Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga (1989)

Another good novel about books, suggested by a friend. I was well into it when it started sounding familiar and I realized I had read this book some time ago, but before I started keeping a blog of what I've read. This time it is Margot, who works in preservation at the Newberry Library, who goes off to Florence in 1966 to help them recover from a flood that damaged much of their art and their books. She ends up spending much of her time in the library of a convent. I have come up against the same theme in two books concurrently, where the convent is considered a good place for women to hide from disagreeable marriages. Here they actually can get research done on behalf of women, and a big motivator in the book is to keep the convent independent and away from the control of the bishops. In this convent library they find the "sixteen pleasures" a Renaissance Kama Sutra. I loved to read about the efforts made to save books and art and the details of restoration. I liked Margot's ties to Italy - she had come there with her mother, an art teacher, and later returned to graduate high school with her class, so she had the language, and was drawn to the place where she was so happy with her mother, who has since died.