100 Books Like The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books

One of the great thrills of researching medieval history is getting the chance to handle original documents up close, as I have had the good fortune to do a few times. Christophe de Hamel is a palaeographer, a manuscripts expert who has travelled the world to examine some of the most precious handwritten works that still survive. As his title hints, De Hamel treats these artefacts as personalities, and his no-nonsense decipherment of priceless treasures is like listening in on a wise and witty conversation.

More than forty years after its first publication, this biographical study is still one the best things ever written on Manutius—arguably the most important printer in history after Gutenberg. Lowry shows how this obscure teacher of Greek moved to Venice in 1490 and became not only a printer and designer of genius but also a shrewd businessman whose publications put the wisdom of the Greeks and Romans into the hands of everyday readers. As Lowry explains, the concerns of Manutius ring an all-too-modern tone: how to disseminate information without “the debasement and dilution of learning” and “the spread only of confusion, obscenity, and heresy.”

Why do our libraries, those at home, at university, or in the public library network, look the way they do? Many people would agree that books are best stored upright on shelves, spine out, but how did we come to that conclusion? This delightful book offers all the answers, and incidentally reveals more than you could ever think of to ask about the manner in which we take care of, store, and display books. It might even give you some inspiration on how to arrange your own collection.

While The Swerve is not exactly a book about posterity, it nonetheless provides a wonderful case study of a text that remained on the verge of destruction for centuries, before going on to play a tremendously influential role in shaping our modern world. This book is none other than On The Nature of Things by Lucretius –one of the foundational texts of Western culture, whose impact was postponed to the fifteenth century, as it would not have seen the light of day without its serendipitous rediscovery in a German monastery by Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). This gripping work offers a fascinating example of the delayed reception of a prominent cultural object, a proof of its extraordinary resilience, and, at the same time, an illustration of the role played by chance and accidents on the transmission of texts to posterity. 

The key obstacle to communication in the pre-modern age was distance: this was particularly the case in the transported communities of European settlers in distant continents, often sparsely settled and without the familiar settled infrastructure of roads and trade. In this landmark study, Richard Brown considers the case of colonial America and the early Republic through a series of well-chosen case studies. These reveals that Americans relied on a multi-media experience of newsgathering, where conversation, gossip, and neighbour networks competed with new media innovations. An instant classic full of insight.

It is striking that the multitude of studies of propaganda in the Second World War deal with newspapers, cinema, radio, and poster campaigns and largely ignore books. The Nazi regime certainly did not, as this fascinating and authoritative book makes clear. From the first months after their takeover of power, Nazi authorities moved swiftly to establish control over libraries and the publishing industry, as well as authors and booksellers. This is the definitive study of how the German book world was reordered to serve the totalitarian state.

As an 80s kid, it pains a small part of me to recommend a historical fiction book that takes place in 1984, but this book goes into so much more than simply the tragic fire that destroyed part of the LA Central Library. While I found those aspects compelling, what really drew me in was the history of library sciences and how women played—and got pushed out of—the history of such beloved institutions.

There is also a nice bonus of humanity restored for all those who helped salvage as many books as they could after the tragedy. I found it to be a really gripping and informative read.  

This is the one that got away. There was no communications revolution in the sixteenth century as important as the establishment of a transcontinental European postal network. It was made possible by the fact that the Habsburg Empire under Charles V now united most of its major postal hubs, and they found in the family Thurn and Taxis contractors with the influence and administrative brilliance to set up the necessary postal relays. This crucial innovation found its historian in Wolfgang Behringer, in a magisterial study published in the year 2003. Remarkably, it has never been published in English. There are a couple of nice articles in English, but this is like railway sandwiches compared to the feast available for those who can read the original in German.

Among the great many books that simply narrate the Columbus story, this one stands out for its engaging writing style and—above all—for its interweaving of the Columbus story into the parallel (and, Boyle argues, closely overlapping) stories of Cabot and Vespucci. I found it a fun and fascinating reading.

That said, I do think Boyle deploys his imagination a little too freely at times. Some of the old myths and misconceptions about Columbus are nestled in here as facts—which is very much part of the Columbus tradition—and Boyle even adds some new ones. And yet that use of speculation and imagination is central to what makes the book so enjoyable. 

If I want to read a more recent narrative of the Four Voyages, without caring if its details are well-evidenced or drawn from Columbiana mythology, I’ll turn to a lively book like Lawrence Bergreen’s Columbus.

But for one that finds a middle ground between Bergreen and Fernández-Armesto, telling a good tale while also paying close attention to historical evidence, I turn to this book by the Phillipses.

I especially value and enjoy how the authors emphasize and explain Columbus’s contexts, bringing us along with Columbus into the worlds of Genoa, Portugal, Spain, and then the Caribbean. I also appreciate how hard the Phillipses try to avoid overtly condemning or defending Columbus in a general way—not an easy path to stay on!