126. Pen, Page, and People - The History of the Book: Prof. Adam Smyth (Author of "The Book-Makers")
December 29, 2024 • 27 mins
When we think of history of books, we often neglect the people who created them. We think of history as a figment of facts, connected together by time and advances in technology. But sometimes we overlook the humanity, the souls, the fingerprints in the ink-stained margins of long-forgotten tomes. In this episode, I sit down with Oxford's Prof. Adam Smyth to discuss his The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives. How a book was made tells us about the people who created it, as well as what the culture valued about books. The way a book was formed changes how we interact with it.
Topics:
- Humanizing the history of the book - the forgotten lives of the book-makers
- The book - a blend of prose and production
- How culture influenced the design of books
- How hand-printing influences your view of writing
- Do you think the abstract nature and accessibility of text have changed how we view it?
- "What books have had an impact on you?"
- "What advice do you have for teenagers?
Bio:
Adam Smyth is professor of English literature and the history of the book at Balliol College, University of Oxford. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the TLS. He also runs the 39 Steps Press, a small printing press, which he keeps in a barn in Oxfordshire, England.
Affiliate book links: (Support the show by buying through these links :D)
Socials -
Lessons from Interesting People substack: https://taylorbledsoe.substack.com/
Website: https://www.aimingforthemoon.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aiming4moon/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Aiming4Moon
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
When we think of the history of books, we often
neglect the people who createdthem.
We think of history as afigment of facts, connected
together by time and advances intechnology, but sometimes we
overlook the humanity, the souls, the fingerprints in the
ink-stained margins oflong-forgotten tomes.
This is the Aiming for the Moonpodcast and I'm your host,
(00:31):
taylor Bledsoe.
On this podcast, I interviewinteresting people from a
teenage perspective.
In this episode I sit down withProfessor Adam Smythe to
discuss his bookmakers.
A history of the book in 18lives.
How a book was made tells usabout the people who created it,
as well as what the culturevalued about books.
The way a book was formedchanges how we interact with it
(00:52):
as well.
Adam Smythe is professor ofEnglish literature and the
history of the book at BalliolCollege University of Oxford.
He's a regular contributor tothe London Review of Books and
the TLS.
He also runs the 39 Steps Press, a small printing press which
he keeps in a barn inOxfordshire, england.
If you enjoyed this episode,please rate the podcast and
(01:13):
subscribe.
You can follow us ataimingthenumber4moon on all the
socials to stay up to date onpodcast news and episodes.
Check out the episode notes forlinks to our website
aimingforthemooncom and ourpodcast sub stack Lessons from
Interesting People.
All right, before we dive intothe episode, a quick life update
.
If you've been tracking withthe development of the podcast,
(01:34):
you may have guessed that I amnow a senior in high school,
which means it's collegedecision time and I have
officially made my decision.
I've committed to at least myfirst year to the University of
Tulsa on a full ride as acomputer science major.
So it's been an excitingjourney.
Thank you everyone forlistening and all the guests for
(01:55):
having supported me up to thispoint.
All right, with that, sit back,relax and, of course, listen in
.
Thanks again to Paxton Page forthe incredible music.
Welcome, professor adam smith,to the interview.
Thank you so much for coming onI'm so pleased to be here.
Thanks for inviting me you wrotea wonderful book called the
bookmakers, a history of thebook in 18 lives, which, first
(02:18):
off, I don't say this a lotabout, um, especially modern
books, but the prose of it isjust really beautiful.
I really enjoyed reading,especially the style of it.
It was fascinating just in thatrespect, from a writing
standpoint.
It's a history book, but it's areally interesting medium that
you choose to introduce thistopic to us.
You do it by biography.
Why do you choose this medium?
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Well, so yeah, as you say, it's a history book, it's
an account of the history of theprinted book over the last 550
years or so.
So we begin in the mid, late15th century, just shortly after
the introduction of theprinting press by Gutenberg in
Mainz, germany, and then we movethrough 18 different characters
until we culminate incontemporary New York.
(03:01):
Actually, we finish up with zinemakers, diy publishing in New
York, and the history of thebook normally centers the book,
understandably, as its object ofanalysis and discussion.
But I wanted to think about thebookmakers behind those books,
which meant the booksellers andthe printers and the compositors
and the proofreaders and thebinders and the publishers and
(03:23):
all those kind of very humanentrepreneurs who did different
things with the form of the book.
And I wanted to do that toreally humanize the book as a
medium and as a kind oftechnology, to think about the
book as the product of realpeople who had real lives, were
trying to do real things, hadother stuff to do, were busy,
(03:44):
were flawed, were ambitious,were idealistic, and to think
about the book as an object ofhuman culture rather than
something more technologicallyabstract.
That was my ambition and as aresult, I guess, as your
question implies, the book kindof works on at least two scales
in terms of timeframe.
It has a long sixth century arcof what the printed book has
(04:07):
been from the mid-15th centuryto now, and then it has
individual chapters looking at18 individuals who have a more
local timeframe when we thinkabout what was going on in the
18th century or the 19th centuryor the 15th century or whatever
it may be.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
It was really interesting reading, first off
because I almost read the firstfew chapters.
A little sad, almost, becausethere are these people that you
were describing that we havealmost lost accounts of their
individual lives completely.
You describe just only havingfingerprints or the name on a
will or something, or even themistake in some of their
spelling on a book has justreminded us that they existed.
(04:46):
So I'm curious what thatexperience was going through the
lives of these people who ofcourse, impacted the history of
the book but almost have losttheir individuality to at least
the popular culture.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Yeah, that's a really great question.
The later figures,chronologically later, are
really vivid to history and evenif they may not be the names we
traditionally dominatehistories of the book because I
wanted a slightly different rollcall they're still reachable.
In the recent past, people likeNancy Cunard or William Morris
or Virginia Woolf or whoever itmay be, these are.
(05:18):
These are names we can recoverand we can.
