Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe

An Open Letters Review Best Book of the Year“Grafton presents largely unfamiliar material…in a clear, even breezy style…Erudite.”-Michael Dirda, Washington PostIn this celebration of bookmaking in all its messy and intricate detail, Anthony Grafton captures both the physical and mental labors that went into the golden age of the book-compiling notebooks, copying and correcting proofs, preparing copy-and shows us how scribes and scholars shaped influential treatises and forgeries. Inky Fingers ranges widely, from the theological polemics of the early days of printing to the pathbreaking works of Jean Mabillon and Baruch Spinoza.Grafton draws new connections between humanistic traditions and intellectual innovations, textual learning and the delicate, arduous, error-riddled craft of making books.Through it all, he reminds us that the life of the mind depends on the work of the hands, and the nitty gritty labor of printmakers has had a profound impact on the history of ideas. “Describes m