The Bookseller Of Florence

The bestselling author of Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling captures the excitement and spirit of the Renaissance in this chronicle of the life and work of "the king of the world's booksellers" and the technological disruption that forever changed the ways knowledge spread. The Renaissance in Florence conjures images of beautiful frescoes and elegant buildings—the dazzling handiwork of the city's skilled artists and architects. But equally important for the centuries to follow were geniuses of a different sort: Florence's manuscript hunters, scribes, scholars, and booksellers, who blew the dust off a thousand years of history and, through the discovery and diffusion of ancient knowledge, imagined a new and enlightened world. At the heart of this activity was a remarkable man: Vespasiano da Bisticci. Born in 1422, he became what a friend called "the king of the world's booksellers." At a time when all books were made by hand, over four decades Vespasiano produced and sold many hundreds of volumes from his bookshop, which also became a gathering spot for discussion and debate. Besides repositories of ancient wisdom by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, his books were works of art in their own right, copied by talented scribes and illuminated by the finest miniaturists. His clients included a roll-call of popes, kings, and princes across Europe who wished to burnish their reputations by founding magnificent libraries. Vespasiano reached the summit of his powers as Europe's most prolific merchant of knowledge when a new invention appeared: the printed book. By 1480, the king of the world's booksellers was swept away by this epic technological disruption, whereby cheaply produced books reached readers who never could have afforded one of Vespasiano’s elegant manuscripts. A thrilling chronicle of intellectual ferment set against the dramatic political and religious turmoil of the era, including the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, Ross King's The Bookseller of Florence is also an ode to books and bookmaking that charts the world-changing shift from script to print through the life of an extraordinary man long lost to history—one of the true titans of the Renaissance.

The bestselling author of Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling captures the excitement and spirit of the Renaissance in this chronicle of the life and work of "the king of the world's booksellers" and the technological disruption that forever changed the ways knowledge spread

Official organ of the book trade of the United Kingdom.

We're not talking about rooms that are just full of books. We're talking about bookshops in barns, disused factories, converted churches and underground car parks. Bookshops on boats, on buses, and in old run-down train stations. Fold-out bookshops, undercover bookshops, this-is-the-best-place-I've-ever-been-to-bookshops. Meet Sarah and her Book Barge sailing across the sea to France; meet Sebastien, in Mongolia, who sells books to herders of the Altai mountains; meet the bookshop in Canada that's invented the world's first antiquarian book vending machine. And that's just the beginning. From the oldest bookshop in the world, to the smallest you could imagine, The Bookshop Book examines the history of books, talks to authors about their favourite places, and looks at over three hundred weirdly wonderful bookshops across six continents (sadly, we've yet to build a bookshop down in the South Pole). The Bookshop Book is a love letter to bookshops all around the world. -- "A good bookshop is not just about selling books from shelves, but reaching out into the world and making a difference." David Almond (The Bookshop Book includes interviews and quotes from David Almond, Ian Rankin, Tracy Chevalier, Audrey Niffenegger, Jacqueline Wilson, Jeanette Winterson and many, many others.)

The profession of peddling has until now received only slight and fragmentary scholarly attention. Usually treated in an anecdotal fashion, the pedlar has generally been thought of as a marginal figure, closer in character to a vagabond than a trader. In this first sustained account of the profession in Europe, Laurence Fontaine argues that peddling, particularly as a means of distributing new commodities such as books, watches, and tobacco, played a crucial role in the formation of the modern European economy. Focusing primarily on the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, Fontaine traces the origins and development of peddling and the establishment of trading networks. She analyzes the changing social construction of the practice and the effect of encounters between traders of different regions. Following the pedlars' trade routes across Europe from Spain to Sweden and Scotland to the upper Rhine, she examines their importance as channels of communication as well as of goods and raises such issues as the impact of pedlars on the values and cultural practices of the communities they visited and the ways in which being merchants changed the lives of these migrants. History of Pedlars in Europe separates the mythology that surrounds peddling from the historically reliable and integrates existing studies with new archival research to illuminate one of the most remote areas of the social and economic history of early modern Europe. A means of trade based on mobility, uncertainty, and interdependence, peddling is rediscovered as a dynamic force involved in nothing less than the creation of a modern consumer society.