Adam Smyth Libri

This book combines book history and literary criticism to explore how early modern books were richer things than previously imagined.

The book delves into various life-writing forms that surfaced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including almanacs, financial accounts, commonplace books, and parish registers. It examines how these documents reflect personal and communal identities, revealing insights into the social and cultural contexts of the time. Through this exploration, the author highlights the significance of these writings in understanding historical perspectives and individual experiences.

Books tell all kinds of stories - romances, tragedies, comedies - but if we learn to read the signs correctly, they can tell us the story of their own making too. This is the first history of the world's most important object, told through thirteen dynamic portraits of the individuals who helped to define it. Books have undergone a remarkable evolution in production, commerce and style, ultimately serving to challenge the way we think about life and the world around us. They have transformed humankind from primates to thinkers, scholars and storytellers by enabling the creation of documentation and entertainment, and encouraging the democratisation of learning. Yet we know little about the individuals who brought these fascinating objects into existence and of those who first experimented in the art of printing, design and binding. Who were the renegade book-makers who changed the course of history? From Caxton's first printings of The Canterbury Tales to Nancy Cunard's avant-garde pamphlets produced on her small press in Normandy, Adam Smyth explores the lives of these early innovators in order to understand how books have been introduced to new readers, bought, sold and borrowed, and the invention of new technologies which transformed the landscape of the printing press.