Ex Libris

Following the huge success of Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, Vintage re-issue Ross King's two fantastic historical crime novels, Ex Libris and Domino, with a sumptuous new jacket treatment.  Irresistible.

Ross King is a renowned expert in the Italian Renaissance. He is the author of numerous bestselling and acclaimed books include Brunelleschi’s Dome, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, Leonardo and the Last Supper and Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies. His love of Renaissance Florence, which he has been studying, writing and lecturing about for over twenty years, made Vespasiano’s long-forgotten story – never written about before – an irresistible next subject. He lives just outside Oxford.

Responding to a cryptic summons to a remote country house, London bookseller Isaac Inchbold finds himself responsible for restoring a magnificent library pillaged during the English Civil War, and in the process slipping from the surface of 1660s London into an underworld of spies and smugglers, ciphers and forgeries. As he assembles the fragments of a complex historical mystery, Inchbold learns how Sir Ambrose Plessington, founder of the library, escaped from Bohemia on the eve of the Thirty Years War with plunder from the Imperial Library.  Inchbold's hunt for one of these stolen volumes - a lost Hermetic text - soon casts him into an elaborate intrigue; his fortunes hang on the discovery of the missing manuscript but his search reveals that the elusive volume is not what it seems and that he has been made an unwitting player in a treacherous game.

Domino

'Delivers a seamless coup. It has the pace of a thriller and black humour slivered with superb menace...be sure to read it' - Spectator

Fleshes out wildly and deliciously the Rabelaisian goings-on of London's finest

Domino sends you spinning into [an] utterly convincing world

Evokes engrossingly and brilliantly the sights, smells, language and manners of late eighteenth-century London

By the author of the acclaimed Brunelleschi's Dome. 
 
After meeting the mysterious and beautiful Lady Beauclair at a society ball, George Cautley, a hapless young artist adrift in the gilded world of 1770s London, paints her portrait. She, in turn, tells him the scandalous story of Tristano, a castrato singer in Handel's opera company fifty years before. But Cautley also meets the eminent painter Sir Endymion Starker that same evening and his mistress, Eleanora, who has another tragic tale to tell, one that will have George unwittingly re-enacting the fate of Tristano...

The Story of the Great Cathedral in Florence

Brunelleschi's Dome

The superb story of the architect Filippo Brunelleschi and the design and construction of the Great Cathedral in Florence - one of the most magnificent achievements of the Italian Renaissance.

'Compelling... fascinating' Spectator 
 
'Abounding with excellent little stories' Financial Times 
 
This is the story of one of the most magnificent achievements of the Italian Renaissance, and the architect behind it. 
 
Even in an age of soaring skyscrapers and cavernous sports stadiums, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence still retains a rare power to astonish. Yet the elegance of the building belies the tremendous labour, technical ingenuity and bitter personal strife involved in its creation. For over a century after work on the cathedral began, the proposed dome was regarded as all but impossible to build. The greatest architectural puzzle of its age, when finally completed it was hailed as one of the great wonders of the world. 
 
This book tells the extraordinary story of how the cupola was raised and of the dome's architect, the brilliant and volatile Filippo Brunelleschi. Denounced as a madman at the start of his labours, he was celebrated at their end as a great genius. His life was one of ambition, ingenuity, rivalry and intrigue - a human drama set against the plagues, wars, political feuds and intellectual ferments of Renaissance Florence, the glorious era for which the dome remains the most compelling symbol. 
 
VOTED NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE AMERICAN INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS

Compelling... professional jealousy, committee intrigue, feats of bluff and fascinating scraps of obsolete lore... Where Longitude had ocean wastes, Brunelleschi's Dome has vertigo

As each novel feat of genius engineering flowers high above the ground, details of scandals and pranks blow up from the city streets to create an altogether enchanting tale

An adventure yarn set on the wild frontiers of human knowledge... abounding with excellent stories

Even in an age of soaring skyscrapers and cavernous sports stadiums, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence still retains a rare power to astonish. Yet the elegance of the building belies the tremendous labour, technical ingenuity and bitter personal strife involved in its creation. For over a century after work on the cathedral began in 1296, the proposed dome was regarded as all but impossible to build because of its enormous size. The greatest architectural puzzle of its age, when finally completed in 1436 the dome was hailed as one of the great wonders of the world. It has gone down in history as a masterpiece of Renaissance architecture. 
 
This book tells the extraordinary story of how the cupola was raised and of the dome's architect, the brilliant and volatile Filippo Brunelleschi. Denounced as a madman at the start of his labours, he was celebrated at their end as a great genius. His life was one of ambition, ingenuity, rivalry and intrigue - a human drama set against the plagues, wars, political feuds and intellectual ferments of Renaissance Florence, the glorious era for which the dome remains the most compelling symbol. 
 
