Barbara Ludman
EX-LIBRIS by Ross King (Vintage)
Isaac Inchbold is a bookseller in 1660s London, summoned to a crumbling house on a ruined estate and commissioned to find a book missing since the start of the Thirty Years War.
The library is magnificent. Collected by an adventurer who smuggled the books out of Prague ahead of the troops of Catholic Emperor Ferdinand, who was deposing Protestant King Frederick, the library contains much of the knowledge of the time. Sharing walnut shelves with volumes of plays and philosophy, history, politics, science and adventure are subversive works – Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, for example, and Galileo’s Dialogo sopra i Due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo – and some very odd books indeed. Among them are 17 of the 18 Hermetic texts allegedly written by an ancient Egyptian priest-magician – Thoth or Hermes Trismegistus – but, it is rumoured, actually written by a collection of Greek scholars centuries later. It is the 18th book that Inchbold is set to find.
Ex-Libris is a book about books – bound in buckram or leather, inscribed on vellum, on parchment or rag paper, in Latin, Greek, in French or English translation – and the power contained between the tooled covers. The novel swings between war-torn Prague in 1620 and civil war-weary London in 1660, with atmosphere laid on so expertly one can smell the cannon smoke in Bohemia and the fog in London.
There is more history than one needs – voyages to the New World are thrown in for good measure, and searches for legendary cities of gold. And the plot is so complicated it takes King 10 pages at the end to explain it all. But the book is worth the effort, even for those readers, including this reviewer, who make a point of avoiding historical novels of any sort out of gratitude for being alive in a gentler and – perhaps – more enlightened age.