Aiming for the Moon
Aiming for the Moon
126. Pen, Page, and People - The History of the Book: Prof. Adam Smyth (Author of "The Book-Makers")
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.
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When we think of the 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. This is the Aiming for the Moon podcast and I'm your host, taylor Bledsoe. On this podcast, I interview interesting people from a teenage perspective. In this episode I sit down with Professor Adam Smythe to discuss his bookmakers. A history of the book in 18 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 as well. Adam Smythe is professor of English literature and the history of the book at Balliol College University of Oxford. He's 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. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate the podcast and subscribe. You can follow us at aimingthenumber4moon on all the socials to stay up to date on podcast news and episodes. Check out the episode notes for links to our website aimingforthemooncom and our podcast sub stack Lessons from Interesting People.
Speaker 1:All right, before we dive into the episode, a quick life update. If you've been tracking with the development of the podcast, you may have guessed that I am now a senior in high school, which means it's college decision time and I have officially made my decision. I've committed to at least my first year to the University of Tulsa on a full ride as a computer science major. So it's been an exciting journey. Thank you everyone for listening and all the guests for having supported me up to this point. All right, with that, sit back, relax and, of course, listen in. Thanks again to Paxton Page for the incredible music. Welcome, professor adam smith, to the interview. Thank you so much for coming on I'm so pleased to be here.
Speaker 1:Thanks for inviting me you wrote a wonderful book called the bookmakers, a history of the book in 18 lives, which, first off, I don't say this a lot about, um, especially modern books, but the prose of it is just really beautiful. I really enjoyed reading, especially the style of it. It was fascinating just in that respect, from a writing standpoint. It's a history book, but it's a really interesting medium that you choose to introduce this topic to us. You do it by biography. Why do you choose this medium?
Speaker 2:Well, so yeah, as you say, it's a history book, it's an account of the history of the printed book over the last 550 years or so.
Speaker 2:So we begin in the mid, late 15th century, just shortly after the introduction of the printing press by Gutenberg in Mainz, germany, and then we move through 18 different characters until we culminate in contemporary New York.
Speaker 2:Actually, we finish up with zine makers, diy publishing in New York, and the history of the book normally centers the book, understandably, as its object of analysis and discussion.
Speaker 2:But I wanted to think about the bookmakers behind those books, which meant the booksellers and the printers and the compositors and the proofreaders and the binders and the publishers and all those kind of very human entrepreneurs who did different things with the form of the book.
Speaker 2:And I wanted to do that to really humanize the book as a medium and as a kind of technology, to think about the book as the product of real people who had real lives, were trying to do real things, had other stuff to do, were busy, were flawed, were ambitious, were idealistic, and to think about the book as an object of human culture rather than something more technologically abstract. That was my ambition and as a result, I guess, as your question implies, the book kind of works on at least two scales in terms of timeframe. It has a long sixth century arc of what the printed book has been from the mid-15th century to now, and then it has individual chapters looking at 18 individuals who have a more local timeframe when we think about what was going on in the 18th century or the 19th century or the 15th century or whatever it may be.
Speaker 1:It was really interesting reading, first off because I almost read the first few chapters. A little sad, almost, because there are these people that you were describing that we have almost lost accounts of their individual lives completely. You describe just only having fingerprints or the name on a will or something, or even the mistake in some of their spelling on a book has just reminded us that they existed. So I'm curious what that experience was going through the lives of these people who of course, impacted the history of the book but almost have lost their individuality to at least the popular culture.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really great question. The later figures, chronologically later, are really vivid to history and even if they may not be the names we traditionally dominate histories of the book because I wanted a slightly different roll call they're still reachable. In the recent past, people like Nancy Cunard or William Morris or Virginia Woolf or whoever it may be, these are. These are names we can recover and we can. We can hear their voices, sometimes literally or but at least metaphorically. Further back in in history it's harder to do that and I was really interested in the kind of pathos and the drama of reaching for those lives but those lives not being fully grasped of all. So one of the figures I talk about in the early 70s centuries is a bookbinder called William Wild Goose, which is a fantastic name, and he was a bookbinder called William Wild Goose, which is a fantastic name, and he was a bookbinder in Oxford and he did. He bound lots of important books, including the Bodleian Library in Oxford's copy of Shakespeare's first folio. So the 1623 printed collected works of Shakespeare, 400 years old last year and subject to kind of worldwide celebrations. So he bound a crucial copy of that book and enabled it to survive in Oxford, but we know almost nothing about him and we only know, we only can feel his kind of presence in the binding work that he performed, in the kind of the use of his tools and the impressions and the binding and the stitching and the gluing in of the waste papers that he performed.
Speaker 2:And lots of the early figures have that kind of presence. It's rather as if we enter their studio and they've left. They've left the studio. They're not there, but the pile of books that they produce are there on the desk. We can get somewhere close to them via the books, but they're not fully rounded presences. But there's something of them there too.
