TORCH Book at Lunchtime: The Book Makers

Описание: 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.