“Absorbing and brilliant. A remarkable piece of book history and a vividly entertaining portrait of a cast of characters to whom books were, in Gigante’s words, ‘a real way of life’.”

“This book is a complete delight. In Denise Gigante’s most capable hands, the sale of Charles Lamb’s library is the starting point for a dizzying, enlightening, and often hilarious journey into a lost world of bibliomaniacs.”

“In this fascinating, original, and elegantly written book, Denise Gigante traces the stories of Charles Lamb’s books and how they caused a sensation in America, creating the strange book madness of America’s nineteenth-century bibliomaniacs.”

“Noted Romanticist Denise Gigante uses the sale of Charles Lamb’s library as a hook on which to hang larger questions: What did English books signify for collectors on the other side of the Atlantic? How did public libraries and university libraries draw on, and differentiate themselves from, gentlemen’s private collections? And most timely of all in the age of the ebook and the audiobook, what attaches us to particular copies of books rather than, or in addition to, the words that they contain?”