book-making
(ˈbʊkˌmeɪkɪŋ)
† 1. The manufacture of books (as material articles). Obs.
| 1487 Ch.-warden's Acc. St. Dunstan's, Canterb., John Casse hathe delyueryd..to the booke makyng iijs. iiijd. 1899 T. Veblen Theory of Leisure Class vi. 162 Artistic book-making. 1930 Publishers' Weekly 5 Apr. 1892/1 The increasing attention that the book-trade is giving to the art of book-making. |
2. The compilation of books. (Now usually contemptuous: see prec. word.) Also attrib.
| 1589 Marprel. Epit. (1843) 8 Note here a new founde manner of bookemaking. 1615 Latham Falconry Ded., I am not so well experienced in the art of bookemaking. 1794 Mathias Pursuits Lit. (1798) 384 It is mere book-making, beneath the character of so learned a gentleman as Dr. Warton. 1807 Cabinet I. 113 This is a fine book-making age. a 1856 in K. H. Digby Lover's Seat (1856) II. xviii. 222 Of all the books in this book-making world the philosophical books are the least intelligible. 1865 Englishm. Mag. 220 Bookmaking now has got a bad name, or at any rate the term is used in a bad sense. |
3. The making of a betting-book.
| 1824 Sporting Mag. XV. n.s. 51/2 Betting at present proceeds but slowly..what is done consists merely in book-making and speculation. 1836 R. S. Surtees in Mrs. Mathews Mem. C. Mathews (1839) IV. ix. 184 He entered into the spirit and excitement of the thing with the true ardour of a turfite, without any knowledge however of the science of book-making. 1886 Boston (Mass.) Herald 16 July, In England, book-making is rigidly prohibited elsewhere, but on the race tracks it is allowed. |
Hence (as a back-formation) ˈbook-make v. intr. (rare).
| 1819 Byron Let. 6 Apr. (1900) IV. xvii. 284, I could have spun the thoughts of the four cantos of that poem into twenty, had I wanted to book-make. 1845 R. Browning Let. 16 Apr. (1899) 48 Mrs Norton has gone and book-made at a great rate about the Prince of Wales. |