We can hear their voices,sometimes literally or but at
least metaphorically.
Further back in in history it'sharder to do that and I was
really interested in the kind ofpathos and the drama of
reaching for those lives butthose lives not being fully
grasped of all.
So one of the figures I talkabout in the early 70s centuries
(05:41):
is a bookbinder called WilliamWild Goose, which is a fantastic
name, and he was a bookbindercalled William Wild Goose, which
is a fantastic name, and he wasa bookbinder in Oxford and he
did.
He bound lots of importantbooks, including the Bodleian
Library in Oxford's copy ofShakespeare's first folio.
So the 1623 printed collectedworks of Shakespeare, 400 years
old last year and subject tokind of worldwide celebrations.
(06:03):
So he bound a crucial copy ofthat book and enabled it to
survive in Oxford, but we knowalmost nothing about him and we
only know, we only can feel hiskind of presence in the binding
work that he performed, in thekind of the use of his tools and
the impressions and the bindingand the stitching and the
gluing in of the waste papersthat he performed.
(06:24):
And lots of the early figureshave that kind of presence.
It's rather as if we entertheir studio and they've left.
They've left the studio.
They're not there, but the pileof books that they produce are
there on the desk.
We can get somewhere close tothem via the books, but they're
not fully rounded presences.
But there's something of themthere too.
(06:45):
And lots of the early bookmakersfrom early history are not
named in books, they're notnamed on front covers, they
don't have legal rights in theway they do now.
So the compositors, that is,the individuals, the men and
later the women who arranged thetype, for example, in composing
sticks and put it in theprinting press, or the men and
women who pulled the press andcaused the ink to be impressed
(07:09):
onto the paper, or theproofreaders, or even most of
the binders before about 1800.
We just don't know their names,we don't know their biographies
, but we can sense them, I thinka little bit through their work
with books, because I do thinkbooks are expressive objects.
They tell us something aboutthe people who made them,
whether they were in a hurry orwhether they were ambitious, or
(07:30):
whether they were looking forposterity to remember them, or
whether they were producingcheap, ephemeral everyday stuff
for a quick pound or so.
We can get somewhere towardsthem through the books that they
produced.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
It's interesting.
You argue that basically, thephysical book provides a medium
that allows us to experience notjust the prose itself, the
content of the book, butsomething beyond it.
As you were discussing, theculture of the time that this
book was printed in.
It honestly made me feel moreconnected to used books as well.
Usually, I think it's probablyjust our modern sense when you
(08:04):
get a book, you want to get itnew, right so that you can do
the marking and you can do theannotation in it, but you
describe almost in a mortalsense of the book.
So if you buy a used book, forexample, not only does it have
the etched out kind of ownershiptitles throughout it, but it
also has the other notes frompeople who've come before you
who've read this same book.
Can you describe that a littlebit?
(08:25):
Why do you think that'simportant to maybe our digital
culture, for example?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I think that's such a fascinating feature of early
books and even books through totoday.
There's a kind of doublenessthat the book has, which I'm
really interested in this book.
On the one hand, a book is amedium for carrying text.
So we read a book and we readthe novel, and we read the plot
and the narrative or the poetryor the drama or the history,
whatever it is we're reading.
So the book is like a messengerthat tells us the story, as it
(08:52):
were.
But books also, at the sametime, are physical objects in
our hands, with weight andmaterial form, and often in
their markings they carry anaccount of, sometimes a latent
account, sometimes a more overtaccount of their history.
So early books often, as you'resuggesting, have lots and lots
of handwritten annotations inthe margins.
16th, 17th, 18th centuryreaders read with pens in hand
(09:15):
in this very non-reverential wayand scribbled across their
books in the margins ticks,little flowers, pointing fingers
, notes, sometimes to do with astory or sometimes more detached
household notes, financialaccounts.
But the books come to uscovered in those very humanising
sense of history.
Or we could look at the bindingor the type or the paper or the
(09:40):
stitching and all of this, allthe provenance notes or the book
plates that are glued in byearlier owners, all of these
material features, which are notquite the same as the poem or
the play.
They tell us where the bookcame from and how it's moved
through time, and I think that'sreally powerful, that sense of
both a narrative, a story to betold, and also a kind of
(10:03):
material biography that the bookwants to tell us.
And I think it's appealing forus, as digital people, to be
aware of the longevity ofprinted books.
I think we've bought in toorapidly and with too much
confidence to the idea that thedigital is the way to preserve,
(10:23):
the way to preserve culture, andthat print is something that
passes away.
Um, you know, a book printed byWinkender Werder, who's the
Dutch immigrant who sets up inLondon who I talk about in my
first chapter, really kind ofinvents the idea of an English
language bestseller in the 1490s.
Um, a book by him on your desktoday is recognizable and we
(10:45):
know what to do with it, wecould navigate it, we know how
to turn the pages, we know whereto start, we knew how to move
forward and back.
Uh, it transcends time in areally amazing way.
My desk at home is full of theseold floppy disks and jump
drives from 10 years ago that nolonger work.
You know, I can't I literallycan't open the the documents
that are contained in them.
(11:06):
Um, the british library inLibrary in London and also the
Library of Congress inWashington DC have rooms where
they have fascinating rooms fullof dead media technologies like
old Betamax video recorders orlaser discs or DAT tapes or kind
of 1990s and noughties forms oftext storage that no longer
(11:27):
work and circulate, and theykeep a copy of each of these
machines because in the futurethey'll have disks or cassettes
that need reading and this willbe the last machine that can do
that.
So I think print endures andthose books covered with
annotations from 500 years agotell us that power that it has.
And I think I think sometimesthat's in contrast to a very
(11:49):
short-termness of the digital.
I mean, obviously the digitalcan do amazing, wonderful things
and it's essential to life.
