Haha, my first quick glance read your first sentence as "I came across a book in Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts" and I was like, damn, I wonder if I will have seen it! I do know De Hamel's book. Flipped through it at the British Museum last summer by turning straight to a book I've written about to check on his details. Mostly right but had a couple of things really wrong. De Hamel is a super smart guy and knows books, but his background is as a bookseller, a Sotheby's man, rather than an academic. I've seen him carrying 'round old books in ways that make me physically cringe, holding 800 year old books upside down by the spine or grabbing books by a single board. Perhaps it is from a lifetime of playing with other people's books? But the only time I met him I was at the Parker Library to see a book (and to write, in part, about the library too) and he was kind enough to chat for a few minutes. I guess I was the only one there that day so it would have been super rude not to, but the moment he left the sub-librarian (at the time -- I've got some feelings about the new guy) took me straight into the vault and let me look around. But I should probably get the book, because it probably has lots of pretty pictures and would teach me stuff I don't know about non-English literary books.
Re: Thieves of Book Row, it has been on my nightstand for a month or two, and I'm having trouble making much progress. I'm about halfway through. It's very interesting stuff, especially about the formation of the NYPL, but parts of it are pretty repetitive. Just got to the first real, planned heist where they grabbed three books from rare books room (which is just as dark and "19th-century secure" as they describe).
If you ever get a job investigating book theft, call me. I know nothing about the law or about thieves really but it sounds cool.
Ah, I've been to the Providence Athenaeum, but I don't remember seeing it there. Just the Edgar Allen Poe desk. 5 Million is pretty good for a book. But the market is kind of crazy for these things because they don't come up very often. I was looking at this gorgeous, clean humanist fifteenth century thing in the ugliest red velvet binding I've ever seen at this NYC bookseller's house a couple of years ago, and he priced the thing at a million. I asked him if it was worth a million bucks, and he said "maybe not because no one has bought it." Just silly money, but books are really a fantastic investment.
