Publishing used to be a dirty business. I’m talking not only about the ink-stained fingers of disreputable writers, but also about the filthy hands of those who actually put the words on the page: the devils and cutters who worked with metal type. For the most part, typesetting is now a digital business, although there are a few holdouts (myself included) who like the smell of ink on rollers, the dusting of lead on our hands and the satisfying dents in a piece of paper made by forcing it into several rows of raised metal. 

For four hundred years after Gutenberg first printed the Bible, the printing process hardly changed. The life cycle of a letter would begin with a drawing. A punchcutter would then carve that drawing out of a steel bar (or ‘punch’) in relief, but backwards, as it might appear in a mirror. He would test his handiwork by putting the punch in an open flame and stamping it onto a piece of paper, leaving a sooty mark. Next, he would drive the steel punch hard into a softer metal, such as copper, to make a mould or matrix. Using this, hundreds of tiny letters could then be cast in a fast-cooling lead alloy – rows of ‘O’s like eyes and ‘I’s like soldiers, perfectly identical, ready to be printed. A compositor would line up the letters in the correct order to make words, paragraphs and pages. A printer would ink the type and press it into paper. An apprentice, known as a ‘printer’s devil’, would clean the type and put each individual letter back into the little slot in the drawer from where it came. 

But where did it come from? When there are so many hands involved in the creation of an object, who, if anyone, can be held responsible? David Jury comes back to this question time and again in his thorough and illuminating book. In the case of the 15th-century printer Nicolas