But print has an astonishingcapacity to carry on, to persist
through centuries and one ofthe things I like when I'm
reading an old book from the17th century say is that sense
that it's already had 400 yearsof life but also that it's
(12:10):
meeting with me for a moment,but then it will carry on long
after I've gone and in centuries.
In the future people will stillbe reading Shakespeare's first
folio or John Donne's poems, orWink and the Word's romances, or
whatever it is.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
There's something about the simplicity that also
just allows it and thematerialness of it that allows
it to continue on past lives, ofboth the people who write the
book as well as the people whoprint it and even read the book
as well.
Yeah, I'm curious.
You discuss this a lot as well.
You talk a lot about, as wekind of alluded to at the
beginning, the culture ofmovements that shape not just
(12:45):
the prose.
This is again a theme thatwe're seeing the prose and the
material being kind of one inthe same.
I'm not one in the same in thesense that the book combines the
two and gives it kind of agreater narrative.
But what are the cultureelements that shape not just the
text of the book but also kindof the way books are designed
and then used by the readers?
Speaker 2 (13:07):
books are designed and then used by the readers.
Yeah well, I think differentcultural historical moments
wanted different things frombooks.
I think If we look back to thatearly period of Wink and de
Werda, the Dutch immigrant inLondon, producing books in
English that were cheap, reallyfor the first time the printers
that had preceded him, peoplelike William Caxton, were very
(13:30):
learned and kind ofcourt-centric people.
Wink and a Werder is producingcheap, mobile, accessible,
printed books that give you easypotted histories of the past or
that translate Cicero intoEnglish for you if you're not
quite up to the language, orgive you contemporary literary
poetry and romances.
(13:50):
And so Wink and the Wordproduces, I think, and responds
to a moment where there's anemerging appetite for cheap,
non-elite English languagewriting and men and women buying
books around St Paul'schurchyard in a way that hadn't
happened before.
I think that's really reallyimportant.
If we leap forward in time tothe early 20th century, for
(14:12):
example, it's an amazinglyinteresting press in London
called the Doves Press,established by an eccentric guy
called Thomas Cobden Sanderson,and he produced beautiful kind
of high end early 20th centuryeditions of classical literature
, canonical literature, but in aform that looked kind of late
(14:35):
medieval, all his books, whichwere printed in the 1900s 1910,
and which were often texts fromthe mid 17th century, actually
looked like late 15th centuryVenetian books.
They look like books from 500years before.
And I think he's responding to amoment, a cultural moment,
where people are beginning tobecome uneasy with mechanized
(14:55):
industrial book production andthey're wanting something
meticulous and exquisite andhandmade and old-fashioned, we
might say.
And so that's a cultural moment.
That's kind of detaching itselffrom what machines can produce
easily.
And in our current moment now,you know, in 2024, there's this
great explosion in zine making,in DIY, do-it-yourself
(15:17):
publishing, zines being, youknow, cheap, informal, homemade
mini magazines, often producedwith a particular political, uh
or intellectual kind of kind oftopic or ambition, and they're
physical, little journals thatare made quickly and photocopied
or xeroxed and handed around.
(15:38):
Um, there's a great publishercalled black mass publishing in
new york who are uh, who producescenes to do with
African-American culture inAmerica today.
And that's a response, I think,to the digital and to the
onlineness of so much is toproduce, is to step back from
(16:04):
that and to produce thesephysical journals and zines
which are handed out and readand turned over and engaged with
in that physical way.
So I think different culturalmoments, different points in
history want different thingsfrom printed books and the
bookmakers tries to show how,while there is both a kind of
continuity in the form of thebook, as I said, if we saw a
book from 1480 in Fleet Streetfrom London we saw it today we
would know what to do with it.
It would be recognizably a book.
(16:25):
But within that arc ofsimilarity there are all these
kind of cultural moments ofdifference, when books are
demanded to be monumental andgrand, or quick and easy and
mobile and politically agile, orcheap and democratizing or
whatever it may be.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
So, reading through your bio, I found it fascinating
that you yourself operate apress, and I believe it's the 39
Step Press.
I'm curious.
You talk about Virginia Woolfand Nancy Cunard.
First off, did I say that name?
Speaker 2 (16:57):
correctly at the end, Perfectly spot on.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Okay, beautiful, you talk about them experiencing
their writing.
Almost it changes becausethey've been printing the books
themselves and they're seeingthe page not just as a place for
text but as the physical inkinvolved in the page.
Did writing this book and kindof thinking about its printing
as well as writing other thingsthat you write.
(17:20):
Has printing shaped the way youthink about text on the page
itself?
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Yeah, absolutely it has, and I think that's been a
really interesting process Witha couple of friends.
About 10 years ago we bought apress, a hand press, a letter
press, ie a press where you haveindividual metal letters which
you arrange and then you pullthem in that very traditional
pre-mechanical way.
And we really did it as anexperiment to kind of understand
(17:46):
how early books were printedbut also to see how our attitude
to language and writing wouldchange as a result.
And it really does.
First of all, producing textbecomes very slow, it's
difficult, it's extremely errorprone.
Output rate at the beginningyou've got 14 lines that might
be 20 mistakes, an astonishinglyhigh error rate of Ws that are
(18:10):
upside down or spaces that arethere or shouldn't be there, of
poor inking that has smudged orisn't quite legible, and so you
do a proof sheet and then youmark it up and you correct the
letters, the metal letters, andyou have another go and you
gradually inch your way towardssomething which isn't perfect
(18:30):
it's never perfect, but it is alittle bit closer to what you
imagine.
So writing through the printingpress is slow, it's embodied
and physical and tiring.
You think of language asletters in space that have to be
tightly constrained and subjectto an even pressure and to be
(18:51):
flat and the whole process ofwriting becomes a different
thing.
Within that paradigm there's anamazing book by amazing short
text by Virginia Woolf from 1926called how Should One Read a
Book?
It is a brilliant lecture andshe's talking about what reading
is and why we read and how weread and why we would bother to
do this strange thing.
