Before the printing press, books were neatly copied out by hand—long books like the Bible by multiple hands. No two were identical. British scholar-librarian Christopher de Hamel has spent time with many of those handcrafted books—years of his life, but hasn’t lost his dry English sense of humor. In Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, he describes his studies of a dozen handwritten books (the Book of Kells is the best known) and remarks, yes, you can see pictures of them online, but it’s not the same as seeing them. The scale is lost as is the physicality, the often translucence of the parchment. Hamel can even guess whether a manuscript originated in England or Italy by smell. The penmanship and illustrations tell their own stories. Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is a bibliophiles’ delight.
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