Illustration by Ferran Coves It’s an atmospheric kind of job, caring for very old books. Wreathed in the druidical fog of time, manuscript keepers on TV and in movies guard secret knowledge. In reality, in my experience, experts in the oldest treasures of literary culture tend to be practical people. You have to be: literary antiquities are delicate, but not that delicate, and heavier than you expect. Book work means washing your hands all day, because that “old book smell” is mould and dead skin. It isn’t that bibliophile fetishism is the opposite of librarianship, or that paleographers have a natural enmity for antiquities dealers. Rather, the cultural mythoi of books and their true historical selves are multiple, intertwining and completely specific to the time and place they occur. For example, the manuscript authority Christopher Frances Rivers de Hamel has long toiled at Oxbridge libraries and put in decades with Sotheby’s Department of Western Manuscripts.…