Jerusalem: City of the Book / Mack, Merav, and Benjamin Balint: New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0300222852.

To produce a book attractive to nonspecialist readers (tourists and residents of Jerusalem, and all fans of books and libraries), as well as to historians, librarians, and bibliographers, is a tall order. To write about Jerusalem critically, yet without bias in favor or against any of the peoples and polities claiming possession to this contested city and its cultural treasures, poses still another challenge. Even to gain permission to see those treasures, many of which are held in monasteries, private collections, and libraries that do not admit visitors, requires diplomatic skills; to read and interpret texts in about a dozen languages living and dead, and to establish their provenance and context, necessitates deep learning. Merav Mack and Benjamin Balint succeed admirably in all of these tasks. In addition, they write beautiful (reflective and understated) prose and they have been fortunate to collaborate with a photographer, Frédéric Brenner, and a publisher, Yale University Press, whose striking images of Jerusalem’s manuscripts and libraries, impeccable editing, and creative design have helped to make Jerusalem: City of the Book a piece of book art in its own right.