(19:12):
But she's and she's writing itjust at the moment when she's
really getting into letterpressprinting with her husband
Leonard.
They found the Hogarth Pressaround this time and go on to
publish lots of modernist books,um, um.
But she's just getting to gripswith printing and you can
really see it in how she talksabout literature and she talks
about writing as shaping wordsand placing them and building
(19:36):
them up and rearranging them andreassembling them, all these
practical hands on verbs sheuses to talk about writing.
So I think if you print in aletterpress way, a traditional
way with movable type, you dothink about writing in a
profoundly different way and Ithink it's a useful jolt to make
(20:02):
writing kind of strange againif it becomes a bit familiar.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
That's absolutely fascinating because we kind of
live.
We live in this world that ifwe've talked about, it's not
very material.
We are doing this on Zoom,we're not in person.
Oftentimes we write on blogs,sub stacks, and even when we
write things that will bepublished, we don't actually get
, usually unless you've printedit out of your printer and done
corrections, which doesn't feelas like monumentous as having a
(20:29):
physical, printed, bound book inyour hand.
We don't get that interactionwith our intellectual work, and
even others intellectual work,unless we've bought a book or
something.
Yeah, do you think that'schanged the significance of
writing to us?
Because of just, in some ways,the accessibility of text, but
not the the physical formulationof it I think it has profoundly
(20:50):
changed and in some ways forthe good.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
I mean, there's obvious arguments about
accessibility and speed ofdissemination and inclusivity,
and those are all real virtues,but something at least changes
and maybe is lost.
One of the things that lost, Ithink, is slowness and kind of
patience and a kind of gradualapproach to producing cultural
objects, whether that's writingor other stuff.
(21:14):
I think we've so bought intothe virtues of speed now today,
in our kind of Anglophoneculture at least, that printing
provides a kind of antidote tothat and slows everything right
down.
And so Virginia Woolf wasattracted to printing because it
(21:39):
was a kind of meditative calm.
She was suffering fromdepression and anxiety and
printing was a way to calmherself down and slow down the
pace.
So she's dealing with pickingup one letter at a time and
slotting it in and movingthrough writing in that
particular way.
So I think printing can reallyhelp with that.
Um, there's a, there's a one ofthe uh two of the kind of heroes
(22:02):
or heroines of my book.
Uh, uh, two women called annaand mary collett who in the
1630s, in little gidding, whichis a tiny, tiny little hamlet in
the middle of nowhere outsideCambridge in England lived in a
small religious Anglicanreligious community, a bit like
a mini university of 35 peopleor so, a kind of Anglican
(22:23):
monastery almost, and they didlots of pious things.
And one of the things they didwas they bought printed gospels,
so printed accounts of Christ'slife, and then they took
scissors and knives to thosetexts and cut them up, snipped
them up as if making a ransomnote, and then glued the text
back together to try andharmonize or make coherent these
(22:44):
four accounts of Christ's lifewhich seemed to them to be
conflicting.
And so they produced theseamazing, beautiful, huge folio
harmonies, big books about ameter high with collaged printed
images in as well, and in someways they look like destructive
acts in that they are cutting upbiblical text which seems to
(23:05):
our culture now transgressive.
But for them I think it wasabout slowing down print and
making religious reading take alot of time and necessarily
fiddly and exact and precise,and made writing not the easy
matter of ink on paper or therapid printing off of hundreds
(23:31):
and hundreds of the same pagevery, very quickly, but by
snipping print up and reorderingit and gluing it down, making
it slow again.
So I think there's one capacityprint has that people often note
in histories of print is speedof reproduction.
You can quickly produce, onceyou've got the typeset, hundreds
(23:51):
and thousands of identical ornear identical copies and that's
tremendously powerful and theradicalism of that in the 16th
century 16th century Europe atleast is not to be
underestimated.
But there's a sort of counterstory to that, which is about
slow printing and attempts to,through a gradual, incremental
(24:13):
process, produce text.
I think that's reallyinteresting and refreshing for
us now and I think you can seesome of that in the zine making
and the contemporary book craftsmoment we're in now.
There's a real interest, Ithink, right now in the physical
book and the beautifully made,hand-bound, hand-stitched book,
(24:34):
and all of that is answering akind of skittish panic that the
speed of the digital produces inpeople.
I think.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Wrapping up the interview, ironically focusing
on the prose itself and not justthe material of the book.
What books have had an impacton you?
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Well, that's a great question.
I guess the first book thatreally made me sort of fall off
my chair metaphorically, maybeliterally was the short stories
of Borges B-O-R-G-E-S, theArgentinian librarian and I talk
(25:15):
about him in this book becausehe was a great librarian in the
20th century but also a shortstory writer and produced these
amazing kind of hall of mirrors,kind of short stories about
infinite libraries and booksthat tell stories about books,
(25:36):
that tell stories about books.
So I found him reallyexplosively interesting.
So if anyone hasn't read borgeshe's available in loads of
english translations.
I'd recommend trying thatbecause they're short as well.
He said why bother to write anovel if you can write a page
and get the job done?
So they're really short to readinteresting, that's fascinating
.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
I'll definitely have to check that out because it's.
It's almost surrealist anddeeply philosophical in a sense,
especially if you apply it inthe context of your book, which
is the book itself.
Has a story within it and thereare two the the pro is and the
material.
Totally that's yeah, I'm gonnahave to think about that in this
and all that writing.
The last question is whatadvice do you have for teenagers
?
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Wow, that's a.
That's a good question, I think.
Well, the broad advice would beto read and read and read and
read as much as you can.
But beyond that platitude, Iwould say Connect one thing up
to another, connect one thing upto another.
And so if you're reading a bookand if it has in it a
(26:35):
particular idea or a referenceto another book, or a reference
to a painting or a bit of musicor a country or a historical
incident that seems interesting,chase that, lead through and
let that take you to anothertext or to a painting or to a
bit of music or a moment fromthe past, and read that and then
see where that takes you.
