In Remarkable Manuscripts, he took 12 manuscript books and wove their history in engaging accounts, allied with personal vignettes. The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club follows a similar format, this time focusing on 12 individuals intimately involved with illuminated medieval manuscripts.

De Hamel roams over a thousand years to follow a monk in Normandy, a prince of France, a Florentine bookseller, an English antiquary, a rabbi from central Europe, a French priest, a Keeper at the British Museum, a Greek forger, a German polymath, a British connoisseur and the woman who created the Pierpont Morgan Library.

De Hamel calls his book "an inquiry into the relationship between people and manuscripts, and why they mattered and still do in human lives". Put more simply at one point, he explains, "manuscripts have a way of weakening resolve, like soulful puppies in dogs' homes".

The first member of his "Manuscript Club" is Benedictine monk and teacher Saint Anselm (c 1033-1109), and his scriptorium in Bec Abbey in Normandy. De Hamel, as with his other subjects , takes the reader to their physical locations and engages with his subject and their environment.

One manuscript, De Hamel's second case study, has been called the most famous illuminated manuscript in the world. This is the richly illuminated 14th-century Très Riches Heures, of Jean, Duc de Berry, (1340 -1416 ), son of the King of France, who claimed to possess the engagement ring of the Virgin Mary.

Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631) assembled a great manuscript collection, "gathering up thousands of discarded manuscripts" after the closure of the monasteries and their libraries under Henry VIII. Sadly, Sir Robert Cotton's library was partially destroyed by fire in 1731, including the book binding together the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of Asser's Life of King Alfred and the old English poem, "The Battle of Maldon". The manuscripts that survived, including the Lindisfarne Gospels, became a base collection of the British Museum, now the British Library.

Later, in the 19th century, the British Museum library's Keeper of Manuscripts, Frederic Madden (1801-1873), the subject of a chapter, played a major role in developing the British Museum's collection of illuminated manuscripts. Unfortunately, Madden had a lifelong distaste of making them available to a wider public - "more harm than good can come from this public display of art to the mob".

When Madden decided that it was time to get married, he "looked first among those who might inherit manuscripts". Another collector, who is referenced in several chapters, is the English antiquary, Sir Thomas Phillips (1792-1872), whose wife famously commented that she was "booked out of one wing and ratted out of the other".

Phillips was taken in, as were a number of others, by the subject of another chapter, the Greek forger of biblical texts, Constantine Simonides (c 1824-90) whom de Hamel also calls "a confidence trickster and a fantasist". De Hamel notes, "every age makes forgeries of what people care about most".

The geographical context of the collecting is largely focused on Latin Western texts, but a chapter is devoted to the collecting of the Chief Rabbi of Moravia and then Bohemia, David Oppenheim (1664-1736), many of whose Hebrew manuscripts are now housed in Oxford's Bodleian Library.

Sir Sydney Cockerell (1867-1962), who was obsessed with manuscripts from a very young age, did not have the money to pursue manuscript purchases. When he became director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, however, he was able to make significant institutional purchases. Unlike Madden, "He enjoyed introducing (manuscripts) to people, if he thought they had interests in common". At the end of his life, selling off his personal collection, he commented, "I can now afford to have an egg with my tea".

The New York millionaire banker J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) assembled the finest collection of medieval manuscripts in the world outside of the great European library collections. In 1924, the private collection became the public Pierpont Morgan Library in New York with the remarkable Belle da Costa Greene (1879-1950) as its first director. De Hamel writes, "almost single-handedly, Belle Green created the fashion for millionaire manuscript libraries".

Belle Green had, however, to hide her true origins. She was the granddaughter of slaves on both sides and her father was the first black graduate student at Harvard. The pale colour of her skin and adoption of a fictitious Portuguese name were essential for her to survive and evolve into "a grande dame of America", with her own apartment on Park Avenue in New York.