Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers

First edition, first impression.  xiv, 370pp, with black and white illustrations in text and colour plates.  Slate grey cloth-covered boards, gilt lettering on spine.  Blue endpapers.  There’s a previous owner’s details neatly inked on the half title page, and the lower text blocl edge is toned, else volume is neat, clean, bright and tight throughout.  Dust jacket, not price clipped just a little bumped on extreme edges.  

Manuscripts are not only stuff of beauty and literature, but they offer some of the only tangible evidence of entire lives, long receded.  Hidden Hands tells the stories of the artists and artisans, scribes and readers, patrons, collectors and traders who have made, valued, conserved, admired and destroyed these fascinating medieval documents.