THE BOOK: A COVER-TO-COVER EXPLORATION OF THE MOST POWERFUL OBJECT OF OUR TIME By Keith Houston

the-book-keith-huston
Just in time for that bibliophile on your Holiday Gift List comes Keith Houston’s wonderful The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time. Houston’s new book explores the history of the development of the book. I had no idea that Johannes Gutenberg was cheated out of his invention of movable type printing. And I had no idea that an out-of-work actor named Ira Rubel invented the lithographic press. Houston provides dozens of fascinating stories about the development of the modern book. If you love books as much as I do, you’ll love The Book! GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Part 1. The page
A clean sheet : the invention of papyrus
Hidebound : the grisly invention of parchment
Pulp fictions : the ambiguous origins of paper in China
From Silk Road to paper trail : paper goes global
Part 2. The text
Stroke of genius : the arrival of writing
The prints and the pauper : Johannes Gutenberg and the invention of movable type
Out of sorts : typesetting meets the industrial revolution
Part 3. Illustrations
Saints and scriveners : the rise of the illuminated manuscript
Ex Oriente lux : woodcut comes to the West
Etching a sketch : copperplate printing and the Renaissance
Better imaging through chemistry : lithography, photography, and modern book printing
Part 4. Form
Books before the book : papyrus scrolls and wax tablets
Joining the folds : the invention of the codex
Ties that bind : binding the paged book
Size matters : the invention of the modern book.
Colophon
Acknowledgments
Further Reading
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index

14 thoughts on “THE BOOK: A COVER-TO-COVER EXPLORATION OF THE MOST POWERFUL OBJECT OF OUR TIME By Keith Houston

  1. Wolf Böhrendt

    Sounds interesting and again reminds me of my youth. While I was still at the “Gymnasium” (kind of high school that prepares you for the university) one summer, probably 1960, I got a “holiday job” at my aunt’s business – she had a print shop and also published the local newspaper.

    I was a proof reader for several weeks for the newspaper’s local news and also for some books – one I remember was on marriage laws all over Europe, very complicated with a lot of footnotes in different languages and hard work for the typesetters. Often one line had to be split (at first I didn’t get that …) because there were not enough of the special characters in the linotype machine – these machines really fascinated me …

    So I learned a few things about the publishing and printing business and also about how the press works – sometimes the journalist would take an existing article, modifay and “localse” it and then give it to the printer and a lot of printing was still done by hand with special types and fonts …

    Sadly my aunt’s business went bankrupt soon after.

    Reply
  2. maggie mason

    It sounds interesting and relevant. I had a friend helping me clear out houses and she kept saying “no one reads books any more, no one watches DVD’s any more and other crap like that” When I found a paperback that had gotten bent and had pages falling out, she said that if it had been on a kindle, that wouldn’t have happened, not realizing or caring that most vintage books of (now) lesser known authors aren’t on kindle. My response was but you can’t sell a book on a kindle for 100 times what you paid for it (something I’ve done quite often in the past)

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      1. Wolf Böhrendt

        My wife has taken to reading mostly ebooks – they’re much easier to hold than say, the heavy almost 1000 page books of George Martin and others.

        The last Martin book I had to cut in three pieces for her!

        PS:
        And her son who works in IT gets many ebooks for free …

        Of course we still have that one room full of books …

  3. Bob Napier

    I worked in print shops for years and know a lot about the trade as it existed before computers took over! But, as always, I have too many books on hand now to consider another one!

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  4. Wolf Böhrendt

    A small correction:

    Ira Rubel did invent the offset technology which derives from lithography and is economically important:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offset_printing

    Strangely enough there is no English wiki on him – just a German and a Hungarian???
    http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=666
    “The inspiration was an accident. While operating his lithographic press he [Rubel] noticed that if he failed to insert paper the stone plate would transfer its image onto the rubber impression cylinder. When he then placed paper into the machine it would have the image on two sides, one from the stone plate and one from the rubber impression cylinder. To Rubel’s amazement, the image from the rubber impression cylinder was much clearer; the soft rubber was able to give a sharper look than the hard stone litho plate. Soon he created a machine that repeated this original “error”.

    Funny how some things are “invented”!

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