The Bookseller of Florence Review

Reading the ancient books that I do, I often wonder about which books survived through the years, how they did, and why.  To what extent do the books that come down to us from long ago do so because they are exceptional and there have been deliberate efforts to preserve them throughout the ages, and to what extent are they books that, by accident or happenstance, have happened to survive into the present?  For that matter, how true are the versions that we have today to the versions that were first written two thousand or more years ago?  It may be impossible to say with certainty.

I’ve also long wondered what it was about the Renaissance period that prompted a resurrection in interest in the learning of the Greeks and Romans.  Yes, Rome of a sort still existed during the Renaissance, but neither Byzantium, nor papal Rome, possessed the dynamism and vigor of Cicero’s Rome.  Roman concrete and architectural techniques were not the only things lost, but there was little emphasis on attempting to recover the learning of the past.  Florence sat in the shadow of Roman aqueducts for centuries, but not until the Renaissance did its people begin resurrecting some of what was lost.  Various explanations for the lack of interest over so many years have been proposed, but what prompted the change?

Perhaps it was the rediscovery of ancient texts.  Not just their rediscovery: their proliferation.  Aristotelian logic formed a cornerstone of religious discourse and argument in the pre-Renaissance period, so interest in texts by other ancient thinkers make a certain degree of sense.  However, King’s book doesn’t answer these questions, for it begins when the interest in such works is already surging, with an introduction to the titular Florentine bookseller, who follows something of a rags-to-riches story to become the preeminent bookseller in most of Europe.  Vespasiano, sometimes referred to as “the king of booksellers,” who was also a bookseller to kings, is threaded throughout the book.  Unlike Brunelleschi in King’s other book, however, Vespasiano is more of an occasional touchstone than a driving figure of the text.

In fact, including so many details about Vespasiano is almost irrelevant to the greater thrust of King’s book, an exemplar rather than a lens.  He did not single-handedly go out and recover numerous key writings presumed lost to time, nor did he personally scribe manuscripts to ensure such pieces were not lost.  He provided elaborate manuscripts that were pieces of art in their own right, quite aside from the text contained therein, to wealthy clients across Europe, including the Medicis, English diplomats, and various royals.  Far more interesting are the process details that King includes: how printing presses were operated, how manuscripts were scribed and illuminated, and so forth, down even to the alloys involved.

King makes bold assertions at times in the text, many of which are supported by his citations, although in a few places he makes statements that are not associated with a citation that seem more like assumptions on his part.  It makes a sometimes peculiar contrast with how detailed some of his descriptions are.  His writing is at its best when he is exploring that intersection of biography and technology, with some excellent sections on the intersection of the printing press, Renaissance economics, and traditional manuscript preparation.  For all the detail he lavishes on different formulations of ink appropriate for printing presses versus those appropriate for manual manuscript preparation (a level of detail that will be useful in any period writing), he sometimes skims over other details that would greatly amplify a reader’s understanding of the context of the time.

Most of the time, I don’t worry too much about the physical nature of the books that I read.  Most books I read on my Kindle, which offers a mostly paper-like reading experience without obliging me to cart around multiple, thousand-page tomes, and even those books which I read in physical edition are usually mass market paperbacks.  Only occasionally do I really notice the quality of a book’s form, like in US Constitution and Other Writings, or Mysteries of the Middle Ages.  Reading about the care and attention that booksellers like Vespasiano lavished upon the tomes they sold, though, has me wishing I had a library of fine tomes.  Not on the level of jewel-encrusted, gold-painted artifacts, but books that won’t look worn after a few readings.  Then again, there’s something genuine about my bookshelves full of mismatched, well-worn volumes.

Despite the title, The Bookseller of Florence is not really Vespasiano’s story.  Rather, it is a book about books: how they were made, who funded them, who read them, and which books were of interest.  The impact of the resurrection of texts by Cicero, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Plato can hardly be overstated, and were it not for the efforts of the manuscript preparers during the Renaissance, they may have been lost forever.  If you’ve ever read a book from 2500 years ago and wondered how it is that you can so easily read it, then The Bookseller of Florence might just have the answer.