Brunelleschi's Dome was voted Non-Fiction Book of the Year by American Independent Booksellers.

The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism

The Judgement of Paris

The acclaimed author of Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling paints a dazzling portrait of late-nineteenth century France and of the painters who were emblematic of the struggle between old and new - a struggle which resulted in the birth of Impressionism.

This is an exhilarating book... The success Ross King achieved with Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling is repeated here, for he fashions history anew

A crowded canvas - like, say, Manet's Music in the Tuileries Gardens - full of diverse characters

A brilliant book, a micro-history that feels like a macro-history... A good read and a good history; an unusual a pairing as its twin subjects

Wonderfully rich... With great deftness [King] tracks the careers of both men in the decade leading up to the most important exhibition in the history of art, the Impressionist group show of 1874

It is, in its broad outlines, a familiar story, but King, the author of Brunelleschi's Dome, tells it with tremendous energy and skill. It is hard to imagine a more inviting account of the artistic civil war that raged around the Paris salons of the 1860s and 1870s, or of the outsize personalities who transformed the way the world looked at painting

King's book is an absorbing investigation into [Meissonier's] rise and fall, and while this alone would have been subject enough, the author opens up the canvas by interweaving the parallel fortunes of another artist, Edouard Manet... In King's careful hands this tale of two artists rises beyond a mere historical account to become a revealing investigation into the vagaries of taste and success

King's history of artistic rivalry and the stormy gestation of the Impressionist movement is a rich and textured read, full of the sounds and smells of Paris in a wild and exciting time

In 1863, the French painter Ernest Meissonier was one of the most famous artists in the world and the darling of the 'Salon' - that all important public art exhibition held biannually in Paris. Manet, on the other hand, was struggling in obscurity. Beginning with the year that Manet exhibited his ground-breaking Déjeuner Sur L'Herbe and ending in 1974 with the first 'Impressionist' exhibition, Ross King plunges into Parisian life during a ten-year period full of social and political ferment with his usual narrative brillliance. 
 
These were the years in which Napoleon III's autocratic and pleasure-seeking Second Empire fell from its heights into the ignominy of the Franco-Prussian war and the ensuing Paris Commune of 1871. But it was also a period in which a group of artists, with Manet in the vanguard began to challenge the establishment by turning to the landscapes and ordinary people they saw around them. The struggle between Meissonier and Manet to get their paintings exhibited in pride of place at the Salon was not just about art, it was about how to see the world.

Michelangelo And The Pope's Ceiling

The extraordinary story behind Michelangelo's masterpiece by the author of Brunelleschi's Dome.

Ross King deftly stitches modern Michelangelo scholarship into his fluent and gripping narrative. The result is a delightful book that overturns many legends

A fascinating and carefully researched account of day-to-day life atop the Sistine scaffolding

A narrative that never falls back on exaggeration or deviates from the facts

We learn an enormous amount by reading this book; King's grasp of and research into the period seem all-encompassing

In 1508, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The thirty-three-year-old Michelangelo had very little experience of the physically and technically taxing art of fresco; and, at twelve thousand square feet, the ceiling represented one of the largest such projects ever attempted. 
 
Nevertheless, for the next four years he and a hand-picked team of assistants laboured over the vast ceiling, making thousands of drawings and spending back-breaking hours on a scaffold fifty feet above the floor. The result was one of the greatest masterpieces of all time. This fascinating book tells the story of those four extraordinary years and paints a magnificent picture of day-to-day life on the Sistine scaffolding - and outside, in the upheaval of early sixteenth-century Rome.

Ross King

If you want to celebrate the place that bookmaking and bookselling still have in our lives . . . immerse yourself in Ross King's rich history of Vespasiano da Bisticci, "the king of the world's booksellers," in 15th-century Florence . . . wonderful

Excellent . . . a fascinating read . . . Though ostensibly a biography of Vespasiano, he is less the book's subject than its method: a window on to the intellectual, political and technological developments of a time in radical ferment . . . entertaining, witty and expert

A brilliant narrative that seamlessly weaves together intellectual debate, technological exploration and the excitement of new ways of thinking about ethics, politics and human capability

A terrific and utterly absorbing read, full of narrative pace and remarkable breadth and depth of scholarship. It deserves to make the bestseller lists . . . I haven't enjoyed a history book as much for years

The Bookseller of Florence is a way of entering the world of Renaissance humanism and its fascination with the writings of the past at a time when these were still - but not for much longer - handwritten