Speaker 2:And lots of the early bookmakers from early history are not named in books, they're not named on front covers, they don't have legal rights in the way they do now. So the compositors, that is, the individuals, the men and later the women who arranged the type, for example, in composing sticks and put it in the printing press, or the men and women who pulled the press and caused the ink to be impressed onto the paper, or the proofreaders, 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 think a little bit through their work with books, because I do think books are expressive objects. They tell us something about the people who made them, whether they were in a hurry or whether they were ambitious, or whether they were looking for posterity to remember them, or whether they were producing cheap, ephemeral everyday stuff for a quick pound or so. We can get somewhere towards them through the books that they produced.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. You argue that basically, the physical book provides a medium that allows us to experience not just the prose itself, the content of the book, but something beyond it. As you were discussing, the culture of the time that this book was printed in. It honestly made me feel more connected to used books as well. Usually, I think it's probably just our modern sense when you get a book, you want to get it new, right so that you can do the marking and you can do the annotation in it, but you describe almost in a mortal sense of the book. So if you buy a used book, for example, not only does it have the etched out kind of ownership titles throughout it, but it also has the other notes from people who've come before you who've read this same book. Can you describe that a little bit? Why do you think that's important to maybe our digital culture, for example?
Speaker 2:I think that's such a fascinating feature of early books and even books through to today. There's a kind of doubleness that the book has, which I'm really interested in this book. On the one hand, a book is a medium for carrying text. So we read a book and we read the novel, and we read the plot and the narrative or the poetry or the drama or the history, whatever it is we're reading. So the book is like a messenger that tells us the story, as it were. But books also, at the same time, are physical objects in our hands, with weight and material form, and often in their markings they carry an account of, sometimes a latent account, sometimes a more overt account of their history. So early books often, as you're suggesting, have lots and lots of handwritten annotations in the margins. 16th, 17th, 18th century readers read with pens in hand in this very non-reverential way and scribbled across their books in the margins ticks, little flowers, pointing fingers, notes, sometimes to do with a story or sometimes more detached household notes, financial accounts. But the books come to us covered in those very humanising sense of history. Or we could look at the binding or the type or the paper or the stitching and all of this, all the provenance notes or the book plates that are glued in by earlier owners, all of these material features, which are not quite the same as the poem or the play. They tell us where the book came from and how it's moved through time, and I think that's really powerful, that sense of both a narrative, a story to be told, and also a kind of material biography that the book wants to tell us. And I think it's appealing for us, as digital people, to be aware of the longevity of printed books. I think we've bought in too rapidly and with too much confidence to the idea that the digital is the way to preserve, the way to preserve culture, and that print is something that passes away. Um, you know, a book printed by Winkender Werder, who's the Dutch immigrant who sets up in London who I talk about in my first chapter, really kind of invents the idea of an English language bestseller in the 1490s. Um, a book by him on your desk today is recognizable and we know what to do with it, we could navigate it, we know how to turn the pages, we know where to start, we knew how to move forward and back. Uh, it transcends time in a really amazing way.
Speaker 2:My desk at home is full of these old floppy disks and jump drives from 10 years ago that no longer work. You know, I can't I literally can't open the the documents that are contained in them. Um, the british library in Library in London and also the Library of Congress in Washington DC have rooms where they have fascinating rooms full of dead media technologies like old Betamax video recorders or laser discs or DAT tapes or kind of 1990s and noughties forms of text storage that no longer work and circulate, and they keep a copy of each of these machines because in the future they'll have disks or cassettes that need reading and this will be the last machine that can do that. So I think print endures and those books covered with annotations from 500 years ago tell us that power that it has. And I think I think sometimes that's in contrast to a very short-termness of the digital.
Speaker 2:I mean, obviously the digital can do amazing, wonderful things and it's essential to life. But print has an astonishing capacity to carry on, to persist through centuries and one of the things I like when I'm reading an old book from the 17th century say is that sense that it's already had 400 years of life but also that it's 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 still be reading Shakespeare's first folio or John Donne's poems, or Wink and the Word's romances, or whatever it is.
Speaker 1:There's something about the simplicity that also just allows it and the materialness of it that allows it to continue on past lives, of both the people who write the book as well as the people who print 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 we kind of alluded to at the beginning, the culture of movements that shape not just the prose. This is again a theme that we're seeing the prose and the material being kind of one in the same. I'm not one in the same in the sense that the book combines the two and gives it kind of a greater narrative. But what are the culture elements that shape not just the text of the book but also kind of the way books are designed and then used by the readers?
