The Book - A Global History

["history of the book in the muslim world | 533 works. Where they do occur, they rarely follow sentence structure in the modern sense. Gatherings (quires) were often (except in the early period) numbered to assist in assembling them in the correct order, using \ufb01rst alphabetic (abjad) numeration and later Indo-Arabic numerals or numbers spelt out as words. The numbering of leaves (foliation) did not become widespread until the 16th cen- tury. Catchwords were also used as a method of ensuring correct sequences as early as the 11th century, and became common from the 13th century onwards. Texts normally ended with colophons, which usually gave the date (and occa- sionally also the place) of copying and the copyist\u2019s name, together with thank- ful invocations and benedictions, and sometimes a recapitulation of the title and\/or author of the work. At the beginning of a MS, title-pages are sometimes found on the blank recto of the \ufb01rst leaf, or incorporated into an illuminated frontispiece, but they are not necessarily contemporary with the rest of the book, and their contents may be inaccurate. Details of author and title are nor- mally located within the \ufb01rst page or two of text, after preliminary pious invoca- tions and, sometimes, other prefatory matter. The text nearly always starts on the verso of the \ufb01rst leaf. The illumination and decoration of MSS was an important Islamic art form, second only to calligraphy. The \ufb01nest Qur\u2019\u0101ns contain magni\ufb01cent frontispieces and headpieces (\u2018unw\u0101ns) with gilt and\/or multicoloured abstract, \ufb02oral, and foliate patterns, as well as text borders, panels for headings, and sometimes interlinear decoration as well. Many lesser MSS were also illuminated, at least at their start. This, and some of the other features previously mentioned, under- line the important role of the book in the visual as well as the literary culture of Muslim societies. These features can also provide useful, sometimes vital, evidence for the placing and dating of otherwise unattributed MSS. One category of MS book in which the Muslim world made a notable contri- bution to global knowledge is that of maps and atlases. Muslims extended the inherited traditions of Ptolemy and other ancient cartographers to create world and regional maps of an accuracy that was not matched until modern times. This development was driven by the of\ufb01cial and administrative requirements of the Muslim empires, but it coincided and interacted with the emergence of the new paper-based book culture from the 9th century onwards. Maps and atlases were, however, produced not to meet any widespread demand, but generally in response to rulers\u2019 commissions. Many of these maps were schematic rather than realistically scaled, but they re\ufb02ected a growing visual sophistication that eventually culminated in such cartographical masterpieces as the world map of the 12th-century geographer Al-Idr\u012bs\u012b and the extraordinary atlas entitled Kit\u0101b Ghar\u0101\u2019ib al-Fun\u016bn (Book of Curiosities) now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, which has published it on the World Wide Web. Bookbindings in the Muslim world were also vehicles for artistic \ufb01nesse (see 19). Although isolated examples are recorded of books in scroll form, the codex","534 | history of the book in the muslim world A map of the Gulf of \u0130zmir from a MS dated 1587 of Piri Reis\u2019s Kit\u0101b-i Ba\u0136riyye: the original work belongs to about 1521 and, like a portolan, describes the Mediterranean for sailors. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (MS D\u2019Orville 543, fol. 17r)","history of the book in the muslim world | 535 was the normal form of the book from the very beginning of the Islamic period, and at \ufb01rst wooden boards, later leather covers, were used to hold the leaves and gatherings together. Bookbinders emerged as specialized craftsmen by the 9th century, when several of their names were recorded. Yet, although the craft clearly enjoyed a certain prestige, its practitioners are predominantly anony- mous, and their status is unclear. Book covers were generally made of pasteboard, often containing recycled MS leaves, and wholly or partly covered with leather, which was also pasted directly on to the spine. This unsatisfactory method often caused bindings to become detached, so many MSS were subsequently rebound. The rear cover was normally extended into a folding \ufb02ap covering the book\u2019s fore-edge. The front cover was usually decorated\u2014in the late medieval period from which most of the earlier surviving examples date\u2014with tooled rectangular panels contain- ing geometric patterns, and borders, sometimes containing Qur\u2019anic quota- tions. Often, the rear cover was also decorated, with a different design. Gilding was sometimes used. Later, central medallions of various shapes were imposed. In Iran, from the 16th century onwards, there was greater use of gold, with other colours added. Lacquer was also used to create elaborate pictorial compositions on bindings. Inside the binding, the endpapers of books of this later period were sometimes adorned with marbling, using a technique that seems to have origi- nated in Iran and reached its apogee in Ottoman Turkey. Some MSS, of square or oblong shape, were encased in boxes, often glued to the spine, which served to protect what would otherwise have been a somewhat cumbersome and vulnerable book. Boxes, envelopes, and bags were also used for small portable MSS, especially Qur\u2019\u0101ns and prayer books, designed to accompany and to protect travellers. However important bindings may have become, the central role in the pro- duction of MS books was always held by the scribes themselves. The profession of scribe soon became established and honourable in Muslim society, and included people of all levels of education. Professional scribes were sometimes also specialized calligraphers, illuminators, or miniature painters operating in palace workshops, or secretaries working in court chanceries with an exalted status. At the other end of the scale, however, they might be market stallhold- ers offering their services to all and sundry. In between, there were many paid copyists working in libraries, colleges, mosques, and other religious institu- tions. They were employed by wealthy patrons and book collectors, by scholars with particular needs, or by authors. Many MSS, however, were not written by professionals. Some were written by authors themselves: a number of auto- graph or holograph copies of Muslim writings survive in libraries. Impecuni- ous writers and scholars also often resorted to copying in order to sustain themselves; students and other readers frequently made copies, in libraries and elsewhere, simply for their own use; such MSS often fall well short of the standards of calligraphy, or even legibility, found in those made for sale or on commission.","536 | history of the book in the muslim world Inevitably in traditional society, most scribes, whether professionals or ama- teurs, were male. Yet there exist a surprising number of references to women performing this role. Some caliphs and other rulers employed female servants or slaves as calligraphers or as secretaries. Poets and writers also sometimes employed bondwomen to transcribe their works; other Muslim women were themselves poets or scholars who produced their own MSS. Even some \ufb01ne Qur\u2019\u0101ns are known to have been copied by female calligraphers, and in 10th-century C\u00f3rdoba there were reported to be 170 women occupied in writing Qur\u2019\u0101ns in the Ku\ufb01c script. Much later, in 16th-century Iran, a traveller claimed that \u2018the women of Shiraz are scribes . . . in every house in this city the wife is a copyist\u2019 (B\u016bd\u0101q Qazw\u012bn\u012b, quoted in D\u00e9roche, 192). With all due allowance for exaggeration, these references indicate that book production was by no means an exclusively male domain in traditional Muslim societies. Scribal activity did not entirely displace oral transmission in the diffusion of texts, however. Written books were often created in the \ufb01rst place by copying from dictation or from memory. The right to transmit the text was frequently granted in the form of a licence (ij\u0101za) given by the author (or, later, an author- ized agent in an established chain of transmission) on the basis of a satisfactory reading from the copy, which had to conform to the orally transmitted and memorized version. This system applied especially to religious or legal texts copied in the environment of a madrasa (college), and was prevalent in the 11th\u201316th centuries, although in some places it continued until much later. Whatever the immediate source, the maintenance of accuracy has always been a problem in texts reproduced in Muslim MS culture, as elsewhere. Copy- ists, however well-educated and trained, were always fallible. Sometimes they may have had dif\ufb01culties reading the source MS, especially if it were in an unfa- miliar variety of script. Even if this were not so, they could all too easily lapse into unintentional repetitions, omissions, and other corruptions of the text. Two particular problems arising from the nature of the Arabic script are false transcriptions caused by misreading or misplacing the diacritical points distin- guishing different letters (ta\u0174\u0136\u012bf ), and by transposing root letters within a word (ta\u0136r\u012bf or ibd\u0101l). Although many MSS were checked and edited before being released, the corruption of texts in this way, an inevitable consequence of scribal culture, was a continual source of anxiety and insecurity in a civilization for which the authenticity and integrity of texts was of paramount importance. Some books, as already stated, were written to order or for the use of the writer. Many others, however, were produced for sale. The occupation of book- seller and stationer (warr\u0101q) overlapped with that of scribe. In some ways, this enterprise was comparable to that of publishers in the print era: they received texts from authors, either by dictation or in writing, then transcribed them, or employed others to do so, in suf\ufb01cient quantities to meet demand, bound them, and sold them at a pro\ufb01t. Occasionally, they restricted the supply in order to keep prices high; sometimes they sold books by auction. As well as trading in copies made by or for themselves, booksellers dealt in copies bought in from","history of the book in the muslim world | 537 elsewhere; they also acted as purchasing agents, seeking out particular titles or genres on behalf of scholars or collectors. Some booksellers were learned or lit- erary men themselves: one of the most famous was the 10th-century scholar- bibliographer Ibn al-Nad\u012bm al-Warr\u0101q. Bookshops tended to cluster in particular streets or quarters of towns, a pattern (common among many trades) that can still be found today in, for example, the Saha\ufb02ar market in Istanbul. In some cities, a guild structure existed, with the book trade supervised by a shaykh or master. The high importance and value attached to books and reading in traditional Muslim societies led to the formation of many large libraries. These belonged to rulers, mosques, educational institutions, and private individuals. Although the quantities of volumes that they contained were undoubtedly exaggerated in literary sources, there can be little doubt that they numbered many tens of thousands in the major centres, such as Baghdad, Cairo, and C\u00f3rdoba. Cata- logues of libraries were compiled, and some libraries provided facilities, and even personnel, for making new copies of texts. Many libraries in the Muslim world were established as inalienable endowments (waqfs), so that books could not be sold or otherwise dispersed. Yet, borrowing by scholars was generally allowed, and this inevitably led to some losses. Much greater destruction and dispersal, however, resulted from \ufb01res, \ufb02oods, and con\ufb02ict, often compounded by neglect, misappropriation, and theft\u2014problems that have continued into modern times. 