Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World

This book about beautiful books is, as you would hope, a beautiful book itself. But more so, like the books it describes, it has personality. De Hamel, one of the world's experts on illuminated manuscripts, visited rare-book rooms in some of the world's most exclusive libraries and museums to encounter, in person, twelve of the most famous books from the thousand years before the printing press. His connoisseur's appreciations, illustrated with copious photographs, are interwoven with equally interesting histories of these rare, fragile objects, stories full of piety and power, selflessness and greed, and chance. The survival of each of them, and of their vivid, strange artistry, comes to seem like a miracle.