Speaker 2:books are designed and then used by the readers. Yeah well, I think different cultural historical moments wanted different things from books. I think If we look back to that early period of Wink and de Werda, the Dutch immigrant in London, producing books in English that were cheap, really for the first time the printers that had preceded him, people like William Caxton, were very learned and kind of court-centric people. Wink and a Werder is producing cheap, mobile, accessible, printed books that give you easy potted histories of the past or that translate Cicero into English for you if you're not quite up to the language, or give you contemporary literary poetry and romances. And so Wink and the Word produces, I think, and responds to a moment where there's an emerging appetite for cheap, non-elite English language writing and men and women buying books around St Paul's churchyard in a way that hadn't happened before. I think that's really really important. If we leap forward in time to the early 20th century, for example, it's an amazingly interesting 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 century editions of classical literature, canonical literature, but in a form that looked kind of late medieval, all his books, which were printed in the 1900s 1910, and which were often texts from the mid 17th century, actually looked like late 15th century Venetian books. They look like books from 500 years before.
Speaker 2:And I think he's responding to a moment, a cultural moment, where people are beginning to become uneasy with mechanized industrial book production and they're wanting something meticulous and exquisite and handmade and old-fashioned, we might say. And so that's a cultural moment. That's kind of detaching itself from 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 publishing, zines being, you know, cheap, informal, homemade mini magazines, often produced with a particular political, uh or intellectual kind of kind of topic or ambition, and they're physical, little journals that are made quickly and photocopied or xeroxed and handed around.
Speaker 2:Um, there's a great publisher called black mass publishing in new york who are uh, who produce scenes to do with African-American culture in America today. And that's a response, I think, to the digital and to the onlineness of so much is to produce, is to step back from that and to produce these physical journals and zines which are handed out and read and turned over and engaged with in that physical way. So I think different cultural moments, different points in history want different things from printed books and the bookmakers tries to show how, while there is both a kind of continuity in the form of the book, as I said, if we saw a book from 1480 in Fleet Street from London we saw it today we would know what to do with it. It would be recognizably a book. But within that arc of similarity there are all these kind of cultural moments of difference, when books are demanded to be monumental and grand, or quick and easy and mobile and politically agile, or cheap and democratizing or whatever it may be.
Speaker 1:So, reading through your bio, I found it fascinating that you yourself operate a press, and I believe it's the 39 Step Press. I'm curious. You talk about Virginia Woolf and Nancy Cunard. First off, did I say that name?
Speaker 2:correctly at the end, Perfectly spot on.
Speaker 1:Okay, beautiful, you talk about them experiencing their writing. Almost it changes because they've been printing the books themselves and they're seeing the page not just as a place for text but as the physical ink involved in the page. Did writing this book and kind of thinking about its printing as well as writing other things that you write. Has printing shaped the way you think about text on the page itself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely it has, and I think that's been a really interesting process With a couple of friends. About 10 years ago we bought a press, a hand press, a letter press, ie a press where you have individual metal letters which you arrange and then you pull them in that very traditional pre-mechanical way. And we really did it as an experiment to kind of understand how early books were printed but also to see how our attitude to language and writing would change as a result. And it really does. First of all, producing text becomes very slow, it's difficult, it's extremely error prone. Output rate at the beginning you've got 14 lines that might be 20 mistakes, an astonishingly high error rate of Ws that are upside down or spaces that are there or shouldn't be there, of poor inking that has smudged or isn't quite legible, and so you do a proof sheet and then you mark it up and you correct the letters, the metal letters, and you have another go and you gradually inch your way towards something which isn't perfect it's never perfect, but it is a little bit closer to what you imagine. So writing through the printing press is slow, it's embodied and physical and tiring. You think of language as letters in space that have to be tightly constrained and subject to an even pressure and to be flat and the whole process of writing becomes a different thing.
Speaker 2:Within that paradigm there's an amazing book by amazing short text by Virginia Woolf from 1926 called how Should One Read a Book? It is a brilliant lecture and she's talking about what reading is and why we read and how we read and why we would bother to do this strange thing. But she's and she's writing it just at the moment when she's really getting into letterpress printing with her husband Leonard. They found the Hogarth Press around this time and go on to publish lots of modernist books, um, um. But she's just getting to grips with printing and you can really see it in how she talks about literature and she talks about writing as shaping words and placing them and building them up and rearranging them and reassembling them, all these practical hands on verbs she uses to talk about writing. So I think if you print in a letterpress way, a traditional way with movable type, you do think about writing in a profoundly different way and I think it's a useful jolt to make writing kind of strange again if it becomes a bit familiar.
