Anthony Grafton

New York couldn’t compete with London or Paris: it had no bouquinistes, no Farringdon Road, no British Library or Bibliothèque nationale de France. It lacked the quaint bookshops of Boston, where the staff seemed to know not only the books they sold but their 18th and 19th-century authors, not to mention Harvard’s Widener Library. But it was still a city of books, collectors and readers.

In​ 1930, Edmund Wilson went on the road for the New Republic. He covered striking textile workers in Massachusetts, militant miners in West Virginia and suicides in industrial cities. His pieces concerned social conflict and ruined lives, but Wilson had a deep interest in the new industrial world that was still taking shape. His informants made clear to him that time itself took a new form...

Indexes are​ trouble. If you index your own work, you have to chew your cabbage twice, and then again, and again. You must reread the text that seemed so cogent when you sent it to the publisher – not to mention when you revised it, following the advice of your editor and referees, and when you answered the copy editor’s queries, and when you read the proofs. As you collect...

Piranesi’s ‘Plan of Rome’ (1756)

The​ life of a Renaissance antiquarian was far from simple. In April 1436, when Cyriac of Ancona arrived in Athens, he was thrilled by his first sight of the Parthenon, the ‘marvellous marble temple of the goddess Pallas, the divine work of Phidias’. He counted its columns, admired its friezes and commented on the artistry...

In​ the last decades of the 16th century, Rome attracted visitors much as Moscow would in the 1920s and 1930s. Like Moscow, it was the centre of an international movement that sought to transform the world. Like Moscow, it provided spectacles for tourists and enclaves for foreign recruits, who were often warmly admired but never wholly trusted. And like Moscow, Rome was a Rorschach blot in...