Bookmakers is a celebration of 550 years of the printed book, told through the lives of eighteen extraordinary men and women who took the book in radical new directions: printers, binders, publishers, artists, papermakers, and library founders. It is a story of skill, craft, mayhem, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error.

We know some of these names. We meet the working printer (and American Founding Father) Benjamin Franklin. We watch Thomas Cobden Sanderson conjure books that flicker between the early 20th and 15th centuries. Others have been forgotten. We don't remember Sarah Eves, wife of John of Baskerville, and her crucial contribution to the history of printing. Nor Charles Edward Moody, promoter of the circulating library—and the most influential figure in book publishing before Jeff Bezos. Nor William Wildgoose, who meticulously bound the first volume of Shakespeare, then disappeared from history.

Bookmakers brings people back into the story of the book. It takes you inside a book press as deadlines approach and adrenaline surges—from 1492 Fleet Street to New York in 2023. It is a story of odds and ends, successes and failures, paths forward and paths not taken. Bookmakers is a history of the book industry, a memorial to the book industry, and a demonstration of why the printed book will continue to thrive.