This book was very pretty and just a cool diversion into a bunch of people's lives and how they intersected with the books they collected.
Also it wasn't until the chapter on David Oppenheim that I realized that most of the collectors...weren't collecting to read and that threw me for a loop. It's not that I know a ton about manuscript culture, but I do have a rather different relationship to them than the average person and it took de Hamel pointing out that the rabbis were different for me to realize that I had completely wrong assumptions about everyone else (except Anselm, yes).
It was a really fun book and my major critique, unsurprisingly, is that he brings up neurodivergence and mental illness to explain problematic character traits when, I promise you, the guy who forgot to change out of his bright green slippers when putting on a tailcoat and hated traveling and fell asleep with the candle burning is not neurotypical, my dude. That could have been handled way better.