Enfilade

Several chapters address 18th-century topics, including extra-illustration, as seen through the work of Alexander and Charlotte Sutherland. From Hachette Book Group:

Adam Smyth, The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives (New York: Basic Books, 2024), 400 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1541605640, £25 / $32.

A scholar and bookmaker “breathes both books-as-objects and their creators back into life” (Financial Times) in this five-hundred-year history of printed books, told through the people who created them

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. The Book-Makers offers a new way into the story of Western culture’s most important object, the book, through dynamic portraits of eighteen individuals who helped to define it. Books have transformed humankind by enabling authors to create, document, and entertain. 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 Wynkyn de Worde’s printing of fifteenth-century bestsellers to Nancy Cunard’s avant-garde pamphlets produced on her small press in Normandy, this is a celebration of the book with the people put back in.

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.

First published in hardcover in 2021, it was released in paperback last fall. From Hachette Book Group:

Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, The Library: A Fragile History (New York: Basic Books, 2021), 528 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1541600775 (hardcover), $35 / ISBN: ‎978-1541603721 (paperback), $22.

The ‘engaging’ and ‘ambitious’ (Washington Post) history of libraries and the people who built them, from the ancient world to the digital age

The history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident. In The Library, historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen introduce us to the antiquarians and philanthropists who shaped the world’s great collections, trace the rise and fall of literary tastes, and reveal the high crimes and misdemeanors committed in pursuit of rare manuscripts. In doing so, they reveal that while collections themselves are fragile, often falling into ruin within a few decades, the idea of the library has been remarkably resilient as each generation makes—and remakes—the institution anew.

Andrew Pettegree is professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews and a leading expert on the history of book and media transformations.
Arthur der Weduwen is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the University of St. Andrews.