The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club

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public Wi-Fi - this extends to the majority of our public spaces including the Reading Rooms, as well as our study desks and galleries at St Pancras (you won't require a login) There was a time when I considered myself more than just an avid reader, but a collector of books. Had I the resources, I have no doubt that I would have collected manuscripts if I'd had the resources (ie money) and so this title really grabbed my attention. I have to admit, though, that I had no idea where this book might go. The text is engagingly written, inviting the reader to follow the author on his travels to study these people in their own environments. Throughout his career de Hamel has done an immense amount to make these complex and fascinating artefacts accessible to a wide audience. At times his imaginative leaps demonstrate the gaps between our contemporary questions and the nature of historical records. For example, suggesting medical diagnoses for the people of the past can only ever be extremely speculative. Nevertheless, although the book wears its thorough research lightly, the interested reader will find much valuable information in the endnotes. The epilogue indicates that membership of de Hamel’s club is not restricted to 12; many other characters appear, who may become the subject of a study in their own right. The club is open.

Chapter 13: Some Account of Eatanswill; of the State of Parties therein; and of the Election of a Member to serve in Parliament for that ancient, loyal, and patriotic Borough Chapter 23: In which Mr. Samuel Weller begins to devote his Energies to the Return Match between himself and Mr. TrotterIn this talk we will meet the patrons and illuminators, but also the antiquaries and collectors, the librarians, the dealers, the scholars and a rabbi and even a forger, all brought together by their passion for the books of the Middle Ages. We learn more about manuscripts by knowing the company they have kept throughout history.

The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club is a logical sequel to Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (2016), in which he introduced readers to some of the most famous handmade books of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In this new book he turns his attention to the important question of how such manuscripts have survived the intervening centuries since they were made. The book examines the lives of 11 men and one woman whose actions have played a major part in shaping the fates of medieval books and determining both what survives and where the manuscripts are to be found today. I dream of stealing it away, and I am not alone in my weakness for these singular objects (as centuries of light-fingered clergymen could attest). My bibliophilia, however, cannot compete with that of Christopher de Hamel, the Cambridge fellow and ex-Sotheby’s expert whose 2017 Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts saw him wrangle with hundreds of the things. For this follow-up, The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club, he takes us into the strange world of bibliomaniacs across time, presenting 12 portraits of collectors and their surprisingly “restless” texts, that shuffle across nations and continents as they pass between collections.The people who made, saved and sometimes destroyed medieval manuscripts, over a thousand years of history, from the acclaimed author of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts