Nobody ever had to tell me, as a child, of the special provenance surrounding the Steinway piano company, the subject of James Barron’s exhaustive and sometimes-exhausting new book, “Piano.” When my mother — a Wisconsin music and piano teacher — decided to buy a grand, Steinway was her brand of choice. It occupied a prime corner of our neverused-except-for-company living room and was unspeakably impressive in its shiny, black-lacquered dignity. That the New York City maker was the last word in pianos was accepted as unspoken truth in our family; I grew up with a subconscious contempt for Baldwins and Yamahas.

Steinway has held on to that Tiffany reputation for more than a century, even though the piano market has fallen steadily since hitting a peak in 1905, and the company — which has changed hands many times, but is still located in Astoria, Queens — is a far cry from the monstrously influential, string-pulling cultural and commercial institution it was during the last decades of the 19th century. There is no name more associated with piano-making, and that’s “making” with a capital “M.” For, unlike Japan’s Kawai and other producers, Steinways are still largely handmade by idiosyncratic craftsman housed in a warren of antiquated buildings near Steinway Street. It is this old-world way of doing things that interests Mr. Barron and creates the spine of his narrative. The book — which grew out of a series of articles that appeared in the New York Times, where the author is a staff reporter — follows one concert grand (number K0862, to be exact) from maple planks to recital hall, making a stop in every esoteric department of the factory.

It’s a good idea. Certainly everyone who’s ever hoisted the lid on a grand and peered in at the complex works has wondered (however briefly): “How’d they come up with that?” Mr. Barron tells you, from both the historical and the how-to angles. Smartly, he intercuts the factory chapters, which can be dry at times, with colorful trips back into Steinway past, beginning with patriarch Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, a furniture maker who, according to family lore, built his first pianoforte in his Seesen, Germany, kitchen “in his spare time.” (Pianoforte, the original name of what we now call a piano, actually means “softloud” — an apt description of its primary musical asset, a range of sound and volume that left the tonally narrow harpsichord in the dust.)

One of Heinrich’s instruments won a prize at a fair in 1839 and, by 1850, he and his many sons left for New York, rechristened as the Steinways. Those sons were a crafty, entertaining lot. Charles Steinway protected the family’s Manhattan factory from the Draft Riots of 1863 by handing the mob organizers $30 apiece. C.F.Theodore, the clan’s inventor genius, hated America so much he moved back to Europe in 1884 and founded Steinway’s Hamburg plant. But it was William, who took over after Charles and another brother, Henry Jr., died young in 1865, who was the Barnum-like marketing master.

In 1866, he built Steinway Hall on 14th Street to showcase pianists who played his instruments. Steinway piano No. 25,000 was sent to Tsar Alexander and No. 50,000 to the Baron de Rothschild, and William made sure the papers knew it. He drafted star pianist Anton Rubinstein for a U.S. tour, paying the distrustful musician with a 140-pound bag of gold.As for handling his less-celebrated employees, he moved his operations from Manhattan to then-lonely Queens to frustrate the overtures of labor organizers. Even his personal life was great copy. His libertine wife, Regina, had affairs with Louis Dachauer, among others, and bore another man’s child, forcing William to send wife and bastard packing for Europe.

William’s efforts to win out over archrival Chickering at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia are particularly hilarious, involving the buying of a judge and the ghostwriting of the judge’s report. In the aftermath of what the press called “the piano war,” William declared, with gorgeous chutzpah, that he would never enter another competition “because of the payoffs.” With William’s death in 1896, the ribald side of the Steinway saga seems to end.The story of Steinway in the 20th century is mainly a litany of financial crisis and downsizing, leading to the eventual sale to CBS in 1972.

But all this is meant as background to the birthing journey of K0862, a tale of painstaking artistry, century-old traditions, and often mind-numbing detail. A completist, Mr. Barron leaves out nothing. This is a problem, because while a Steinway grand is a fascinating mechanism, not every aspect of its creation is, in and of itself, fascinating. Moreover, it would take quite the prose stylist to fully invigorate such workaday manufacturing matters. After pages about wrestplanks, capstan screws, bushings and bridge pins, your eyes begin to cross.

That said, Mr. Barron deserves praise for leading us through the manufacturing maze with a good amount of clarity and grace. And there are some wonderful stops along the way. What seems like the impossible — the manual manipulation of 17 glued-together strips of maple into the familiar curve of the Steinway frame — is accomplished every 20 minutes in the rim-bending department. Bellyman Ante Glavan — so-called because his careful work inside the guts of the piano keep him on his stomach — regularly carves, sans ruler, 88 perfect notches in a bridge for the piano’s strings. (Many members of the factory staff, a melting pot of New York cultures, have gratifyingly Dickensian names: Senad Beharovic, Athanasios Kotsis, Mario Villalobos.) The folksy Bruce Campbell charmingly embodies the awe-inspiring job of tone regulator, intuitively mastering the myriad relationships between the keys, strings, and hammers. And noodling around with the concert hall loners that crowd the storied basement of Steinway Hall on West 57th Street is pretense-free Ronald Coners, a chief piano tuner who dresses and acts with the modesty of a piano mover.

Much of it filled me with a new appreciation of what went into Mom’s old Steinway. But, then again, I knew the piano was special for many a year while fully ignorant of all that back story. Congrats, William. That was some marketing job.

Mr. Simonson last wrote for these pages about “DruidSynge” at the Lincoln Center Festival.