5 The Muslim MS book beyond the Arab world The Qur\u2019\u0101n gave the Arabic language and script a central importance in Islam. The areas of western Asia, North Africa, and Spain that adopted Arabic became the heartlands of book culture in the heyday or \u2018classical\u2019 period of Muslim civi- lization, from the 8th to the 13th centuries. As such, they have been the main focus of studies of that culture. But Islam eventually spread over a huge area from the Atlantic to the Paci\ufb01c, and in later periods other, non-Arab Muslim peoples and empires became predominant. They created their own literary tra- ditions and produced MS books in their own languages; but the powerful in\ufb02u- ence of Arabic was such that they adopted many Arabic loanwords and, most importantly, the Arabic script, which was adapted to write a variety of lan- guages, most of which are intrinsically unrelated to Arabic. In most of these areas, however, much religious and legal literature was also written in Arabic, and many copies of the Qur\u2019\u0101n were made, always in the original. Iran had a proud ancient literary tradition and, from the 10th century onwards, in addition to producing magni\ufb01cent Qur\u2019\u0101ns, created a \ufb02ourishing Persian MS culture. Poetic books were especially noteworthy, and a characteris- tic oblique and highly artistic form of the Arabic script was developed to write them, known as nasta\u2018l\u012bq (\u2018hanging script\u2019). Rulers and wealthy patrons often commissioned exquisitely decorated and illustrated MSS, and Persian miniatures","538 | history of the book in the muslim world have become much-treasured objets d\u2019art. Unfortunately, this has led to many of them becoming separated from the texts they were created to illustrate. Ottoman Turkey became the centre of a large empire that by the mid-16th century included most of the Arab world and much of southeastern Europe. Having inherited the Arabic MS tradition, the Turks both continued it and created a Turkish book culture that also borrowed some elements of the Per- sian. Ottoman calligraphers became especially celebrated, both for Qur\u2019\u0101ns and for more humble MSS executed with great elegance. Istanbul became the greatest centre in the world for Islamic books, and remains the largest reposi- tory of them to this day. At the same time, the Ottomans extended Muslim book culture into the Balkans. In Bosnia-Herzegovina especially, many MSS in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish were both written and imported, and were preserved in important libraries. The Bosnian language itself was also written in the Arabic script. Further east, in India (and south Asia generally) there were many centres of Muslim civilization, especially during the period of the Mughal empire (1526\u2013 1857), and many of these also became centres of MS production. Apart from Qur\u2019\u0101ns, most books were in Persian, including \ufb01ne illuminated and illustrated MSS, but from the 18th century onwards, there was also some writing in local vernaculars, especially Urdu. In central Asia, many MSS were likewise in Per- sian, but with increasing use of regional Turkic languages. In southeast Asia, Arabic Qur\u2019\u0101ns were written in quite distinct local styles (similarly, in China), and there was also a signi\ufb01cant Malay literature in the Arabic script that devel- oped its own MS traditions. Finally, mention must be made of sub-Saharan Africa, where the advent of Islam in large areas of both east and west brought literacy and a distinctive written culture embodied in characteristic MS books both in Arabic and in African languages, using a distinctive style of the Arabic script (see 39). Some of these were preserved in libraries; many more have emerged from private collections in recent years. 6 The longevity of the Muslim MS tradition Most surviving Muslim MSS date from the 16th century or later. This is only partly due to the loss of older ones. The writing of books by hand continued as the normal method of textual transmission for far longer in the Muslim world than elsewhere. The late arrival of printing was as much the consequence as the cause of this state of affairs. A number of more fundamental reasons can be identi\ufb01ed. One is the extreme reverence felt by Muslims for the handwritten word. Not only was writing regarded as a quasi-divine and mystical activity, but the beauty of the cursive Arabic script aroused an almost physical passion, akin to human love. Annemarie Schimmel has identi\ufb01ed numerous passages of Muslim poetry in which books and writing are likened to bodily characteristics of the beloved","history of the book in the muslim world | 539 that arouse desire. Given such feelings, even if they were directed by poetic con- ceits, it is not surprising that Muslims were reluctant to abandon the handwrit- ten book. Another factor was the widespread engagement of large sections of the educated population in book copying (and associated trades). Many wholly or partly earned their living by it. There was thus a substantial vested interest in retaining this method of production, whatever its limitations. A third reason, arising from the other two, was that Muslims felt supremely comfortable with MSS, which they regarded as an integral part of their culture and society. Even when economic and other conditions created a substantial rise in demand for books among emerging classes of society, as in 18th-century Egypt, it was felt that scribal production was adequate to cope with this phenomenon. At the same time, patterns of intellectual and religious authority within Muslim society were closely bound up with book production and the limited transmission of texts. Islam has no ecclesiastical organization, and the status of religious leaders, who had great authority but lacked secular power, depended essentially on their role as scholars and producers of texts. This in turn depended on maintaining the sacred character of writing and a degree of exclusiveness in and control over the creation and distribution of books. Accordingly, Muslims went on writing and copying books by hand until the emergence of new pat- terns of state authority that were associated with modernizing in\ufb02uences com- ing partly from outside the Muslim world. 7 The origins of printing in the Arabic script Printing was practised in the Muslim world as early as the 10th century. Block prints on paper, and at least two on parchment, found in Egypt, survive in sev- eral collections, notably in Cairo, Vienna, Cambridge, and New York, and fur- ther pieces have emerged from excavations. One in private hands may originate in Afghanistan or Iran. However, no literary or historical testimony to the craft of block printing seems to exist, except for two obscure references in Arabic poems of the 10th and 14th centuries to the use of \u017earsh to produce copies of amu- lets. It has been suggested that this non-classical Arabic term signi\ufb01ed tin plates with engraved or repouss\u00e9 lettering used to produce multiple copies of Qur\u2019anic and incantatory texts for sale to the illiterate poor. Certainly, the style of the surviving pieces indicates that they were not intended to gratify any re\ufb01ned literary or artistic taste, since the script is generally far from calligraphic, and there are even errors in the Qur\u2019anic texts. Some have headpieces with designs incorporating bolder lettering and ornamental motifs, sometimes white on black, which may have been printed with separate woodblocks. Some block- printed patterns have also been found on the endpapers of MS codices. The origin of the processes used is unknown: China or central Asia have been sug- gested, but there are serious doubts about any connection with Chinese wood- block printing, in view of the marked differences in the techniques and the contrast between these pieces and the luxurious character of other Chinese","540 | history of the book in the muslim world imports to the Muslim world and their local imitations. A link with the printing of patterns on textiles, also practised in medieval Egypt, cannot be ruled out. Some scholars have speculated that this Muslim precedent may have played a part in the origins of European printing several centuries later. No evidence of any such link has yet emerged, and de\ufb01nitive answers to this and other out- standing questions concerning medieval Arabic printing must await further discoveries and research. Muslim block printing of texts seems to have died out in the 15th century, although this or a related technique was evidently employed subsequently to make lattice patterns for use in the decorative arts. There is nothing to suggest that this technique was ever used to produce books or substantial literary texts in any form. These remained the monopoly of scribes in the Muslim world until the 18th century, and the origins of Arabic typography and printed-book produc- tion must be sought not in the Muslim world itself, but in Europe. Arabic script, being cursive, presents problems quite unlike those of the Roman, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets which preoccupied the \ufb01rst few genera- tions of European typographers. Not only is a higher degree of punchcutting skill required\u2014especially if calligraphic norms are to be imitated\u2014but matrices must be justi\ufb01ed even more minutely if the breaks between adjacent sorts are to be disguised. The compositor likewise must constantly avoid using the wrong letter form. Moreover, as well as different initial, medial, \ufb01nal, and isolated sorts for each letter, an abundance of ligatures is also needed for pairs or groups of letters. If vowel signs (\u0136arak\u0101t) are required\u2014for Qur\u2019anic and certain other texts\u2014then even more sorts are needed, as well as huge quantities of quadrats and leads to be interspersed between the vowel strokes. A full Arabic fount can therefore contain over 600 sorts. This makes it an expensive investment, and economic factors alone have therefore impeded the development of Arabic typography, as compared with its European counterparts. Arabic printing with movable type originated in Italy in the early 16th cen- tury. The \ufb01rst book was the Kit\u0101b \u0173al\u0101t al-Saw\u0101\u2018\u012b (Book of Hours), printed by the Venetian printer Gregorio de Gregorii at Fano (or possibly in Venice) in 1514 and sponsored