![]() Alberto Manguel’s “A History of Reading” and “The Library at Night” are poetic meditations on the needful habit. Robert Darnton’s “The Business of the Enlightenment,” about the buccaneering publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke and the marketing of the Encyclopédie Méthodique, transformed our understanding of how Enlightenment ideas found readers and partisans. So if you want to celebrate the place that bookmaking and bookselling still have in our lives, notwithstanding all those hours captive to the digital glimmer, you could do a lot worse than immerse yourself in Ross King’s rich history of Vespasiano da Bisticci, “the king of the world’s booksellers,” in 15th-century Florence.īooks about books - their publishing, selling and collecting - are a specialized genre, but over the years they have included some brilliantly illuminating classics. What’s missing is the ungloved, unhurried browse, the rifling through the stacks, the chat at the checkout desk. Amazon has been delivering a steady supply of books to unchain our imaginative lockdown, but they have arrived in the same packaging that could just as well bring replacement light bulbs or moth traps. Where are you off to, once the Great Confinement relaxes its bleak grip? A socially distanced movie house? A favorite pizza joint? Call me an elitist, but I’ll be heading to my local indie bookstore. ![]() ![]() ![]() THE BOOKSELLER OF FLORENCE The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance By Ross King ![]()
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