoose, and often the other end of the craft scale too, there’s a look at zines and other DIY publications – frequently banged out on a photocopier, stapled together and distributed by hand. The intention may be serious but the physical form can be rough, fast and everything that old-school fine printing wasn’t.
The subtitle would be more accurate if it said “A (mostly English) history of the book …” Asian and Islamic contributions to the art form do get a mention, but not much more. That aside, Smyth succeeds in inserting people into the history of print.
The Bookmakers: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives by Adam Smyth (The Bodley Head, $75 hb, ebook, audio)