I think it's really helpful andpowerful to think about reading
as a kind of network in thatway.
(26:57):
That isn't about kind ofdutifully ticking off one
weighty tome after another andgetting it done, but seeing
these books as having kind ofinfinite number of doors within
them that take you out intoother places where you might not
have been expecting to go.
But think of books like that askind of means of getting
elsewhere very quickly.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Well, thank you so much, Professor Smythe, for
coming on the interview.
It's been a wonderfulconversation about the history
books and almost the philosophyof how it interacts with our
lives in the past and kind ofthe chronology that is not as
linear as we thought it was.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Thanks, it's been really fun talking to you.
When we think of the history of books, we often
neglect the people who createdthem.
We think of history as afigment of facts, connected
together by time and advances intechnology, but sometimes we
overlook the humanity, the souls, the fingerprints in the
ink-stained margins oflong-forgotten tomes.
This is the Aiming for the Moonpodcast and I'm your host,
(00:31):
taylor Bledsoe.
On this podcast, I interviewinteresting people from a
teenage perspective.
In this episode I sit down withProfessor Adam Smythe to
discuss his bookmakers.
A history of the book in 18lives.
How a book was made tells usabout the people who created it,
as well as what the culturevalued about books.
The way a book was formedchanges how we interact with it
(00:52):
as well.
Adam Smythe is professor ofEnglish literature and the
history of the book at BalliolCollege University of Oxford.
He's a regular contributor tothe London Review of Books and
the TLS.
He also runs the 39 Steps Press, a small printing press which
he keeps in a barn inOxfordshire, england.
If you enjoyed this episode,please rate the podcast and
(01:13):
subscribe.
You can follow us ataimingthenumber4moon on all the
socials to stay up to date onpodcast news and episodes.
Check out the episode notes forlinks to our website
aimingforthemooncom and ourpodcast sub stack Lessons from
Interesting People.
All right, before we dive intothe episode, a quick life update
.
If you've been tracking withthe development of the podcast,
(01:34):
you may have guessed that I amnow a senior in high school,
which means it's collegedecision time and I have
officially made my decision.
I've committed to at least myfirst year to the University of
Tulsa on a full ride as acomputer science major.
So it's been an excitingjourney.
Thank you everyone forlistening and all the guests for
(01:55):
having supported me up to thispoint.
All right, with that, sit back,relax and, of course, listen in
.
Thanks again to Paxton Page forthe incredible music.
Welcome, professor adam smith,to the interview.
Thank you so much for coming onI'm so pleased to be here.
Thanks for inviting me you wrotea wonderful book called the
bookmakers, a history of thebook in 18 lives, which, first
(02:18):
off, I don't say this a lotabout, um, especially modern
books, but the prose of it isjust really beautiful.
I really enjoyed reading,especially the style of it.
It was fascinating just in thatrespect, from a writing
standpoint.
It's a history book, but it's areally interesting medium that
you choose to introduce thistopic to us.
You do it by biography.
Why do you choose this medium?
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Well, so yeah, as you say, it's a history book, it's
an account of the history of theprinted book over the last 550
years or so.
So we begin in the mid, late15th century, just shortly after
the introduction of theprinting press by Gutenberg in
Mainz, germany, and then we movethrough 18 different characters
until we culminate incontemporary New York.
(03:01):
Actually, we finish up with zinemakers, diy publishing in New
York, and the history of thebook normally centers the book,
understandably, as its object ofanalysis and discussion.
But I wanted to think about thebookmakers behind those books,
which meant the booksellers andthe printers and the compositors
and the proofreaders and thebinders and the publishers and
(03:23):
all those kind of very humanentrepreneurs who did different
things with the form of the book.
And I wanted to do that toreally humanize the book as a
medium and as a kind oftechnology, to think about the
book as the product of realpeople who had real lives, were
trying to do real things, hadother stuff to do, were busy,
(03:44):
were flawed, were ambitious,were idealistic, and to think
about the book as an object ofhuman culture rather than
something more technologicallyabstract.
That was my ambition and as aresult, I guess, as your
question implies, the book kindof works on at least two scales
in terms of timeframe.
It has a long sixth century arcof what the printed book has
(04:07):
been from the mid-15th centuryto now, and then it has
individual chapters looking at18 individuals who have a more
local timeframe when we thinkabout what was going on in the
18th century or the 19th centuryor the 15th century or whatever
it may be.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
It was really interesting reading, first off
because I almost read the firstfew chapters.
A little sad, almost, becausethere are these people that you
were describing that we havealmost lost accounts of their
individual lives completely.
You describe just only havingfingerprints or the name on a
will or something, or even themistake in some of their
spelling on a book has justreminded us that they existed.
(04:46):
So I'm curious what thatexperience was going through the
lives of these people who ofcourse, impacted the history of
the book but almost have losttheir individuality to at least
the popular culture.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Yeah, that's a really great question.
The later figures,chronologically later, are
really vivid to history and evenif they may not be the names we
traditionally dominatehistories of the book because I
wanted a slightly different rollcall they're still reachable.
In the recent past, people likeNancy Cunard or William Morris
or Virginia Woolf or whoever itmay be, these are.
(05:18):
These are names we can recoverand we can.
We can hear their voices,sometimes literally or but at
least metaphorically.
Further back in in history it'sharder to do that and I was
really interested in the kind ofpathos and the drama of
reaching for those lives butthose lives not being fully
grasped of all.
So one of the figures I talkabout in the early 70s centuries
(05:41):
is a bookbinder called WilliamWild Goose, which is a fantastic
name, and he was a bookbindercalled William Wild Goose, which
is a fantastic name, and he wasa bookbinder in Oxford and he
did.
He bound lots of importantbooks, including the Bodleian
Library in Oxford's copy ofShakespeare's first folio.
So the 1623 printed collectedworks of Shakespeare, 400 years
old last year and subject tokind of worldwide celebrations.
