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Pip Williams | 384 pgs | Affirm Press

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In 1901, the word ‘Bondmaid’ was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it.

Esme is born into a world of words. She spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme begins to collect other words that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men.

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The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

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Ross King | 496 pgs | Atlantic Monthly Press

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A thrilling chronicle set against the dramatic artistic and scientific advances and turmoil of the Renaissance in Florence, The Bookseller of Florence, by bestselling author Ross King, tells the forgotten story of “the king of the world’s booksellers,”  Vespasiano da Bisticci. 

Vespasiano produced and sold many hundreds of volumes from his bookshop over four decades at a time when all books were made by hand. Works of art in their own right, his books were copied by the finest scribes and miniaturists. He counted the elite as his patrons: popes, kings, and princes across Europe. Vespasiano reached the height of his influence as the era’s most prolific purveyor of knowledge when a new invention appeared in the 1450s: the printed book. Within 30 years, his world was upended by this technological disruption that brought cheap books to the masses.

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