A spectacular life of the book trade's Renaissance man . . . King's supreme ability is to imagine himself into the past . . . The scope of his knowledge is staggering

The Bookseller of Florence does for books what Ross King did for the art of Brunelleschi, Leonardo and Michelangelo: it conjures a vivid, lost world of manuscripts and learning. Written with an exquisite touch and enviable flair, King has written a book in defence of the pursuit of knowledge that's needed today more than ever

Jerry Brotton, author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps

A marvel of storytelling and a master class in the history of the book. The Bookseller of Florence is a dazzling, instructive and highly entertaining book, worthy of the great bookseller it celebrates

In the mid-fifteenth-century it must have seemed as if all the wisdom of the world was distilled into a single street in Florence. In this deft, sparkling book, Ross King reanimates the Street of Booksellers and the life of its most fascinating figure: Vespasiano da Bisticci

Peter Moore, author of Endeavour: The Ship and the Attitude that Changed the World

A beautifully constructed work of popular scholarship, at once celebratory and elegiac. Ross King skilfully illuminates the career, interests and connections of a fifteenth-century maker of manuscript books, and in the process paints a compelling picture of Florence in the age of the Medici, and of the fascinating, fractured world of the European Renaissance, in the decades witnessing the final fall of the Byzantine Empire and the fateful appearance of the new technology of print

Peter Marshall, author of Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation

Magnificent . . . King's meticulous research provides an immersive reading experience as he expertly weaves the political intrigue of families vying for power and currying favour with the pope into a riveting intellectual history covering the evolution of books, Renaissance Italy, classical philosophy and literature, and the invention of the printing press. A profoundly engaging study of a time when books were considered essential to a meaningful life, and knowledge and wisdom were cherished as ends in themselves

In this fascinating biography, King weaves Vespasiano's story into the fabric of the tumultuous times in which he lived . . . The result is a narrative about a man and his books, and so much more, including the origins and history of the Frankfurt Book Fair and the influence of Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press on the arc of history

The Bookseller of Florence is a delight, a popular history that makes the complexities of the past understandable... [an] enthralling book

Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance

'A marvel of storytelling and a masterclass in the history of the book' WALL STREET JOURNAL 
 
The Renaissance in Florence conjures images of beautiful frescoes and elegant buildings - the dazzling handiwork of the city's artists and architects. But equally important were geniuses of another kind: Florence's manuscript hunters, scribes, scholars and booksellers. At a time where all books were made by hand, these people helped imagine a new and enlightened world. 
 
 At the heart of this activity was a remarkable bookseller: Vespasiano da Bisticci. His books were works of art in their own right, copied by talented scribes and illuminated by the finest miniaturists. With a client list that included popes and royalty, Vespasiano became the 'king of the world's booksellers'. But by 1480 a new invention had appeared: the printed book, and Europe's most prolific merchant of knowledge faced a formidable new challenge. 
 
'A spectacular life of the book trade's Renaissance man' JOHN CAREY, SUNDAY TIMES

The Bookseller of Florence

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Ross King

Praise for The Bookseller of Florence

If you want to celebrate the place that bookmaking and bookselling still have in our lives . . . immerse yourself in Ross King's rich history of Vespasiano da Bisticci, "the king of the world's booksellers," in ...

Excellent . . . a fascinating read . . . Though ostensibly a biography of Vespasiano, he is less the book's subject than its method: a window on to the intellectual, political and technological developments of a ...

A brilliant narrative that seamlessly weaves together intellectual debate, technological exploration and the excitement of new ways of thinking about ethics, politics and human capability

If you want to celebrate the place that bookmaking and bookselling still have in our lives . . . immerse yourself in Ross King's rich history of Vespasiano da Bisticci, "the king of the world's booksellers," in ...

Excellent . . . a fascinating read . . . Though ostensibly a biography of Vespasiano, he is less the book's subject than its method: a window on to the intellectual, political and technological developments of a ...

A brilliant narrative that seamlessly weaves together intellectual debate, technological exploration and the excitement of new ways of thinking about ethics, politics and human capability

If you want to celebrate the place that bookmaking and bookselling still have in our lives . . . immerse yourself in Ross King's rich history of Vespasiano da Bisticci, "the king of the world's booksellers," in ...

Excellent . . . a fascinating read . . . Though ostensibly a biography of Vespasiano, he is less the book's subject than its method: a window on to the intellectual, political and technological developments of a ...

A brilliant narrative that seamlessly weaves together intellectual debate, technological exploration and the excitement of new ways of thinking about ethics, politics and human capability

Books by Ross King

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