NEW YORK, NY.- The last book that will ever bear the David R. Godine imprint is, fittingly, by David Godine himself. It’s called “Godine at Fifty: A Retrospective of Five Decades in the Life of an Independent Publisher,” and it’s a safe bet that the people who these days run his company (now called just Godine) will never put out such a volume again.

Published last December, the book is oversized, with illustrations on every page, and typeset, in double, wide-margined columns, in Minion — a face based on Renaissance designs, that comes with all kinds of ornaments and swirling ampersands. The paper — a lush-looking, acid-free, 80-pound stock — is a disappointment, Godine says. He would have liked heavier and smoother, but couldn’t get it because of supply problems during COVID.

He would also have liked a full-cloth binding. The cheapness of book bindings these days is a very sore subject with Godine. On the other hand, “Godine at Fifty” does have head- and footbands — those little multicolored strips of cloth often sewn into the backbone of a book both for strength and for looks — and decorative endpapers. How could he skip those?

This kind of attention to the look and design of a book, to its physical properties, was a hallmark of Godine’s publishing career, and someone trying to keep up his standards today would go broke. Even Godine couldn’t keep them up. In 2015 he agreed to sell his company, in installments, to William Thorndike, a Boston investor. Godine knew he had made the right choice in 2017, when a book especially dear to him, a two-volume collection of American choral music, failed to find much of an audience. “If we couldn’t make a book like ‘American Harmony’ work in the marketplace and review climate of the 21st century,” he writes in “Godine at Fifty,” “there was clearly no longer room for the kind of publishing I had championed for 45 years.”

In format, “Godine at Fifty” is an illustrated album or catalog of some 300 of his favorite books, the ones he is proudest of or most enjoyed publishing. The range is both extraordinarily eclectic, suggesting that the publisher had a sort of grasshopper mind, and a little old-fashioned. No diet books, no how-to’s, no celebrity bios. Lots of books about printing and typography, though, along with novels and poetry, photography books and art books, books about sailing, gardening, cooking, music and architecture.

“Godine at Fifty” amounts to an autobiography of sorts, the story of a bookmaking life, and also an elegy for a kind of publishing — beginning back when books were signed up by companies that were not part of huge conglomerates, still printed with hot metal and sold almost exclusively in brick-and-mortar stores — that is no longer possible.

“Did I emphasize the look of the books too much?” Godine said last month while spreading some books out on his dining room table. “Maybe. The text is what really matters — I know that. And that means the author matters. But so do binders and paper makers and typesetters and designers — all those unsung talents that go into making a book.”

Godine, 77, lives in Milton, Massachusetts, in a rambling 19th-century house that he shares with his wife, the book designer Sara Eisenman, two dogs — a labradoodle and a Lhasa apso mix — and hundreds and hundreds of rare books. His library is so big it has sublibraries. There are the incunabula — very early books, printed before 1500 — and, in a class by itself, the Kelmscott Chaucer, after the Gutenberg Bible probably the most famous feat of book printing ever. There’s also the collection of German fine printing and collections of books by famous printers like D.B. Updike, Bruce Rogers, William Pickering and Fred Anthoensen.

Godine, who speaks quickly, with traces of a Boston accent, can get carried away when the subject is books, and talks about printers the way other people talk about movie stars. He also loves to mention typefaces — Bembo, Baskerville, Garamond, Caslon and Janson come up a lot — and the names of beautiful papers: Amalfi, Fabriano, Nideggen.

“It’s an obsession,” he said, and explained that it began back when he was in college, at Dartmouth in the ’60s, and took a course with a professor named Ray Nash, who taught graphic arts and the history of printing. That was also when he fell in love with letterpress — the old-fashioned art of pressing paper so firmly down on inked metal type that the letters leave little dents.

Godine began his career, in fact, as a printer, not a publisher. After college he apprenticed with the sculptor and engraver Leonard Baskin, who also ran a print shop in Northampton, Massachusetts. In 1970, together with two partners, Godine opened a shop of his own in an abandoned cow barn in Brookline. The company did letterpress, setting its own type by hand and printing wedding invitations, birth announcements, the diplomas for Harvard and Wellesley.

Gradually, his company branched out into pamphlets and broadsides — reprints of Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden,” for example, and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” — and from there into books. To judge from the descriptions in “Godine at Fifty,” some of these early efforts verged on the foppish — fine printing for the sake of fine printing. There was an edition of Thomas Boreman’s “Moral Reflections on the Short Life of the Ephemeron,” for example, that featured meticulous, hand-tinted etchings of mayflies.

“I suppose you could say some of those books were ‘privished,’ rather than ‘published,’” Godine said, laughing. “But it was never my intention just to be a fancy printer or a hobbyist. I thought we should be a business. Not that I knew the first thing about business.” He shook his head and told a story that’s also in “Godine at Fifty”: At one point, Godine’s father, learning that his son’s company had never filed a tax return, sent his own accountant over to check on things. The accountant asked if he could look at the books, and Godine said of course, pointing to the printed ones on the shelves. All he had by way of financial records were a couple of checkbooks that hadn’t been balanced in years.

In those days, Godine had a trust fund that he could draw on in emergencies — until it ran out. And his timing was fortunate. “This was right after Sputnik,” he explained, “and for some reason the government thought the way to pull us even with the Russians was to give the libraries a lot of money. So we could publish anything, even the worst poetry in the world, and still sell 500 copies.”

By the mid-70s, though, it had become clear that letterpress printing was no longer a viable business model, and Godine reluctantly turned to the more modern method of offset, which is how most books (and newspapers and magazines, for that matter) are printed, and became a publisher like everyone else. He subcontracted the designing and the printing to others, or as he puts it, “We became architects, not builders.”

Godine still published beautiful books, many of them in large formats and with photographs or engravings, but they didn’t pay the bills. Children’s books, though only about 20% of the list, accounted for about 40% of the income. The company’s intellectual core, and the source of its growing reputation in the wider publishing world, became its line of Nonpareil paperbacks. These were reissues, for the most part, of books that had gone out of print or had their rights revert, and the roster of authors Godine was able to pick up this way practically amounts to a pantheon: William Maxwell, William Gass, George Orwell, Iris Origo, Wright Morris, Stanley Elkin, Donald Hall. This could never happen today, Godine points out, when books are so easily digitized and, in effect, stay in print forever.

While “Godine at Fifty” is probably his last book, Godine hasn’t retired exactly. By mutual agreement, he and the new management of his company stay out of each other’s way, and so Godine has started up a new business, or rather, returned to an old one. Once again he’s a jobbing printer. He has a print shop in a drafty, unheated carriage house behind where he lives, with a hand-cranked rotary press and trays and trays of type in dozens of different fonts and sizes — including his latest acquisition, a German italic font so small it looks like flyspeck.

There he prints by letterpress, in two colors, greeting cards that combine old etchings and engravings with famous mottoes and sayings. He and his daughter sell them at farmers markets and at a handful of stores that are willing to take a chance on them. Godine’s favorite of these cards shows an old farmer shoveling great clumps of something or other out of a horse-drawn cart, and the text, hand set, with extra leading, in 18 point Perpetua, says, “Money is like manure. It works best when it is spread around.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.