Otherwise, by contrast with Pickwick and his whimsical colleagues, the members of De Hamel’s club tend to be crazy monomaniacs. Pickwick and his friends were muddling amateurs and De Hamel, despite his professional expertise, has a little of their homespun dottiness: determined to weigh a bulky Cicero manuscript held in an Oxford college, he brings along his kitchen scales. At one point, he describes a stout and jovial keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum who could have been Pickwick’s prototype he also mentions an 18th-century bibliophile, Sir Gregory Page-Turner, whose allegorical surname even Dickens might not have dared to invent.
The model for De Hamel’s book, as his title proclaims, is The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.
In The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscript Club, silent sessions in libraries are enlivened by De Hamel’s imaginary conversations with long-dead collectors and, at the end of a history that extends across a thousand years, he invites medieval monks, Renaissance princes, Florentine merchants and American industrialists to a notional dinner at which they all unstoppably talk about their shared obsession. C hristopher de Hamel is a bookworm – or, to be more precise, a manuscript weevil for whom “mere printed books” are modish novelties – who has the rare capacity to turn a scholarly specialism into a humane and humorous adventure.
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