by Pope Julius II for the use of Arab Melkite Christians in Leba- non and Syria. The type design is inelegant, and it was set in a clumsy, disjointed manner. Rather better was the typography of Alessandro Paganino, who printed the whole text of the Qur\u2019\u0101n in Venice in 1537\/8, probably as a commercial export venture. Nevertheless, it was still so remote from calligraphic norms as to make it quite unacceptable to the Muslims for whom it was intended, espe- cially as its pointing and vocalization were inaccurate and incomplete; it also contained errors in the Qur\u2019anic text. Italy remained the main home of Arabic printing for the rest of the 16th century; it was in Rome that Robert Granjon produced his elegant Arabic types in the 1580s, which for the \ufb01rst time achieved calligraphic quality, with their liberal use of ligatures and letter forms derived from the best scribal models. They were used principally in the lavish editions of the Tipogra\ufb01a Medicea Orientale between 1590 and 1610, and they set the","history of the book in the muslim world | 541 standard for nearly all subsequent work. Their in\ufb02uence is notable in the Arabic founts of the Dutch scholar-printer Franciscus Raphelengius and his successor, Thomas Erpenius, who produced many Arabic texts with his more practical and workmanlike founts in the early 17th century, and whose type-styles were much used or copied in Germany, England, and elsewhere. A more elegant and beau- tiful fount was commissioned by the French scholar-diplomat Fran\u00e7ois Savary de Br\u00e8ves: it was evidently based on Arabic calligraphy seen while he was French ambassador in Istanbul between 1592 and 1604, and\/or in MSS in Rome, where the types were cut before 1613. It was later used both there and at the Imprimerie royale in Paris in the mid-17th century, and again in the Napoleonic period. Sub- sequently it provided a model for other types, notably that of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, which had a monopoly on Arabic printing in Rome from 1622 onwards, and that of the monastic presses of 18th-century Romania (see 33). There was a steady \ufb02ow of Arabic printed books from most of the European centres of learning during the 17th\u201319th centuries. After Granjon, other leading typographers, such as William Caslon I and Giambattista Bodoni, were also involved in the design of Arabic founts. As well as Orientalist editions, the Euro- pean presses produced biblical and other works for use by Christians in the Middle East, and some polemical literature written with the futile aim of con- verting Muslims. There were also some \u2018secular\u2019 texts intended as a commercial export commodity for sale to Muslims. These seem to have met at \ufb01rst with some resistance, and were seized and con\ufb01scated, but the Ottoman sultan in 1588 issued a decree forbidding any such interference. Nevertheless, these exports of European printed books in Arabic achieved little commercial suc- cess, although some copies were used by Muslims, as is shown by owners\u2019 inscriptions in them. 8 Arabic-script book printing in the Muslim world Printing in the Muslim world originated in the non-Muslim communities living there. Hebrew typographic printing started in the Ottoman empire in 1493, and in Morocco in 1515; Armenian types were used from 1567 in Turkey, and from 1638 in Iran; Syriac type was used for both Syriac and Arabic in Lebanon in 1610; Greek books were printed in Istanbul from 1627; roman types appeared in Izmir in the 17th century. Yet typography in the Arabic script of the Muslim majority was not used in the Muslim world until the 18th century: before then, the few such printed books in use were imported from Europe. Why was book printing not adopted by Muslims for more than 1000 years after it was invented in China and 250 years after it became widespread in west- ern Europe (in spite of its use by non-Muslims in the Muslim world)? The rea- sons for this delay must be sought both in the nature of Muslim societies and in the supreme religious and aesthetic role accorded to the written word within them. Some indications of the profound Muslim attachment to MS books and scribal culture have already been given, and there can be no doubt that this was","542 | history of the book in the muslim world the main reason for the reluctance to embrace printing. Some more speci\ufb01c rea- sons can also be adduced. The use of movable type seemed to be the only practical method of printed- book production before the 19th century. This involved creating punches and matrices and casting individual types for all the letters and letter combinations of the Arabic alphabet, in their different forms; then, the compositor had to reassemble these separate sorts to create lines of text and pages of a book. As far as Muslims could see, this was done without regard to the intrinsic subtleties of the processes of calligraphic composition, and its relation to underlying aes- thetic and \u2018spiritual\u2019 considerations. Such segmentation and mechanization of the sacred Arabic script seemed tantamount to sacrilege in the eyes of devout Muslims. The production of the Qur\u2019\u0101n by mechanical means was considered unthinkable, but other texts bearing the name of God (as nearly all did) were also regarded by most scholars and readers as not to be violated by the methods of mass production. Rumours were also spread of the use in printing of ink brushes made from hogs\u2019 hair, which would automatically de\ufb01le sacred names; other rumours circulated about impure inks, which might also have the same effect. Apart from these considerations, the mass production of books by printing challenged the entrenched monopolies of intellectual authority enjoyed by the learned class (\u2018ulam\u0101\u2019 ), and threatened to upset the balance between that authority and the power of the state. This was indeed one important reason why printing was eventually sponsored, in the 18th and 19th centuries, by moderniz- ing rulers. They wanted to create a new, broader military and administrative class, versed in modern sciences and knowledge, who could bolster the power of the state against both traditional hierarchies within and new threats from out- side. The printing press was seen as an indispensable instrument for achieving this new order. The \ufb01rst printing with Arabic types in the Middle East was at Aleppo in Syria in 1706, by the Christian deacon \u2018Abd All\u0101h Z\u0101khir: the \ufb01rst book was a psalter\u2014 Kit\u0101b al-Zab\u016br al-Shar\u012bf. The initiative in setting up this press came from the Melkite Patriarch of Antioch, Athanasius Dabb\u0101s, who between 1698 and 1705 had spent some time in Romania, where he arranged for two Arabic liturgical books to be printed at the monastery of Sinagovo (Snagov) near Bucharest, under the auspices of the Voivod of Wallachia, Constantin Br\u00e2ncoveanu. This cooperation was facilitated by the common religious and political interests of Melkites and Romanians, both being semi-autonomous Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman empire. They were intended for free distribution to Orthodox priests in Arab countries, to overcome the shortage and high price of MS service books. Under Patriarchal auspices, and with the cooperation of the Romanians, this activity was transferred to Syria, and Z\u0101khir went on to print in Aleppo an Arabic New Testament (also in 1706) and other Christian works, until the press ceased operation in 1711. He subsequently embraced Catholicism and moved to the Greek Catholic monastery of St John the Baptist at Shuwayr in Lebanon,","history of the book in the muslim world | 543 where he set up a new press which published a long but intermittent series of biblical and theological works from 1734 to 1899. Its early materials can still be seen in the museum there. Another Orthodox Arabic press was established in Beirut at the beginning of the 1750s, again with help from Romania, but it pub- lished only two books, in 1751 and 1753. Arabic printing in the Arab world remained in the hands of Syrian and Leba- nese Christians for more than 100 years. They used types modelled partly on local Christian bookhands, but also in\ufb02uenced by the European tradition of Arabic type design, especially that of Orthodox Romania and of the Propaganda Fide Press in Rome. Their output was too small and intermittent to bring about any revolutionary change in book culture, but some observers, such as the French traveller and intellectual C. F. Volney, observed an increase in reading and writing among the Levantine Christians in that period. In his view, how- ever, the press\u2019s potential for such improvement was vitiated by the exclusively religious nature of the books printed there. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks revived Muslim printing in Istanbul in the second decade of the 18th century, when \u0130brahim M\u00fcteferrika began printing engraved maps, using copper plates, and probably techniques, imported from Vienna: the earliest extant map is dated 1719\/20. This was part of a programme of Westernizing innovations in the Ottoman capital which also led, less than ten years later, to the establishment of M\u00fcteferrika\u2019s famous book-printing estab- lishment, complete with Arabic types cut and cast locally and modelled on the neat Ottoman naskh\u012b bookhand of the period. The \ufb01rst book, an Arabic\u2013Turkish Dictionary, was printed in 1729 in 500 copies and was followed by sixteen others in Ottoman Turkish, in editions ranging from 500 to 1,200 copies, before the press was closed in 1742. They were all secular works\u2014on history, geography, language, government (including one written by M\u00fcteferrika himself ), naviga- tion, and chronology\u2014because the printing of the Qur\u2019\u0101n and religious texts was still forbidden. Several were illustrated with maps or pictorial engravings. Apart from a reprint in 1756, the press was not restarted until 1784, after which Ottoman Turkish printing had a continuous history until the adoption of the Latin alphabet in 1928. It has been claimed that the 18th-century M\u00fcteferrika press was a failure, that its printed editions were only marginal phenomena in Turkish literary and scholarly culture, and that most of its limited output remained unsold. Recent research by Orlin Sabev into the book inventories contained in Ottoman pro- bate documents of the period has shown, however, that these printed books achieved a considerable penetration among the contemporary educated classes, especially among administrators and of\ufb01cials, and that 65\u201375 per cent of the press\u2019s output was sold or otherwise distributed before M\u00fcteferrika died in 1747. Yet it remains true that 18th-century Turkish book printing and its impact was at a very modest level compared with earlier western European incunabula (see 6), and that scribal transmission remained prevalent. Print had not yet become an agent of change in the Muslim world, although the way was now open for it.","544 | history of the book in the muslim world Arabic printing in Egypt began with the presses of the French occupation of 1798\u20131801. Napoleon took from Paris a fount of the 17th-century Arabic types of Savary de Br\u00e8ves, and