Christopher de Hamel is a bookworm – or, to be extra exact, a manuscript weevil for whom “mere printed books” are modish novelties – who has the uncommon capability to show a scholarly specialism right into a humane and humorous journey. In The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscript Membership, silent classes in libraries are enlivened by De Hamel’s imaginary conversations with long-dead collectors and, on the finish of a historical past that extends throughout a thousand years, he invitations medieval monks, Renaissance princes, Florentine retailers and American industrialists to a notional dinner at which all of them unstoppably speak about their shared obsession.

The mannequin for De Hamel’s e book, as his title proclaims, is The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Membership. At one level, he describes a stout and jovial keeper of manuscripts on the British Museum who may have been Pickwick’s prototype; he additionally mentions an 18th-century bibliophile, Sir Gregory Web page-Turner, whose allegorical surname even Dickens may not have dared to invent. Pickwick and his associates have been muddling amateurs and De Hamel, regardless of his skilled experience, has a bit of of their homespun dottiness: decided to weigh a cumbersome Cicero manuscript held in an Oxford faculty, he brings alongside his kitchen scales. In any other case, against this with Pickwick and his whimsical colleagues, the members of De Hamel’s membership are usually loopy monomaniacs. One collector congests his nation home with 1000’s of tottering papery piles, blocking the staircase and prompting his spouse to complain that she was “booked out of 1 wing and ratted out of the opposite”. A German professor who upsets a candle in his library and incinerates its contents is suspected of planning a sacrificial suicide on a funeral pyre of manuscripts.

De Hamel’s picaresque travels have a morbidly un-Pickwickian terminus when he visits the Jewish cemetery in Prague, the place the tombstones kind “an out of doors library of one of many oldest types of writing, in its oldest format, lower into stone”. Regardless of all of the archival mud, De Hamel retains an nearly lyrical sense of marvel as he unclasps every groaning tome, opens its parched pages and evenly steps into the choice world painted by its illuminators. Some miniatures disclose a Disneyland of elegantly turreted castles, whereas others excavate an abyss of rotting cadavers and winged demons racing to the inferno with their human prey. An early monastic script seems to be prickly “like holly leaves”, whereas the fragile lettering of one other scribe appears to have been tapped out by “a fairy’s typewriter”. Aptly referred to as “très riches”, the Books of Hours collected by the Duc de Berry within the fifteenth century are jewel containers, encrusted with valuable stones.

The books De Hamel examines usually are not machine-made; earlier than he can justify writing a few Gutenberg Bible, the earliest product of the printing press, he has to categorise it an “an honorary manuscript”. De Hamel approaches these handmade volumes with a delicate, tactile respect for his or her natural components. On his method to a Benedictine monastery in Normandy, he eyes a herd of torpid cattle “whose ancestors would have equipped the parchment for manuscript pages”; when he turns calf-skin pages within the monastic library, he notices how the kinked margins recall the form of the animal’s neck or leg joints. Ink, he deduces, got here from gall nuts grown by the native oaks. A recent scribe in Bruges makes use of quills obligingly donated by swans that cruise the city’s canals and he depends on shells from Belgian oysters to carry his pigments: their rugged outer floor retains them from wobbling and slopping the color.

De Hamel acquired his first antiquarian e book on the age of 15 and promptly defaced it along with his signature “in black ink in a faux-gothic hand”. Since then, there have been additional misdemeanours and mishaps. He remembers a rerouted flight in midwinter when he carted a priceless treasure via Heathrow in a buying bag. On one other event, he paid a vendor for some waste parchment that fell aside in his automotive on the best way house: fragments – truly relics of a fifth-century codex, misplaced since antiquity, although he didn’t realise it then – have been scavenged from underneath the passenger seat by his spouse a number of days later.

In passing, De Hamel reveals that one among his Victorian forebears, having come into cash, added a “de” to his title to assert a pedigree that was “nearly actually spurious”. Inheriting the pretence, De Hamel outs himself as a faux vintage, just like the forgeries he uncovered throughout his many years as an appraiser at Sotheby’s. The endearing confession is typical of the person: he speaks of “assembly a good looking manuscript” quite than studying it and his personal e book makes you are feeling you’ve hung out – a really lengthy however absorbing time – in his convivial firm.

• The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Membership by Christopher de Hamel is printed by Allen Lane (£40). To help the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Supply expenses could apply