Being a printer was what Benjamin Franklin prided himself on most

For some readers this book will have the charm of the Antiques Roadshow. Adam Smyth, professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, Oxford, presents with caressing attention to technical detail an array of illustrious book people. They may be unfamiliar names to those who don’t know a colophon from a cauliflower, but he makes his characters wholly accessible.

Smyth evidently chose the Bodley Head as his publisher for its connection with the Bodleian Library, in whose rare-books room he researches. As importantly, the Bodley Head was founded with a dedication to fine antiquarian books. The Book-Makers breathes bibliophilia. It recalls Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Unpacking My Library’. Like Benjamin, Smyth unpacks his contents lovingly. Nonetheless, at deeper levels, his aim is subversively scholarly on a range of bibliographic fronts. His 18 book-makers offer a chronological, if bitty, 500-year history. Bittiness, as pioneered by Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, has become a widely used historiographical tool. Smyth employs it deftly.

He opens in the early 16th century with Wynkyn de Worde, a Dutchman in London who took Caxton’s innovations, picked up from Gutenberg, to create a market both for patrons and ‘the common reader’ – a smallish number at the time but including a significant nucleus of women. ‘Birth girdles’, printed vellum belts for upper-class women’s pregnant bellies, were a thriving de Worde line.

Then comes a pioneering 17th-century binder, making viable commodities out of loose sheets and quires, and ‘bedding’ them between leather and card. He has the delightfully Roald Dahlish name of William Wildgoose. Another chapter relishes the chastity of John Baskerville’s 18th-century type. Smyth contends that Sarah Eaves, as Baskerville’s partner, wife and widow, played an important part in the creation and posthumous diffusion of the type that bears her husband’s name.