from Rome the Arabic founts of the Propaganda Fide Press. However, these were used only for a relatively insigni\ufb01cant output of proclamations, materials to help the French occupiers to learn Arabic, and a treatise on smallpox. All the equipment was removed when the occupation of Egypt came to an end. The continuous history of Arabic printing in that coun- try, and among Arab Muslims in general, dates from 1822, when the \ufb01rst book emerged from the state press of Mu\u0136ammad \u2018Al\u012b (ruler of Egypt, 1805\u201348), known as the B\u016bl\u0101q Press, after the place near Cairo where it was situated. This undertaking was started by an Italian-trained typographer, Niq\u016bl\u0101 Mas\u0101bik\u012b (d. 1830); the \ufb01rst presses and types were imported from Milan, and are percepti- bly European in style. They were soon replaced, however, by a succession of locally cut and cast founts based on indigenous naskh\u012b hands. Although some- what cramped and utilitarian, rather than calligraphic, they set the norm for Arabic typography, both in Egypt and at many other Muslim Arabic presses elsewhere, for the rest of the 19th century. Nasta\u2018l\u012bq types were also occasionally employed, both for Persian texts and for headings in Arabic works. A Maghrib\u012b fount was also later created, but little used. In the \ufb01rst twenty years of the B\u016bl\u0101q Press (1822\u201342) about 250 titles were published, including some religious and literary works\u2014e.g. the Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa-Layla)\u2014but most were military and technical books, of\ufb01cial decrees, grammars, manuals of epistolography, and translations of European scienti\ufb01c and historical works. After some vicissitudes in the mid- 19th century following the death of Mu\u0136ammad \u2018Al\u012b, the B\u016bl\u0101q Press again became, from the 1860s onwards, the driving force behind a publishing explosion in Egypt. Between 1866 and 1872, it was thoroughly modernized, with new type- founding equipment and mechanized presses imported from Paris, and greatly improved typefaces. By the end of the century it had published more than 1,600 titles, representing about 20 per cent of total Egyptian book production. As the \ufb01rst press in the Arab world to produce Arabic (and Turkish) books for Muslims, the B\u016bl\u0101q Press occupies a crucial place in Arabic and Muslim book history. Although some of its early output achieved only a very limited circulation, it nevertheless established printing for the \ufb01rst time as a normal method of producing and diffusing texts. Initially, technical and educational works, and, then, historical, literary, and religious titles became available to educated people on an unprecedented scale, despite initial resistance. This access to books in turn helped to create a new reading public and a new public sphere. Nor was the in\ufb02uence of the B\u016bl\u0101q Press con\ufb01ned to Egypt: its books were exported to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and other Muslim coun- tries, and stimulated the establishment or revival of printing far beyond the Nile valley. In the \ufb01rst half of the 19th century, many Arabic books were imported into the Middle East by Christian missionaries. Most of these were printed at a British-run","history of the book in the muslim world | 545 press in Malta between 1825 and 1842; they included secular educational works as well as religious tracts. The types were at \ufb01rst brought from England, but in the 1830s a new fount was cut and cast locally from calligraphic models, almost certainly prepared by the famous Arab writer F\u0101ris al-Shidy\u0101q, who had been a scribe in his youth and worked at the Malta press in this period. These set new standards among the Arab (mainly Christian, but also some Muslim and Jewish) pupils who used them, and the tradition was later continued by the American mission press in Beirut, which introduced a new typeface in the late 1840s, again based on calligraphic models: known as \u2018American Arabic\u2019, it has a char- acteristic attenuated and forward-sloping appearance, and was also used by several other presses in the Arab world. A more orthodox, but clear and work- manlike face, based on Turkish models, was adopted by the press of the Jesuit mission in Beirut about 1870, and also became very popular throughout the Levant (see 9). Other Catholic mission presses inaugurated Arabic printing in Jerusalem in 1847 and in Mosul in 1856: in both cases, their \ufb01rst founts were brought from Europe (Vienna and Paris, respectively). The \ufb01rst press in Iraq had, however, operated in Baghdad in 1830, using a fount similar to those of the \ufb01rst Persian ones in Iran, established at Tabriz c.1817 and Tehran c.1823: an elegant Persian- style naskh, but with some curious idiosyncrasies, such as the shortened top- stroke of the letter k\u0101f. Nasta\u2018l\u012bq typography was not and has never been favoured in Iran, despite the prevalence of this style in the scribal tradition (including lithography). It was, however, used in India as early as 1778 and remained in use there, both for Persian and for Urdu, until the mid-19th century; it was later revived in Hyderabad. In the Middle East, Arabic typography burgeoned from the mid-19th century onwards, with presses starting at Damascus in 1855, Tunis in 1860, \u0173an\u2018\u0101\u2019 in 1877, Khartoum in 1881, Mecca in 1883, and Medina in 1885. Most of these used local types in the Istanbul and B\u016bl\u0101q traditions, and many of them produced newspapers as well as books. From the late 1820s onwards, however, many books and some newspapers, were printed not from type, but by a hybrid method of book production: lithog- raphy. This was favoured in many places, especially in Morocco, Iran, and cen- tral, south, and southeast Asia, where it almost completely displaced typography for nearly half a century. This phenomenon in Muslim printing history has no counterpart in earlier European experience. Whereas in Europe lithography was used almost entirely for pictorial and cartographical illustration, Muslims used it to reproduce entire texts written by hand. In this way, they could retain most of the familiar features of Islamic MSS, and the calligraphic integrity of the Arabic script, including some styles dif\ufb01cult to reproduce typographically. At the same time, they could also avoid expensive investment in movable types. As a consequence, some of the conscious and subliminal effects of the stand- ardization of text presentation, and the emergence of a new print-induced esprit de syst\u00e8me, as proposed by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein in relation to early modern","546 | history of the book in the muslim world Europe, do not apply to those societies where this method was prevalent (see 6). On the other hand, the low prices and ready acceptability of books printed by this method meant that lithographically reproduced texts\u2014mainly traditional and classical ones\u2014achieved a far wider dissemination. In this way, lithography did much, as Ian Proudfoot has shown, to \u2018usher in the print revolution\u2019 (Proud- foot, 182). At their best, lithographed texts, many complete with pictorial mini- atures, could rival well-executed MSS of the period in beauty and clarity; at their worst, they could degenerate into barely legible grey scrawls. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a revival of Arabic typography in the Middle East, with considerable improvements in typefaces, especially in Egypt, where the new founts of D\u0101r al-Ma\u2018\u0101rif, and of the B\u016bl\u0101q Press itself from 1902 onwards, set higher standards of clarity and elegance. In 1914, the new fount designed there for A\u0136mad Zak\u012b Pasha halved the number of sorts by eliminating many ligatures, while retaining some of the calligraphic features of the older B\u016bl\u0101q types. Later, the introduction of Linotype hot-metal machines further simpli\ufb01ed the setting of Arabic-script texts, while inevitably moving the appear- ance of such works further away from traditional calligraphy and bookhands. However, with the modern decline of metal types and the introduction of pho- tocomposition, latterly computer-generated, the way was opened for a return to calligraphic norms. Apart from type styles, other features of the early Muslim printed book must be noted. As with earlier European incunabula, the tendency at \ufb01rst was to imi- tate MS styles and layouts. Words and lines were set closely, paragraphs and punctuation were lacking, the main type area was often surrounded by rules, and glosses or even complete commentaries appeared in the margins. Red ink was sometimes used for headings or key words, following the scribal practice of rubrication. Traditional tapered colophons were common. Title-pages were often lacking, but the verso of the \ufb01rst leaf was commonly commenced by a decorative \u2018unw\u0101n (headpiece), often containing the title and\/or basmala for- mula: the earliest were engraved on wood, but later elaborate designs were con- structed from \ufb02eurons and other single-type ornaments, following a European printing practice whose aesthetic origins lay in the in\ufb01nitely repeatable geo- metric and foliate patterns of Islamic art. In the late 19th century, some elaborate pseudo-Oriental designs were used for headpieces and borders, especially in Ottoman Turkey, perhaps re\ufb02ecting a European rather than an indigenous taste; later still, other European artistic in\ufb02uences, such as the Jugendstil (see 26) can be detected in decoration and page-design. By this time, European norms\u2014title-pages, paragraphing, running heads, etc.