Take, for example, the “greatest coup” of Milan’s Ambrosian Library, which, in the seventeenth century, swapped a selection of “more useful” modern books for part of Bobbio’s ancient library. Bobbio at that time owned a magical and priceless collection—including most of those 666 books it had held in the tenth century, one of the very few substantial surviving groups of Italian pre-Caroline manuscripts—and it swapped them for the latest outputs of the printing press.
