The Book is undoubtedly one of our most successful and treasured inventions.

The ability to mass produce and distribute the same set of words to everyone helps ideas flourish, kindling yet more ideas and debate, as well as allowing every reader to know their copy is the same as the next.

But what goes into the book? It’s a little more than we, at first, imagine.

Obviously, it has to be written. Talented authors work on page after page until they are satisfied it has become a whole. Their lives, experiences and imaginations are complicit in the undertaking. But exactly what it contains, and just as importantly what’s left out, help to make this literary package exactly what it is.

From there it has to printed and sold to people just like you and me. Today that distribution, scale and reach is very different to how it was when these classic authors did it their way.

Even a simple bookshop to many is a sanctuary, a sacred place, to enjoy the quiet company of pages old and new, familiar or just waiting to be found.

In this volume we examine and follow some of the many different ways a book and its journey came into being by some of the greatest pens of any age.