\u2014had begun to dominate Muslim book production. Punctuation was another such modern feature. In Muslim MSS, as has been said, it was rudimentary, and it remained so in printed texts until the end of the 19th century. In the 1830s the celebrated Arab writer F\u0101ris al-Shidy\u0101q had become familiar, while working at the Malta press, with European books and literature, and had observed the usefulness of punctuation marks in clarifying","history of the book in the muslim world | 547 the structure and meaning of passages of prose. In 1839, he published at Malta a primer and reading book of literary Arabic, and boldly decided to introduce Western punctuation into it, using commas, dashes, colons, exclamation marks, question marks, quotation marks, and full stops (or periods). He set them out in his introduction, explained their use, and urged that they should be generally adopted in Arabic. This proposal was, however, ahead of its time. In the Muslim world, his appeal at \ufb01rst fell on deaf ears, and he himself eventually gave up the idea. In the second edition of his primer, published at his press in Istanbul in 1881, all the punctuation marks were omitted, as well as his introduction to them. Later, in the 20th century, full punctuation was widely adopted in Arabic. F\u0101ris al-Shidy\u0101q\u2019s Istanbul press (the Jaw\u0101\u2019ib Press) introduced other signi\ufb01- cant improvements to Arabic book design in the 1870s and 1880s. His books look different from those of most other 19th-century Muslim presses. They largely abandoned the marginal commentaries and glosses with which earlier books were often encumbered. In some cases running heads were introduced, repeating the title or number of the chapter or section at the top of each page as an aid to those referring to the book. They nearly all have title-pages, setting out clearly and systematically not only the title itself, but also the name of the author, and such imprint information as the name of the press, the place and date of publication, and whether it is a \ufb01rst or later edition. This practice, as Eisenstein has pointed out, engendered \u2018new habits of placing and dating\u2019 (Eisenstein, 106); it also aided the subsequent development of more precise cataloguing and enumerative bibliography. Another new feature of the print era to be found in most publications of this period is a table of contents, with page numbers, like- wise enabling the reader to make more systematic use of the book. Page layouts at the Jaw\u0101\u2019ib Press also set new standards, being generally more spacious and easier on the eye than most ordinary MSS or earlier printed books from the Muslim world. Margins are reasonably wide and, as already mentioned, unencumbered by glosses or commentaries. The spacing between words tends also to be more generous, leaving a better overall ratio between black and white than on most pages either of ordinary MSS, or of B\u016bl\u0101q and early Turkish printed books. These features made them easier to read and there- fore more accessible to a wider public. They eventually became standard aspects of 20th-century Arabic book design. The character of the Arabic script itself has been remarkably unaffected by its use in printed books. Because Arabic writing was and is regarded by Muslims as sacred, the self-imposed task of typographers has nearly always been to repro- duce its calligraphic qualities as faithfully as possible. As already noted, this involved the creation of extensive founts containing all the letter forms and com- binations. Thus confronted with considerable dif\ufb01culties and expense, Arab typographers towards the end of the 19th century began to introduce some simpli- \ufb01cations, while for the most part successfully retaining full legibility and a degree of elegance. Yet, the Arabic script, unlike the roman, has never really acquired separate typographic norms, either aesthetic or practical, which could permit a","548 | history of the book in the muslim world decisive breach with its scribal past. Some radical innovators in the 19th and 20th centuries produced schemes to reform the alphabet by creating entirely discrete \u2018printed\u2019 letters, but there was never any serious prospect of their acceptance. Illustrations in Muslim printed books, until the introduction of modern half- tone techniques at the end of the 19th century, can be divided into two categories. First, woodcuts and engraved or lithographed plates were used in typographic books, mainly for maps, diagrams, and didactic or technical illustrations. These often incorporated perspective, itself an innovation in the visual culture of many areas of the Muslim world. Technical illustrations were sometimes found in Ara- bic MSS. Before the print era, however, the transmission of technical data in the form of diagrams always depended upon the accuracy of scribes who often regarded them as little more than exotic appendages, frequently misplacing and sometimes omitting them altogether. With the introduction of standard, repeat- able, engraved diagrams incorporated into printed books, the presentation of such information became far more accurate and reliable. The second category of illustration consisted of pictures introduced into the texts of lithographed books; these were often copied from, or in the style of, miniatures in MSS. Such miniatures are a notable feature of Persian litho- graphed books of the 19th century, where they usually accompany literary works from an earlier period. Although they are broadly in the style of MS miniatures, it has been observed that they belong more to the domain of popular art than to that of the lofty court culture from which illustrated MSS originated. Litho- graphic miniatures also sometimes feature modern subject matter. A notable example is the depiction, in a work of classical Persian poetry printed at Tehran in 1847, of the process of lithographic printing itself. In an Uzbek lithographed text of 1913 a miniature shows a gramophone of the period. Both kinds of illustration\u2014in typographic and lithographic books\u2014repro- duced pictorial elements in a standard, repeatable form for a much wider read- ership than that of illustrated MSS, and thus helped to transform the visual and artistic awareness of educated Muslims during the 19th and 20th centuries. 9 Printing the Qur\u2019\u0101n Apart from short extracts used in medieval block-printed amulets, the Arabic text of the Qur\u2019\u0101n was not printed until the 1530s, when a somewhat inaccurate and defective version was published by Christians in Venice. Subsequent com- plete editions appeared in Hamburg (1694), Padua (1698), and St Petersburg (1787). This last was personally commissioned by the Russian empress Cather- ine for the use of her Muslim subjects, and was the \ufb01rst to involve Muslims in its preparation. It represents a curious and unusual amalgamation of European book design, with baroque text borders and ornaments, and traditional Muslim presentation of the vocalized Qur\u2019anic text, with marginal notes on readings and variants. It was later reprinted a number of times, both in St Petersburg and in Kazan (Russian Tatarstan). In the Muslim world itself, however, printing","history of the book in the muslim world | 549 the sacred text remained \ufb01rmly off-limits until the 1820s or 1830s, when the \ufb01rst editions were published in Iran. The earliest of these may have been typeset (reliable bibliographical information is not readily available), but it was the advent of lithography that gave the impetus to Qur\u2019\u0101n printing because it ena- bled the all-important MS conventions and aesthetic\/theological ethos to be maintained. A further incentive was also provided by another European non-Muslim edi- tion, greatly superior to its predecessors, edited by the German orientalist Gus- tav Fl\u00fcgel, and \ufb01rst published by Tauchnitz in Leipzig in 1834. This for the \ufb01rst time provided a convenient and affordable text that was reasonably authentic. It was stereotyped and issued in several subsequent editions, and achieved a considerable circulation, even reaching the Muslim world. However, the verse numbering and some other aspects of this version were not in accordance with orthodox Islamic practice, so there remained a clear need for further Muslim editions. This demand was partly met by subsequent lithographed versions in Iran, India, and Turkey. In Egypt, the impetus of modernization created a tension between conserva- tives, who abhorred the idea of profaning God\u2019s words with movable types, and more progressive religious educators who wanted to place a copy of the Qur\u2019\u0101n, if not in the hands of every Muslim, then at least of every college pupil. Some attempts were made to publish the text in the 1830s, but the distribution of cop- ies was successfully blocked by the religious authorities. Later, in the 1850s, some were distributed, but only after each individual copy had been read by a Qur\u2019anic scholar and checked for errors, at great expense. From the 1860s onwards, the B\u016bl\u0101q and other Egyptian presses did print more Qur\u2019\u0101ns, but generally embedded in the texts of well-known commentaries. In Istanbul, the Ottoman calligrapher and court chamberlain Osman Zeki Bey (d. 1888) started printing Qur\u2019\u0101ns reproducing the handwriting of the famous 17th-century calligrapher Haf\u0131z Osman, using new lithographic equip- ment capable of an unprecedented, high-quality output. For this publishing venture, he had the express permission of the sultan-caliph\u2014one reason why his editions gained a wide popularity in Turkey and elsewhere. This press also used photolithography, which enabled it to print miniature Qur\u2019\u0101ns, small enough to be carried in a locket\u2014no other technique could do this. The Glasgow \ufb01rm of David Bryce, which specialized in miniature books, produced a rival ver- sion around 1900, and Muslim troops on both sides in World War I carried these amuletic miniatures into battle (see 7). By the early 20th century, now that reluctance to accept printed Qur\u2019\u0101ns had largely been overcome, the need was felt for a new authoritative version that would do full justice to the demands of traditional Islamic scholarship, in respect of both the shape of the text (i.e. the form of the text as it appears in the early MSS without vocalization and diacritics) and the way it was presented. The lead was taken by scholars at Al-Azhar mosque-university in Cairo, the pre-eminent seat of traditional learning in Islam. After seventeen years of preparatory work,","550 | history of the book in the muslim world their edition was published in 1924, under the auspices of King Fu\u2019\u0101d of Egypt. It was printed orthographically in such a way that the shape of the original 7th- century consonantal text is clearly presented, but at the same time it included all the vocalization and other indications which are required for understanding the meaning and for correct recitation. It is also meticulously executed in conform- ity with calligraphic norms. The Cairo Qur\u2019\u0101n quickly established its authority, and was followed by a host of further printed editions reproducing it or based upon it. These have continued to the present day, and even online digitized ver- sions follow the Azhar text. The ready availability of inexpensive copies of a standard authorized version of the Qur\u2019\u0101n transformed the attitude of many Muslims to the sacred text, and the uses to which they put it. Its function ceased to be primarily ritual and litur- gical, and it came to be regarded as a direct source\u2014not necessarily mediated by scholarly interpretation and authority\u2014of guidance and wisdom in human affairs. This idea was reinforced by the abolition, in that same year (1924), of the Islamic caliphate, which had previously been, at least in theory, a religiously ordained but non-scriptural source of authority. The new accessibility and role of the Qur\u2019\u0101n consequently led some believers to adopt fundamentalist attitudes to Qur\u2019anic doctrine, with considerable consequences in the social and political spheres. Others, in contrast, gradually abandoned traditional scholastic and legal interpretations in favour of their own reconciliations of Qur\u2019anic ethics with modern life and politics. This divergence remains an acute feature of mod- ern Islam, reinforced by outside pressures and new sources of authority in what continues to be above all a book-based system of belief. 