Speaker 1:That's absolutely fascinating because we kind of live. We live in this world that if we'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 be published, we don't actually get, usually unless you've printed it out of your printer and done corrections, which doesn't feel as like monumentous as having a physical, printed, bound book in your hand. We don't get that interaction with our intellectual work, and even others intellectual work, unless we've bought a book or something. Yeah, do you think that's changed the significance of writing to us? Because of just, in some ways, the accessibility of text, but not the the physical formulation of it I think it has profoundly changed and in some ways for the good.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's obvious arguments about accessibility and speed of dissemination and inclusivity, and those are all real virtues, but something at least changes and maybe is lost. One of the things that lost, I think, is slowness and kind of patience and a kind of gradual approach to producing cultural objects, whether that's writing or other stuff. I think we've so bought into the virtues of speed now today, in our kind of Anglophone culture at least, that printing provides a kind of antidote to that and slows everything right down. And so Virginia Woolf was attracted to printing because it was a kind of meditative calm. She was suffering from depression and anxiety and printing was a way to calm herself down and slow down the pace. So she's dealing with picking up one letter at a time and slotting it in and moving through writing in that particular way. So I think printing can really help with that.
Speaker 2:Um, there's a, there's a one of the uh two of the kind of heroes or heroines of my book. Uh, uh, two women called anna and mary collett who in the 1630s, in little gidding, which is a tiny, tiny little hamlet in the middle of nowhere outside Cambridge in England lived in a small religious Anglican religious community, a bit like a mini university of 35 people or so, a kind of Anglican monastery almost, and they did lots of pious things. And one of the things they did was they bought printed gospels, so printed accounts of Christ's life, and then they took scissors and knives to those texts and cut them up, snipped them up as if making a ransom note, and then glued the text back together to try and harmonize or make coherent these four accounts of Christ's life which seemed to them to be conflicting. And so they produced these amazing, beautiful, huge folio harmonies, big books about a meter high with collaged printed images in as well, and in some ways they look like destructive acts in that they are cutting up biblical text which seems to our culture now transgressive. But for them I think it was about slowing down print and making religious reading take a lot of time and necessarily fiddly and exact and precise, and made writing not the easy matter of ink on paper or the rapid printing off of hundreds and hundreds of the same page very, very quickly, but by snipping print up and reordering it and gluing it down, making it slow again.
Speaker 2:So I think there's one capacity print has that people often note in histories of print is speed of reproduction. You can quickly produce, once you've got the typeset, hundreds and thousands of identical or near identical copies and that's tremendously powerful and the radicalism of that in the 16th century 16th century Europe at least is not to be underestimated. But there's a sort of counter story to that, which is about slow printing and attempts to, through a gradual, incremental process, produce text. I think that's really interesting and refreshing for us now and I think you can see some of that in the zine making and the contemporary book crafts moment we're in now. There's a real interest, I think, right now in the physical book and the beautifully made, hand-bound, hand-stitched book, and all of that is answering a kind of skittish panic that the speed of the digital produces in people. I think.
Speaker 1:Wrapping up the interview, ironically focusing on the prose itself and not just the material of the book. What books have had an impact on you?
Speaker 2:Well, that's a great question. I guess the first book that really made me sort of fall off my chair metaphorically, maybe literally was the short stories of Borges B-O-R-G-E-S, the Argentinian librarian and I talk about him in this book because he was a great librarian in the 20th century but also a short story writer and produced these amazing kind of hall of mirrors, kind of short stories about infinite libraries and books that tell stories about books, that tell stories about books. So I found him really explosively interesting. So if anyone hasn't read borges he's available in loads of english translations. I'd recommend trying that because they're short as well. He said why bother to write a novel if you can write a page and get the job done? So they're really short to read interesting, that's fascinating.
Speaker 1:I'll definitely have to check that out because it's. It's almost surrealist and deeply philosophical in a sense, especially if you apply it in the context of your book, which is the book itself. Has a story within it and there are two the the pro is and the material. Totally that's yeah, I'm gonna have to think about that in this and all that writing. The last question is what advice do you have for teenagers?
Speaker 2:Wow, that's a.
Speaker 2:That's a good question, I think.
Speaker 2:Well, the broad advice would be to read and read and read and read as much as you can.
Speaker 2:But beyond that platitude, I would say Connect one thing up to another, connect one thing up to another. And so if you're reading a book and if it has in it a particular idea or a reference to another book, or a reference to a painting or a bit of music or a country or a historical incident that seems interesting, chase that, lead through and let that take you to another text or to a painting or to a bit of music or a moment from the past, and read that and then see where that takes you. I think it's really helpful and powerful to think about reading as a kind of network in that way. That isn't about kind of dutifully ticking off one weighty tome after another and getting it done, but seeing these books as having kind of infinite number of doors within them that take you out into other places where you might not have been expecting to go. But think of books like that as kind of means of getting elsewhere very quickly.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much, Professor Smythe, for coming on the interview. It's been a wonderful conversation about the history books and almost the philosophy of how it interacts with our lives in the past and kind of the chronology that is not as linear as we thought it was. Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Thanks, it's been really fun talking to you.
