Inky Fingers

"Describes magnificent achievements, storms of controversy, and sometimes the pure devilment of scholars and printers. Captivating and often amusing."
- Wall Street Journal

"Ideas, in this vivid telling, emerge not just from minds but from hands, not to mention the biceps that crank a press or heft a ream of paper."
- New York Review of Books

"As usual, Grafton presents largely unfamiliar material in a clear, even breezy style. Erudite."
- Michael Dirda, Washington Post

In this celebration of bookmaking in all its messy and intricate detail, Anthony Grafton captures both the physical and mental labours 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 religious treatises and forgeries.

Inky Fingers ranges widely, from the sustaining and constraining effects of theological polemics in the early days of printing to the textual revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 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 work of printmakers has had a profound impact on the history of ideas.