10 Muslim book culture in the 20th and 21st centuries By the beginning of the 20th century, printing had largely displaced the writing of MSS as the normal method of transmitting texts in most of the Muslim world. Only in a few remote areas, such as Yemen, did the scribal profession continue to \ufb02ourish. In the main centres of literary culture, a new civilization of the book emerged, in which texts were readily available for purchase at affordable prices and were relatively easy to read. Newspapers, periodicals, and other serials were also widespread. These developments in turn encouraged and facilitated the spread of literacy. In schools, the availability of printed primers and textbooks revolutionized education, enabling students to embrace reading as an individ- ual, internalized activity, rather than a ritual adjunct of rote learning. Neverthe- less, older practices continued in some places where well-educated teachers were in short supply, or where conservatism or ideology rejected the free under- standing of texts. The rapid transition from MSS to printed books and serials as the normal means of transmitting texts had profound effects on the development of Muslim literary cultures. Insuf\ufb01cient research has been done to enable these effects to be measured or to be traced accurately. It seems likely, however, that the much","history of the book in the muslim world | 551 wider dissemination of texts, both new and old, together with the standardiza- tion and systematization of their presentation, and their permanent preserva- tion, played a major role in promoting the cultural and national self-awareness that has led to a renaissance of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Urdu, Malay, and other Muslim literatures in modern times. This new self-consciousness has also had repercussions in the social and political spheres. In the case of Turkish and Malay, the rejection of the Arabic script in favour of the roman alphabet has rein- forced their separate literary and national identities. In the Arab world, the early 20th century saw a revival in Arabic typography: a development subsequently reinforced by the adoption of Linotype machines in major printing of\ufb01ces, as well as by the greater mechanization of the print- ing presses themselves. These developments permitted considerable increases in the production of books, magazines, and newspapers. Cairo and Beirut remained the principal publishing centres, as well as the main hubs of literary activity, throughout the transition from Ottoman and European rule to full independence and beyond. Both lost ground, however, in the 1970s and 1980s because of declining quality, lack of investment, rising prices in Egypt, and ruinous strife in Lebanon. Other Arab countries have therefore become rela- tively more important, notably those of the Maghrib (with an important out- put in French as well as Arabic), Iraq until 1991, and most recently Saudi Arabia. The lack of a well-developed book trade in these countries has, how- ever, hampered development, as have political and religious censorship and restrictions in some cases. As elsewhere, the spread of broadcast and electronic media, especially television, video, and the Internet, has had some adverse impact on the market for printed literature, but this has been largely offset by the rise in rates of literacy. Similar trends are to be found in most other Muslim countries, but there has been a publishing explosion in Turkey and Iran, espe- cially in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The advent of electronic texts and the Internet has had a noticeable effect in the Muslim world, as elsewhere (see 21). In some countries, such as Saudi Ara- bia, governmental controls and restrictions on Internet access have prevented full use being made of the new opportunities for access to texts in global cyber- space. Even where this was not the case, however, language barriers have cre- ated problems, because the digitization of the Arabic script was a late development, which at \ufb01rst lacked standardization. Since the widespread adop- tion of Unicode, however, many websites in Arabic and Persian have been estab- lished, some of which provide substantial textual databases, including the Qur\u2019\u0101n, \u0135ad\u012bth, and other essential Islamic texts, as well as a great deal of sec- ondary material, much of it promoting particular doctrinal, sectarian, and political viewpoints. The Internet has also accelerated a pre-existing tendency to adopt English, rather than Arabic, as an international Muslim language. As in the rest of the world, the long-term effects of the development of electronic textuality on Muslim book culture cannot yet be predicted.","552 | history of the book in the muslim world BIBLIOGRAPHY H. S. AbiFar\u00e8s, Arabic Typography (2001) M. Krek, A Bibliography of Arabic Typog- G. N. Atiyeh, ed., The Book in the Islamic raphy (1976) World (1995) \u2014\u2014 A Gazetteer of Arabic Printing (1977) J. Balagna, L\u2019Imprimerie arabe en occident U. Marzolph, Narrative Illustration in Per- (1984) sian Lithographed Books (2001) A. Ben Cheikh, Production des livres et lec- \u2014\u2014 ed., Das gedruckte Buch im Vorderen Ori- ture dans le monde arabe (1982) ent (2002) J. M. Bloom, Paper before Print (2001) B. Messick, The Calligraphic State (1993) A. Demeerseman, Une \u00e9tape importante de J. Pedersen, The Arabic Book, tr. G. French la culture islamique: une parente de (1984; Danish original, 1946) l\u2019imprimerie arabe et tunisienne, la lithog- I. Proudfoot, \u2018Mass Producing Houri\u2019s Moles, raphie (1954) \u2014\u2014 L\u2019Imprimerie en Orient et au Maghreb or Aesthetics and Choice of Technology in (1954) Early Muslim Book Printing\u2019, in Islam: F. D\u00e9roche et al., Islamic Codicology, tr. Essays on Scripture, Thought and Society, D. Dusinberre and D. Radzinowicz, ed. ed. P. G. Riddell and T. Street (1997) M. I. Waley (2005) N. A. Rizk and J. Rodenbeck, \u2018The Book Pub- P. Dumont, ed., Turquie: livres d\u2019hier, livres lishing Industry in Egypt\u2019, in Publishing in d\u2019aujourd\u2019hui (1992) the Third World, ed. P. G. Altbach et al. E. L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an (1985) Agent of Change (2 vols, 1979) G. Roper, ed., World Survey of Islamic Manu- A. Gacek, The Arabic Manuscript Tradition scripts (4 vols, 1992\u20134) (2001) O. Sabev, \u2018The First Ottoman Turkish Print- W. Gdoura, Le D\u00e9but de l\u2019imprimerie arabe \u00e0 ing Enterprise: Success or Failure?\u2019, in Istanbul et en Syrie (1985) Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee, ed. Y. Gonzalez-Quijano, Les Gens du livre: \u00e9di- D. Sajdi (2007) tion et champs intellectuel dans l\u2019Egypte P. Sadgrove, ed., History of Printing and r\u00e9publicaine (1998) Publishing in the Languages and Coun- E. Hanebutt-Benz et al., eds., Middle Eastern tries of the Middle East (2004) Languages and the Print Revolution K. Schaefer, Enigmatic Charms: Medieval (2002) Arabic Block Printed Amulets (2006) N. Hanna, In Praise of Books: A Cultural His- A. Schimmel, \u2018The Book of Life \u2013 Metaphors tory of Cairo\u2019s Middle Class (2003) Connected with the Book in Islamic Litera- F. Hitzel, ed., Livres et lecture dans le monde tures\u2019, in The Book in the Islamic World, ed. ottoman, special issue of Revue des mondes G. N. Atiyeh (1995) musulmans et de la M\u00e9diterran\u00e9e, 87\u20138 C. F. de Schnurrer, Bibliotheca Arabica (1811) (1999) J. Skovgaard-Petersen, ed., The Introduction K. Kreiser, ed., The Beginnings of Printing in of the Printing Press in the Middle East, the Near and Middle East (2001) special issue of Culture and History, 16 (1997)","j 41 i The History of the Book in the Indian Subcontinent ABHIJIT GUPTA 1 The MS book 4 The other presidencies: Bombay and 2 Early printing: from Goa to the Madras Malabar coast 5 Printing in north India 3 Printing in the east: Serampore and 6 Print and the nation 7 Publishing after 1947 Calcutta 1 The MS book The Indian subcontinent is home to more languages than anywhere else in the world. The Indian constitution recognizes 22 of\ufb01cial languages, but the number of mother tongues in India exceeds 1,500, of which 24 are spoken by a million or more people. Any history of such a diverse constituency is bound to be selective and incomplete. This is true for the book as well, especially in the pre-print era. Although the \ufb01rst printing with movable type in India occurred as early as in 1556, almost two and a half centuries were to pass before print was able to in\ufb01l- trate the intellectual world con\ufb01gured by the MS book. This should not be sur- prising, for the history of the MS book in the Indian subcontinent is a long and highly sophisticated one, dating back to at least the 5th century bc. It is beyond the scope of this essay to treat the MS book in any detail, but it is essential to have an understanding of some of its basic features. The rise of heterodox movements such as Buddhism and Jainism triggered a movement from orality to literacy in India. Orthodox Hinduism set little store by writing, and its key texts, the Vedas, were memorized and transmitted orally (see 2). A great deal of signi\ufb01cance was attached to the spoken word and the performative aspects of the text. There are some technical terms in later Vedic works that might be taken as evidence for writing, but that task was assigned to the clerical caste of kayasthas who did not enjoy any great social prestige. On the other hand, the need to transcribe correctly the teachings of the Buddha and","554 | history of the book in the indian subcontinent Mahavira led to a widespread MS tradition from the 5th century bc in which authenticity and canonicity were the chief impulses, as opposed to the more prosaic aims of Hindu MS practice. The Jatakas (collections of stories about the Buddha) mention wooden writing boards (phalaka) and wooden pens (var- naka), and lekha or writing as part of the school curriculum. Buddhist MSS were mostly produced in monasteries and universities. When the Chinese trav- eller Fa Xian visited India in the 5th century ce, he saw professional copyists at work at Nalanda University; two centuries later, another Chinese visitor to the university, Yi Jing, reportedly carried away 400 Buddhist MSS. Similarly, Jain copyists were monks and novices, sometimes even nuns. The earliest known substrate for recording texts in ancient India is the tali- pat or writing palm (Corypha umbraculifera), which is native to the Malabar coast of southern India and has palmate leaves folding naturally around a cen- tral rib. The tree was extensively cultivated, since the leaves were also used for thatching and the sap fermented to make palm wine. It is believed that there was a rich trade in the leaves from the south to the north, but this also meant that the Buddhist scriptoria in Bihar and Nepal were heavily dependent on the availability of the leaf. One of the earliest accounts of the general use of the tali- pat throughout India is from Xuan Zang, who described it in the 7th century ce. In about 1500 ce, the talipat was supplanted by the palmyra, which was easier to cultivate and commercially more valuable, owing to the range of products it yielded. Reed pens were used with the talipat, while an iron stylus was used with the palmyra. After the grooves were scored, they were smeared with ink and then cleaned with sand. In north India, the bark of birch and aloe seem to have been extensively used, the former in the western Himalayas, the latter in the Assam valley. Birch bark was known as bhurjapatra, and is frequently men- tioned