(06:03):
So he bound a crucial copy ofthat book and enabled it to
survive in Oxford, but we knowalmost nothing about him and we
only know, we only can feel hiskind of presence in the binding
work that he performed, in thekind of the use of his tools and
the impressions and the bindingand the stitching and the
gluing in of the waste papersthat he performed.
(06:24):
And lots of the early figureshave that kind of presence.
It's rather as if we entertheir studio and they've left.
They've left the studio.
They're not there, but the pileof books that they produce are
there on the desk.
We can get somewhere close tothem via the books, but they're
not fully rounded presences.
But there's something of themthere too.
(06:45):
And lots of the early bookmakersfrom early history are not
named in books, they're notnamed on front covers, they
don't have legal rights in theway they do now.
So the compositors, that is,the individuals, the men and
later the women who arranged thetype, for example, in composing
sticks and put it in theprinting press, or the men and
women who pulled the press andcaused the ink to be impressed
(07:09):
onto the paper, or theproofreaders, or even most of
the binders before about 1800.
We just don't know their names,we don't know their biographies
, but we can sense them, I thinka little bit through their work
with books, because I do thinkbooks are expressive objects.
They tell us something aboutthe people who made them,
whether they were in a hurry orwhether they were ambitious, or
(07:30):
whether they were looking forposterity to remember them, or
whether they were producingcheap, ephemeral everyday stuff
for a quick pound or so.
We can get somewhere towardsthem through the books that they
produced.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
It's interesting.
You argue that basically, thephysical book provides a medium
that allows us to experience notjust the prose itself, the
content of the book, butsomething beyond it.
As you were discussing, theculture of the time that this
book was printed in.
It honestly made me feel moreconnected to used books as well.
Usually, I think it's probablyjust our modern sense when you
(08:04):
get a book, you want to get itnew, right so that you can do
the marking and you can do theannotation in it, but you
describe almost in a mortalsense of the book.
So if you buy a used book, forexample, not only does it have
the etched out kind of ownershiptitles throughout it, but it
also has the other notes frompeople who've come before you
who've read this same book.
Can you describe that a littlebit?
(08:25):
Why do you think that'simportant to maybe our digital
culture, for example?
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I think that's such a fascinating feature of early
books and even books through totoday.
There's a kind of doublenessthat the book has, which I'm
really interested in this book.
On the one hand, a book is amedium for carrying text.
So we read a book and we readthe novel, and we read the plot
and the narrative or the poetryor the drama or the history,
whatever it is we're reading.
So the book is like a messengerthat tells us the story, as it
(08:52):
were.
But books also, at the sametime, are physical objects in
our hands, with weight andmaterial form, and often in
their markings they carry anaccount of, sometimes a latent
account, sometimes a more overtaccount of their history.
So early books often, as you'resuggesting, have lots and lots
of handwritten annotations inthe margins.
16th, 17th, 18th centuryreaders read with pens in hand
(09:15):
in this very non-reverential wayand scribbled across their
books in the margins ticks,little flowers, pointing fingers
, notes, sometimes to do with astory or sometimes more detached
household notes, financialaccounts.
But the books come to uscovered in those very humanising
sense of history.
Or we could look at the bindingor the type or the paper or the
(09:40):
stitching and all of this, allthe provenance notes or the book
plates that are glued in byearlier owners, all of these
material features, which are notquite the same as the poem or
the play.
They tell us where the bookcame from and how it's moved
through time, and I think that'sreally powerful, that sense of
both a narrative, a story to betold, and also a kind of
(10:03):
material biography that the bookwants to tell us.
And I think it's appealing forus, as digital people, to be
aware of the longevity ofprinted books.
I think we've bought in toorapidly and with too much
confidence to the idea that thedigital is the way to preserve,
(10:23):
the way to preserve culture, andthat print is something that
passes away.
Um, you know, a book printed byWinkender Werder, who's the
Dutch immigrant who sets up inLondon who I talk about in my
first chapter, really kind ofinvents the idea of an English
language bestseller in the 1490s.
Um, a book by him on your desktoday is recognizable and we
(10:45):
know what to do with it, wecould navigate it, we know how
to turn the pages, we know whereto start, we knew how to move
forward and back.
Uh, it transcends time in areally amazing way.
My desk at home is full of theseold floppy disks and jump
drives from 10 years ago that nolonger work.
You know, I can't I literallycan't open the the documents
that are contained in them.
(11:06):
Um, the british library inLibrary in London and also the
Library of Congress inWashington DC have rooms where
they have fascinating rooms fullof dead media technologies like
old Betamax video recorders orlaser discs or DAT tapes or kind
of 1990s and noughties forms oftext storage that no longer
(11:27):
work and circulate, and theykeep a copy of each of these
machines because in the futurethey'll have disks or cassettes
that need reading and this willbe the last machine that can do
that.
So I think print endures andthose books covered with
annotations from 500 years agotell us that power that it has.
And I think I think sometimesthat's in contrast to a very
(11:49):
short-termness of the digital.
I mean, obviously the digitalcan do amazing, wonderful things
and it's essential to life.
But print has an astonishingcapacity to carry on, to persist
through centuries and one ofthe things I like when I'm
reading an old book from the17th century say is that sense
that it's already had 400 yearsof life but also that it's
(12:10):
meeting with me for a moment,but then it will carry on long
after I've gone and in centuries.
In the future people will stillbe reading Shakespeare's first
folio or John Donne's poems, orWink and the Word's romances, or
whatever it is.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
There's something about the simplicity that also
just allows it and thematerialness of it that allows
it to continue on past lives, ofboth the people who write the
book as well as the people whoprint it and even read the book
as well.
Yeah, I'm curious.
You discuss this a lot as well.
You talk a lot about, as wekind of alluded to at the
beginning, the culture ofmovements that shape not just
(12:45):
the prose.
