Subsequent authors have expressed doubts about the Tuscans’ melodramatic accounts of the book room in Hartmut Tower. One of the men in particular has attracted skepticism. Poggio would later be styled “the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance,” the prototype “bird dog” collector. Perhaps the man who relished finding and taking away old books had overstated the monastic disarray as a cover and a justification for making off with some of the abbey’s choicest volumes.