in northern Buddhist and Brahmanical Sanskrit works (Buhler, 1973). After writing, the \ufb01nished stack of leaves was strung on a cord through pre- bored holes and protected by a pair of wooden covers. This form of the book\u2014 known as the puthi or pothi\u2014survived until the mid-19th century, with some minor variations. In Nepal, for example, covers of valuable MSS were some- times made of embossed metal, while Jain MSS were kept in sacks made of white cotton. Papermaking had been known in China from the beginning of the \ufb01rst mil- lennium ce, but it reached India via the Turks after their conquest of northern India in the early 13th century (see 10). There is some evidence of papermaking in the Himalayan region before this period, especially in Nepal, but it never posed a serious challenge to palm-leaf MSS. With the beginnings of Muslim rule in India, paper became the substrate of choice, as no material other than paper was considered suitable for writing in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu (see 40). The rich traditions of illumination, illustration, and calligraphy in these languages required exceptionally high-quality paper, which sometimes had to be imported from places such as Iran. For bindings, leather and board were used: these could not be used for Hindu MSS. Perhaps the richness and sophistication of the","history of the book in the indian subcontinent | 555 Mughal MS tradition was one reason why printing failed to make much impact in north India, despite the presentation to the Emperor Akbar of a copy of Chris- topher Plantin\u2019s polyglot Bible in 1580. This historic gift was made when a dele- gation of Portuguese Jesuits visited the emperor at Fatehpur Sikri (see 7). In a richly symbolic response, the emperor had several of the engravings in the Bible copied by his own painters. Although the Hindu and Muslim MS traditions took somewhat different routes, they were both instrumental in creating highly evolved communication networks. Access to the production and ownership of MSS was restricted in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, yet the rise of the vernaculars in the second millennium ce saw a much wider diffusion of the culture of writing and read- ing. The examples of the great Indian epics Mah\u0101bh\u0101rata and R\u0101m\u0101ya\u0158a dem- onstrate how new interpretive communities were formed once the Sanskrit hegemony was challenged, and created a kind of \u2018social memory\u2019 mediated by the book. On the other hand, the Islamic MS tradition in India was a direct result of court patronage, and consequently much more opulent. Given the cen- trality of the Qur\u2019\u0101n to Islam, book arts such as calligraphy and illumination were accorded the highest prestige. Outside court circles, guilds of scribes acted as purveyors of knowledge and information, leading to the creation of a robust public sphere. The coming of print did not immediately precipitate a battle of books. More often than not the printed book took its cue from the MS book, and for a while there was space for both forms. Ultimately, however, it was the loss of political power to the British that undermined the cultural and social authority of the MS tradition. Under the new political dispensation, the voice of power would henceforth be articulated through print. 2 Early printing: from Goa to the Malabar coast Print arrived in India by accident. In 1556, King Jo\u00e3o III of Portugal despatched a group of Jesuit missionaries and a printing press to Abyssinia, at the request of its emperor. When the ship put in at Goa, a Portuguese colony on the west coast of India, news came that the emperor had changed his mind. The Portu- guese authorities in Goa had not been particularly keen to introduce printing to the area, but they now found themselves with not just a press but a printer. He was Juan de Bustamante, a Jesuit brother from Valencia, reportedly accompa- nied by an Indian assistant trained in printing at Lisbon (see 9). The \ufb01rst book to be printed in Goa was Conclus\u00f5es e outras coisas, in 1556. Unfortunately, no copy is extant, a fate shared by most of the early publications from Goa. The \ufb01rst Indian language rendered in the medium of print was Tamil. This might appear odd, given that the lingua franca in and around Goa was Konkani. But the Jesuits, led by Francis Xavier, who died in Goa in 1552, had established an extensive network of Jesuit missions along the Coromandel coast and had baptized more than 10,000 Tamil-speaking Parava \ufb01sher-people. A key","556 | history of the book in the indian subcontinent \ufb01gure in the new technology was Henrique Henriques, a Portuguese Jew, who produced \ufb01ve books in Tamil script and language, as well as a Tamil grammar and Dictionary. In 1577 Henriques\u2019s \ufb01rst book was printed at Goa: Doctrina Christam, Tampiran Vanakkam, a translation of a Portuguese catechism of 1539. This book was not only the \ufb01rst to be printed with Indian type, but the \ufb01rst with non-roman, metallic type anywhere in the world. The Tamil type for the book was prepared by the Spaniard Juan Gonsalves, a former blacksmith and clockmaker, with assistance from Father Pero Luis, a Tamil Brahmin, who had entered the Jesuit order in 1562. Bustamante was asked by the Portuguese Jesuits to set up a press at the Col- lege of St Paul in Goa, and it was under the imprint of the college that most of the early publications were issued. Other printers who were active in Goa dur- ing this period were Jo\u00e3o de Endem and Jo\u00e3o Quinquencio. Their output may be described as modest, having little or no impact outside the immediate circle of missionary activity. Printing was too alien and expensive an activity to elicit more than polite interest locally, while the \ufb01nished product\u2014the printed book\u2014 was regarded as part of the paraphernalia of church ritual. Even within mis- sionary circles, the protocols and potential of printing were only partially appreciated. In the context of Goa, it seems that the printed book was seen solely as a tool for evangelizing. According to Priolkar, \u2018Printing activity contin- ued to prosper so long as the importance of local languages for the purpose of proselytisation was fully appreciated\u2019 (Priolkar, 23). This was reinforced by the Conc\u00edlio Provincial of 1606, which stated that no cleric should be placed in charge of a parish unless he learnt the local language. Yet Priolkar has argued that this stipulation was steadily undermined through the 17th century, until a decree was promulgated in 1684 which required that the local populace aban- don the use of their mother tongues and switch to Portuguese within three years. It is therefore not surprising that printing came to a standstill in Goa at about the same time, in 1674. Another century and a half was to pass before it would reappear, in 1821. The next signi\ufb01cant printing initiative took place in Tranquebar (now Tha- rangambadi), on the east coast of India, and was triggered by the arrival of the Danish Lutheran missionary Bartholomew Ziegenbalg in 1706. The nearest Jesuit mission at Elakkuricci was less than 50 miles away, and a battle began between the two rival missions to win the hearts and minds of the local people. Ziegenbalg spent long sessions with an Indian pundit learning local language and customs. To his parent body, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowl- edge, he wrote: I must confess that my School-Master . . . has often put such Philosophical Ques- tions to me, as really made me believe . . . one might discover things very \ufb01t to entertain the curiosity of many a learned Head in Europe . . . We hope to bring him over to the Christian Knowledge; but he is con\ufb01dent as yet, that one time or other we will all turn Malabarians. (Priolkar, 37)","history of the book in the indian subcontinent | 557 He sent his emissaries far and wide, to buy up books from the widows of schol- arly Brahmins, and left detailed descriptions of the MSS: As for the Outside of these Books, they are of a quite different Dress from those in Europe. There is neither Paper nor Leather, neither Ink nor Pen used by the Natives at all, but the Characters are by Iron Tools impressed on a Sort of Leaves of a Certain Tree, which is much like a Palm-Tree. At the End of every Leaf a Hole is made, and through the Hole a String drawn, whereby the whole Sett of Leaves is kept together. (Priolkar, 39) Between 1706 and 1711, Ziegenbalg wrote a number of letters to the SPCK ask- ing for a printing press: We heartily wish to be supplied with a Malabarick and a Portuguese printing press to save the expensive charges of getting such books transcribed as are necessary for carrying on this work. I have hitherto employed Six Malabarick writers in my house . . . \u2019Tis true those books which we get from the Malabar heathens must be entirely transcribed; or brought up for ready money, if people will part with them; but such as lay down the grounds of our holy religion, and are to be dispersed among the heathens, must be carefully printed off for this design. (Priolkar, 40) In a remarkably shrewd move, Ziegenbalg argued that the book\u2019s form and con- tent were indivisible, and the \u2018superior\u2019 technology of printing must be employed to confer an equivalent superiority upon Christian teachings. Convinced by his arguments, the SPCK despatched a press to Ziegenbalg in 1711, with a printer, Jonas Finck. After many vicissitudes the ship arrived, but not Finck, who disap- peared off the Cape of Good Hope after the ship had been waylaid by the French and diverted to Rio de Janeiro. A soldier was found to work the press, and print- ing began in October 1712. The press\u2019s crowning work was Ziegenbalg\u2019s 1715 Tamil translation of the New Testament\u2014the \ufb01rst such translation in any Indian language. The fount bore a close resemblance to the letters in the palm-leaf MSS, while the language used was a version of demotic Tamil spoken in and around Tranquebar. The type had originally been cast at Halle in Germany, but it became necessary to cast smaller founts for the various publications undertaken by Ziegenbalg. A typefoundry was set up in Poryar, the \ufb01rst in India, and this was followed by the establishment of the \ufb01rst modern paper mill in the country in 1715. With these, the Lutheran mission attained a degree of self-suf\ufb01ciency in printing, and was no longer entirely dependent on the long supply chain from Germany. This self- suf\ufb01ciency can be gauged from the press\u2019s high output: 65 titles from 1712 to 1720, 52 more in the next decade, and a total of 338 titles for the 18th century. The mission also received requests from the Dutch in Ceylon to print in Tamil and Sinhalese. A press at Colombo was reportedly set up by Peter Mickelsen, one of the casters of Tranquebar\u2019s types. The \ufb01rst book printed in Ceylon was an octavo Singhalese prayer book produced in 1737\u20138 for the East India Company.","558 | history of the book in the indian subcontinent And what of the Jesuits? In 1717, the controversial and colourful C. G. Beschi arrived in Elakkuricci near Trichinopoly and stayed there for the next three dec- ades. Despite his meddling in local politics and ostentatious