This is again a theme thatwe're seeing the prose and the
material being kind of one inthe same.
I'm not one in the same in thesense that the book combines the
two and gives it kind of agreater narrative.
But what are the cultureelements that shape not just the
text of the book but also kindof the way books are designed
and then used by the readers?
Speaker 2 (13:07):
books are designed and then used by the readers.
Yeah well, I think differentcultural historical moments
wanted different things frombooks.
I think If we look back to thatearly period of Wink and de
Werda, the Dutch immigrant inLondon, producing books in
English that were cheap, reallyfor the first time the printers
that had preceded him, peoplelike William Caxton, were very
(13:30):
learned and kind ofcourt-centric people.
Wink and a Werder is producingcheap, mobile, accessible,
printed books that give you easypotted histories of the past or
that translate Cicero intoEnglish for you if you're not
quite up to the language, orgive you contemporary literary
poetry and romances.
(13:50):
And so Wink and the Wordproduces, I think, and responds
to a moment where there's anemerging appetite for cheap,
non-elite English languagewriting and men and women buying
books around St Paul'schurchyard in a way that hadn't
happened before.
I think that's really reallyimportant.
If we leap forward in time tothe early 20th century, for
(14:12):
example, it's an amazinglyinteresting press in London
called the Doves Press,established by an eccentric guy
called Thomas Cobden Sanderson,and he produced beautiful kind
of high end early 20th centuryeditions of classical literature
, canonical literature, but in aform that looked kind of late
(14:35):
medieval, all his books, whichwere printed in the 1900s 1910,
and which were often texts fromthe mid 17th century, actually
looked like late 15th centuryVenetian books.
They look like books from 500years before.
And I think he's responding to amoment, a cultural moment,
where people are beginning tobecome uneasy with mechanized
(14:55):
industrial book production andthey're wanting something
meticulous and exquisite andhandmade and old-fashioned, we
might say.
And so that's a cultural moment.
That's kind of detaching itselffrom what machines can produce
easily.
And in our current moment now,you know, in 2024, there's this
great explosion in zine making,in DIY, do-it-yourself
(15:17):
publishing, zines being, youknow, cheap, informal, homemade
mini magazines, often producedwith a particular political, uh
or intellectual kind of kind oftopic or ambition, and they're
physical, little journals thatare made quickly and photocopied
or xeroxed and handed around.
(15:38):
Um, there's a great publishercalled black mass publishing in
new york who are uh, who producescenes to do with
African-American culture inAmerica today.
And that's a response, I think,to the digital and to the
onlineness of so much is toproduce, is to step back from
(16:04):
that and to produce thesephysical journals and zines
which are handed out and readand turned over and engaged with
in that physical way.
So I think different culturalmoments, different points in
history want different thingsfrom printed books and the
bookmakers tries to show how,while there is both a kind of
continuity in the form of thebook, as I said, if we saw a
book from 1480 in Fleet Streetfrom London we saw it today we
would know what to do with it.
It would be recognizably a book.
(16:25):
But within that arc ofsimilarity there are all these
kind of cultural moments ofdifference, when books are
demanded to be monumental andgrand, or quick and easy and
mobile and politically agile, orcheap and democratizing or
whatever it may be.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
So, reading through your bio, I found it fascinating
that you yourself operate apress, and I believe it's the 39
Step Press.
I'm curious.
You talk about Virginia Woolfand Nancy Cunard.
First off, did I say that name?
Speaker 2 (16:57):
correctly at the end, Perfectly spot on.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Okay, beautiful, you talk about them experiencing
their writing.
Almost it changes becausethey've been printing the books
themselves and they're seeingthe page not just as a place for
text but as the physical inkinvolved in the page.
Did writing this book and kindof thinking about its printing
as well as writing other thingsthat you write.
(17:20):
Has printing shaped the way youthink about text on the page
itself?
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Yeah, absolutely it has, and I think that's been a
really interesting process Witha couple of friends.
About 10 years ago we bought apress, a hand press, a letter
press, ie a press where you haveindividual metal letters which
you arrange and then you pullthem in that very traditional
pre-mechanical way.
And we really did it as anexperiment to kind of understand
(17:46):
how early books were printedbut also to see how our attitude
to language and writing wouldchange as a result.
And it really does.
First of all, producing textbecomes very slow, it's
difficult, it's extremely errorprone.
Output rate at the beginningyou've got 14 lines that might
be 20 mistakes, an astonishinglyhigh error rate of Ws that are
(18:10):
upside down or spaces that arethere or shouldn't be there, of
poor inking that has smudged orisn't quite legible, and so you
do a proof sheet and then youmark it up and you correct the
letters, the metal letters, andyou have another go and you
gradually inch your way towardssomething which isn't perfect
(18:30):
it's never perfect, but it is alittle bit closer to what you
imagine.
So writing through the printingpress is slow, it's embodied
and physical and tiring.
You think of language asletters in space that have to be
tightly constrained and subjectto an even pressure and to be
(18:51):
flat and the whole process ofwriting becomes a different
thing.
Within that paradigm there's anamazing book by amazing short
text by Virginia Woolf from 1926called how Should One Read a
Book?
It is a brilliant lecture andshe's talking about what reading
is and why we read and how weread and why we would bother to
do this strange thing.
(19:12):
But she's and she's writing itjust at the moment when she's
really getting into letterpressprinting with her husband
Leonard.
They found the Hogarth Pressaround this time and go on to
publish lots of modernist books,um, um.
But she's just getting to gripswith printing and you can
really see it in how she talksabout literature and she talks
about writing as shaping wordsand placing them and building
(19:36):
them up and rearranging them andreassembling them, all these
practical hands on verbs sheuses to talk about writing.
So I think if you print in aletterpress way, a traditional
way with movable type, you dothink about writing in a
profoundly different way and Ithink it's a useful jolt to make
(20:02):
writing kind of strange againif it becomes a bit familiar.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
That's absolutely fascinating because we kind of
live.
