Ephemeral city explores the rapid rise of cheap print and how it permeated Venetian urban culture in the Renaissance. In contrast to the familiar image of Venice as the tranquil, ordered 'Serenissima', it evokes the noisy, shifting, transient life of the city at street-level, and offers the first view of one of the city's most productive and creative industries from the bottom up. The result is a new and unexpected vision of Renaissance culture, characterised by the fluid mobility and dynamic intermingling of texts, ideas, goods and people.

The book follows the flood of cheap print...