NONFICTION REVIEW

The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for this Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures by Charlie English

The mysterious desert city is still generating myths, Jerome Starkey discovers
Manuscripts rescued from one of Timbuktu’s libraries
Manuscripts rescued from one of Timbuktu’s libraries
XAVIER ROSSI/GETTY IMAGES

Few things grow in Timbuktu save for the stories of travellers who haven’t been there. Herodotus told of sorcerers, Pliny described monsters whose mouths and eyes were in their chests. Later Timbuktu was reimagined as an African El Dorado. Mali’s king, Musa I, who built one of the city’s mosques, spent so much gold on his pilgrimage to Mecca in the 14th century that he supposedly depressed its price in Cairo for a generation.

The Moorish traveller Leo Africanus, in his Description of Africa in 1550, said the city’s traders were so wealthy that they used pieces of pure gold instead of coins and that the king owned a gold ingot weighing 1,300lb. In 1620 an English merchant called Richard Jobson met a trader on