We live in this world that ifwe've talked about, it's not
very material.
We are doing this on Zoom,we're not in person.
Oftentimes we write on blogs,sub stacks, and even when we
write things that will bepublished, we don't actually get
, usually unless you've printedit out of your printer and done
corrections, which doesn't feelas like monumentous as having a
(20:29):
physical, printed, bound book inyour hand.
We don't get that interactionwith our intellectual work, and
even others intellectual work,unless we've bought a book or
something.
Yeah, do you think that'schanged the significance of
writing to us?
Because of just, in some ways,the accessibility of text, but
not the the physical formulationof it I think it has profoundly
(20:50):
changed and in some ways forthe good.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
I mean, there's obvious arguments about
accessibility and speed ofdissemination and inclusivity,
and those are all real virtues,but something at least changes
and maybe is lost.
One of the things that lost, Ithink, is slowness and kind of
patience and a kind of gradualapproach to producing cultural
objects, whether that's writingor other stuff.
(21:14):
I think we've so bought intothe virtues of speed now today,
in our kind of Anglophoneculture at least, that printing
provides a kind of antidote tothat and slows everything right
down.
And so Virginia Woolf wasattracted to printing because it
(21:39):
was a kind of meditative calm.
She was suffering fromdepression and anxiety and
printing was a way to calmherself down and slow down the
pace.
So she's dealing with pickingup one letter at a time and
slotting it in and movingthrough writing in that
particular way.
So I think printing can reallyhelp with that.
Um, there's a, there's a one ofthe uh two of the kind of heroes
(22:02):
or heroines of my book.
Uh, uh, two women called annaand mary collett who in the
1630s, in little gidding, whichis a tiny, tiny little hamlet in
the middle of nowhere outsideCambridge in England lived in a
small religious Anglicanreligious community, a bit like
a mini university of 35 peopleor so, a kind of Anglican
(22:23):
monastery almost, and they didlots of pious things.
And one of the things they didwas they bought printed gospels,
so printed accounts of Christ'slife, and then they took
scissors and knives to thosetexts and cut them up, snipped
them up as if making a ransomnote, and then glued the text
back together to try andharmonize or make coherent these
(22:44):
four accounts of Christ's lifewhich seemed to them to be
conflicting.
And so they produced theseamazing, beautiful, huge folio
harmonies, big books about ameter high with collaged printed
images in as well, and in someways they look like destructive
acts in that they are cutting upbiblical text which seems to
(23:05):
our culture now transgressive.
But for them I think it wasabout slowing down print and
making religious reading take alot of time and necessarily
fiddly and exact and precise,and made writing not the easy
matter of ink on paper or therapid printing off of hundreds
(23:31):
and hundreds of the same pagevery, very quickly, but by
snipping print up and reorderingit and gluing it down, making
it slow again.
So I think there's one capacityprint has that people often note
in histories of print is speedof reproduction.
You can quickly produce, onceyou've got the typeset, hundreds
(23:51):
and thousands of identical ornear identical copies and that's
tremendously powerful and theradicalism of that in the 16th
century 16th century Europe atleast is not to be
underestimated.
But there's a sort of counterstory to that, which is about
slow printing and attempts to,through a gradual, incremental
(24:13):
process, produce text.
I think that's reallyinteresting and refreshing for
us now and I think you can seesome of that in the zine making
and the contemporary book craftsmoment we're in now.
There's a real interest, Ithink, right now in the physical
book and the beautifully made,hand-bound, hand-stitched book,
(24:34):
and all of that is answering akind of skittish panic that the
speed of the digital produces inpeople.
I think.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Wrapping up the interview, ironically focusing
on the prose itself and not justthe material of the book.
What books have had an impacton you?
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Well, that's a great question.
I guess the first book thatreally made me sort of fall off
my chair metaphorically, maybeliterally was the short stories
of Borges B-O-R-G-E-S, theArgentinian librarian and I talk
(25:15):
about him in this book becausehe was a great librarian in the
20th century but also a shortstory writer and produced these
amazing kind of hall of mirrors,kind of short stories about
infinite libraries and booksthat tell stories about books,
(25:36):
that tell stories about books.
So I found him reallyexplosively interesting.
So if anyone hasn't read borgeshe's available in loads of
english translations.
I'd recommend trying thatbecause they're short as well.
He said why bother to write anovel if you can write a page
and get the job done?
So they're really short to readinteresting, that's fascinating
.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
I'll definitely have to check that out because it's.
It's almost surrealist anddeeply philosophical in a sense,
especially if you apply it inthe context of your book, which
is the book itself.
Has a story within it and thereare two the the pro is and the
material.
Totally that's yeah, I'm gonnahave to think about that in this
and all that writing.
The last question is whatadvice do you have for teenagers
?
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Wow, that's a.
That's a good question, I think.
Well, the broad advice would beto read and read and read and
read as much as you can.
But beyond that platitude, Iwould say Connect one thing up
to another, connect one thing upto another.
And so if you're reading a bookand if it has in it a
(26:35):
particular idea or a referenceto another book, or a reference
to a painting or a bit of musicor a country or a historical
incident that seems interesting,chase that, lead through and
let that take you to anothertext or to a painting or to a
bit of music or a moment fromthe past, and read that and then
see where that takes you.
I think it's really helpful andpowerful to think about reading
as a kind of network in thatway.
(26:57):
That isn't about kind ofdutifully ticking off one
weighty tome after another andgetting it done, but seeing
these books as having kind ofinfinite number of doors within
them that take you out intoother places where you might not
have been expecting to go.
But think of books like that askind of means of getting
elsewhere very quickly.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Well, thank you so much, Professor Smythe, for
coming on the interview.
It's been a wonderfulconversation about the history
books and almost the philosophyof how it interacts with our
lives in the past and kind ofthe chronology that is not as
linear as we thought it was.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Thanks, it's been really fun talking to you.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com