Tuesday 25 January 2011

Dash, Mike "Tulipomania"

Dash, Mike "Tulipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused" - 2000

When our book club discussed "Tulip Fever" by Deborah Moggach, I purchased two additional books to go along with it. I thought both of them were very interesting as an additional read to what was really going on. One of them is this one, the other one is "The Tulip" by Anna Pavord is a book about the general history, this one adds a lot of extra information about the craze about Tulips in the 17th century and almost reads like a crime story.

 From the back cover: 
 
"In 1630s' Holland thousands of people, from the wealthiest merchants to the lowest street traders, were caught up in a frenzy of buying and selling. The object of the speculation was not oil or gold, but the tulip, a delicate and exotic bloom that had just arrived from the east. Over three years, rare tulip bulbs changed hands for sums that would have bought a house in Amsterdam: a single bulb could sell for more than 300,000 at today's prices. Fortunes were made overnight, but then lost when, within a year, the market collapsed. Mike Dash recreates this bizarre episode in European history, separating myth from reality. He traces the hysterical boom and devastating bust, bringing to life a colourful cast of characters, and beautifully evoking Holland's Golden Age.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.

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