TORCH Book at Lunchtime: The Book Makers

Book at Lunchtime was delighted to welcome Professor Adam Smyth (English) to discuss his acclaimed work The Book Makers. The wonderful review in the Financial Times last year provides a taste of how captivating this discussion was. "This is a triumphant and seductive story; it is also one to which Adam Smyth’s absorbing The Book-Makers presents an alternative. The flipside, he writes, “is the world of jobbing printing: the production of cheap, everyday, usually ephemeral texts, the torrent of nonbook print that has circulated in the world since the 1450s”. The pink paper (or pink-tinged screen) on which you’re reading this now is a living part of that story: a testament to the way in which books have only ever formed a tiny part of the crowded landscape that is print culture. With this reframed understanding of progress in mind, Book-Makers explores the lives of a handful of men and women who each contributed something distinctive to the history of the book. The story they collectively tell is not one of continuous technological improvement but rather a cyclical drama of making and remaking of the idea of the book itself." Join TORCH and a packed seminar room to relive this excellent discussion.