The Book-Makers
A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives
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The Book-Makers
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Narrated by:
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Adam Smyth
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By:
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Adam Smyth
About this listen
The 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.
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Impossible Monsters
- Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the Battle Between Science and Religion
- By: Michael Taylor
- Narrated by: Michael Langan
- Length: 15 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 14
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 13
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Story4 out of 5 stars 13
Impossible Monsters reveals the central role of dinosaurs and their discovery in toppling traditional religious authority, and in changing perceptions about the Bible, history, and mankind's place in the world.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Repetitive and not that interesting
- By Michael on 09-09-24
By: Michael Taylor
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The Library
- A Fragile History
- By: Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett
- Length: 15 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 71
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 61
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 59
Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes, or filled with bean bags and children’s drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Stays on point
- By Alex on 04-29-23
By: Andrew Pettegree, and others
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The Library
- A Catalogue of Wonders
- By: Stuart Kells
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 12
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 11
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 11
Libraries are much more than mere collections of volumes. The best are magical, fabled places whose fame has become part of the cultural wealth they are designed to preserve. The Library is a celebration of books as objects, a celebration of the anthropology and physicality of books and bookish space, and an account of the human side of these hallowed spaces by a leading and passionate bibliophile.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent Story -- Really Enjoyed It
- By JW on 04-21-25
By: Stuart Kells
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How the World Made the West
- A 4,000 Year History
- By: Josephine Quinn
- Narrated by: Alix Dunmore
- Length: 15 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 49
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 44
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Story4 out of 5 stars 44
In How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the “civilizational thinking” regarding the origins of Western culture—that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Rather, she locates the roots of the modern West in everything from the law codes of Babylon, Assyrian irrigation, and the Phoenician art of sail to Indian literature, Arabic scholarship, and the metalworking riders of the Steppe, to name just a few examples.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Middling
- By Amazon Customer on 11-14-24
By: Josephine Quinn
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The Manuscripts Club
- The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts
- By: Christopher de Hamel
- Narrated by: John Lee, Christopher de Hamel
- Length: 17 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 13
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 10
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Story5 out of 5 stars 10
The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest works of European art and literature. We are dazzled by them and recognize their crucial role in the transmission of knowledge. However, we generally think much less about the countless men and women who made, collected and preserved them through the centuries, and to whom they owe their existence. This entrancing book describes some of the extraordinary people who have spent their lives among illuminated manuscripts over the last thousand years.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Manuscripts Through the Centuries
- By Tbaley on 12-02-23
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American Civil Wars
- A Continental History, 1850-1873
- By: Alan Taylor
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 34
The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.
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5 out of 5 stars
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fascinating!
- By Brandon Marken on 07-12-24
By: Alan Taylor
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Every Living Thing
- The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
- By: Jason Roberts
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 24
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 24
In the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France’s royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began his task believing it to be difficult but not impossible: How could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species—or as many could fit on Noah’s Ark?
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating history of scientific thought
- By Candy Dan on 06-10-24
By: Jason Roberts
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The Notebook
- A History of Thinking on Paper
- By: Roland Allen
- Narrated by: Mark Elstob
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 50
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 46
We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did these indispensable implements come from? How did they revolutionize our lives? And how can using a notebook help change the way you think? In this wide-ranging history, Roland Allen reveals how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A fascinating look at an often overlooked powerful tool.
- By Andrew Darlow on 12-28-24
By: Roland Allen
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Henry V
- The Astonishing Triumph of England's Greatest Warrior King
- By: Dan Jones
- Narrated by: Dan Jones
- Length: 14 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 661
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 606
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Story5 out of 5 stars 606
Henry V reigned over England for only nine years and four months and died at the age of just thirty-five, but he looms over the landscape of the late Middle Ages and beyond. The victor of Agincourt, he is remembered as the acme of kingship, a model to be closely imitated by his successors. William Shakespeare deployed Henry V as a study in youthful folly redirected to sober statesmanship. For one modern medievalist, Henry was, quite simply, “the greatest man who ever ruled England.”
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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing Book & Fantastic Storyteller
- By L. Reilly on 11-26-24
By: Dan Jones