habits, he was una- ble to raise suf\ufb01cient resources to take on the well-funded Lutherans and was forced to fall back on palm-leaf MSS. The only weapon in his arsenal was his vastly superior knowledge of Tamil: what ensued was a battle of books\u2014MS versus print, Jesuit versus Lutheran, purity versus contamination\u2014in many ways anticipating the clash between the rival intellectual worlds of MS and print in 19th-century Bengal. Though Beschi poured scorn on his rivals for their imperfect knowledge of Tamil and their \ufb02awed translations of the scriptures, he was \ufb01ghting a losing cause, and soon the Jesuits were in retreat in the region, leaving the \ufb01eld clear for Protestants. After Tranquebar and Colombo, the scene for printing shifted to Madras (now Chennai). In 1726, Benjamin Schultze set up a branch of the SPCK at Vepery, outside Madras. By the middle of the century, it was under the care of Johann Philipp Fabricius. In 1761, the English under Sir Eyre Coote successfully besieged the French at Pondicherry, and the spoils of war included a printing press seized from the French governor\u2019s palace. This press would probably have been used for Jesuit printing, so its loss was a further blow to the Society of Jesus in the region. Coote took the press and its printer to Madras, where Fabri- cius persuaded him to donate the press to the SPCK, on condition that printing orders from Fort St George\u2014the seat of the Madras presidency\u2014would take precedence over mission work. Soon the SPCK acquired its own press: the Eng- lish war booty was returned to Fort St George, where it was renamed the Gov- ernment Press, while the Vepery Press now became the SPCK Press. It was on this press that Fabricius printed his famous Tamil\u2013English dictionary in 1779. In 1793 the Press produced a Tamil translation of The Pilgrim\u2019s Progress: this was a bilingual edition, with English on the left and Tamil on the right side of every page. In many ways the fortunes of the Pondicherry press were symbolic of the momentous changes taking place in mid-18th-century India. Coote\u2019s military action dealt a decisive blow to French colonial aspirations, leaving the way clear for the British. Just four years earlier, in 1757, Robert Clive had won a historic battle at Plassey in Bengal, defeating the last independent nawab of Bengal, and paving the way for the territorial expansion of the East India Company in India. As centres of administration were set up in the three presidencies of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, print became an indispensable component of the engine of colonization. The missionaries, who had thus far championed print, suddenly found their efforts being swiftly outstripped by government printing. 3 Printing in the east: Serampore and Calcutta If religion was behind the coming of print to west and south India, the initial impulse in Bengal was almost entirely political. In 1778 Nathaniel Brassey","history of the book in the indian subcontinent | 559 The \ufb01rst British use of Bengali founts: N. B. Halhed, A Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778). The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (EE 48 Jur., title page) Halhed, a civil servant of the East India Company, produced the \ufb01rst printed book in the Bengali language and script, A Grammar of the Bengal Language. Initially, William Bolts was asked to design the Bengali type, but his design was not to Halhed\u2019s liking. The task was then entrusted to Charles Wilkins, also a civil servant with the Company, who cast the type with the help of Panc\u0101nan Karmak\u0101r, a smith, and Joseph Shepherd, a seal- and gem-cutter. The printing was carried out on a press at Hooghly, possibly owned by one John Andrews. The Company itself paid for the printing, in a somewhat miserly manner. By the end of 1800, there were as many as 40 printers working in Calcutta (now Kolkata). This was unprecedented not just in India, but in the whole of south Asia. Although presses in Madras remained mainly in government hands, Calcutta saw a large number of private entrepreneurs open printing of\ufb01ces. The almost overnight rise of the periodical press is also remarkable. In the period 1780\u201390, seventeen weekly and six monthly periodicals were launched in Calcutta; almost all of the city\u2019s printers were connected with the periodical press at some time. Chief among them was James Augustus Hicky, who was the editor of the first newspaper in India, the weekly English- language Bengal Gazette (1780), and who went to jail for his fearless\u2014and sometimes scurrilous\u2014criticism of the governing council. As far as book pub- lishing was concerned, Andrews\u2019s press had travelled to Calcutta via Malda and had acquired a new name\u2014the Honourable Company\u2019s Press\u2014and was now run by Charles Wilkins. This press accounted for a third of all books printed in Calcutta before 1800, including Asiatick Researches, the journal of the newly established Asiatic Society. Books and periodicals were, however, not","560 | history of the book in the indian subcontinent the chief sources of revenue for the Calcutta printing trade. stationery, legal and mercantile forms, handbills, etc. formed the staple of their survival, a fur- ther sign that the trade was coming of age. The most characteristic product of the trade was the almanac, with three different calendars: Muslim, Hindu, and Christian. In fact, the trade in almanacs still continues to be a lucrative sector of the Bengali book trade. Materials and equipment\u2014type, paper, ink, and the presses\u2014had to be imported from Europe. Some type was manufactured locally, notably by Daniel Stuart and Joseph Cooper, who set up a foundry for their Chronicle Press. Along with Bengali, this foundry also made Devnagari and nasta\u2018l\u012bq types, the latter being used for printing in Persian. The availability of paper continued to be a problem. Good-quality paper had to be imported from Britain, while Patna sup- plied the local handmade variety, which was considerably cheaper. There were several unsuccessful attempts to set up paper mills in Calcutta during this period. John Borthwick Gilchrist, principal of Fort William College in Calcutta and founder of the Hindustanee Press, was not alone in complaining bitterly about the unscrupulous and fraudulent behaviour of printers, referring to \u2018typo- graphical quicksands, and whirlpools, on the siren shores of oriental literature\u2019 and deploring the \u2018eternal treacherous behaviour\u2019 of his Bengali assistants (Shaw, Printing, 24\u20135). Two events in 1800 were to have a momentous effect on printing in south and southeast Asia. The \ufb01rst was the establishment in Calcutta of the Fort Wil- liam College to train the British civilians of the East India Company. The second was the establishment of a Baptist mission at Serampore (25 km from Calcutta) by William Carey, an ex-cobbler, who arrived at Calcutta in 1793. His \ufb01rst few years in India were spent in Malda, working for an indigo planter, and learning Bengali and Sanskrit from his munshi (language teacher), R\u0101m R\u0101m Basu. His early attempts to set up a mission in British India failed, as the Company was hostile towards missionary activity. Eventually, Carey was permitted to estab- lish his mission in Danish-controlled Serampore (then known as Fredericksna- gar), where he was joined by two other Baptists, William Ward and Joshua Marshman. In the meantime Carey had acquired a wooden hand press, thanks to the muni\ufb01cence of George Udny, the indigo planter who had supported Carey and his family. The Serampore mission was founded on 10 January 1800. In August that year, a Bengali translation of St Matthew\u2019s Gospel was published by the press. About the same time, Carey joined Fort William College as a teacher of Bengali and Sanskrit, for a salary of Rs. 500. The same mission that had been refused permission by the government now became a partner in training the future elite of the Raj. The efforts of Carey and his assistants soon made the Serampore Mission Press the most important centre of printing in Asia. Panc\u0101nan Karmak\u0101r, the goldsmith trained in type production by Wilkins, was \u2018borrowed\u2019 by Carey from Colebrooke, and then put under virtual house arrest in Serampore. With the","history of the book in the indian subcontinent | 561 help of Panc\u0101nan and his son-in-law Manohar, a typefoundry was set up in March 1800. In its \ufb01rst ten years, the foundry produced type in at least thirteen languages. The printing press was in the immediate charge of Ward, who left detailed accounts of its day-to-day running. In a letter of 1811 he wrote: As you enter, your see your cousin in a small room, dressed in a white jacket, read- ing or writing, and looking over the of\ufb01ce, which is more than 170 ft. long. There you \ufb01nd Indians translating the scriptures into the different tongues and correct- ing the proof-sheets. You observe, laid out in cases, types in Arabic, Persian, Nagari, Telugu, Panjabi, Bengali, Marathi, Chinese, Oriya, Burmese, Kanarese, Greek, Hebrew and English. Mussulmans and Christian Indians are busy composing, correcting, distributing. Next are four men throwing off the scripture sheets in dif- ferent languages, others folding the sheets and delivering them to the large store- room, and six Mussulmans do the binding. Beyond the of\ufb01ce are varied type-casters besides a group of men making ink, and in a spacious open-walled round place, our paper-mill, for we manufacture our own paper. (Koschorke, 59\u201360) Not surprisingly, translations of the Bible accounted for the bulk of the publica- tions. Between 1800 and 1834, the Serampore Press printed bibles in almost 50 languages, 38 of which were translated at Serampore by Carey and his associ- ates. There were altogether 117 editions, of which 25 were in Bengali. It seems that the Press supplied bibles to almost all signi\ufb01cant Baptist missions in the region, from Indonesia in the east to Afghanistan in the west. From the report for 1813, it appears that a Malay bible in roman characters was in preparation, while a \ufb01ve-volume reprint of the entire Bible in Arabic was being undertaken for the lieutenant-governor of Java. The memorandum of 1816 claims that a Chinese Pentateuch was in the press, and that \u2018the new moveable metal type, after many experiments, are a complete success\u2019. The 1820 report records the printing of the New Testament in Pashto, and also the setting up of a paper fac- tory: \u2018After experiments lasting for twelve years, paper equally impervious to the worm with English paper, and of a \ufb01rmer structure, though inferior in colour, is now made of materials [from] the growth of India\u2019 (Grierson, 247). Perhaps even more signi\ufb01cant than the bibles were the Bengali translations of the two great epics R\u0101m\u0101ya\u0158a and Mah\u0101bh\u0101rata. These were published dur- ing 1802\u20133, and marked the \ufb01rst appearance of the epics in printed form, in any language. The Press also published dictionaries, grammars, dialogues or collo- quies, Sanskrit phrasebooks, philosophy, Hindu mythological tales, tracts, and the \ufb01rst newspaper in Bengali, the Samachar Durpun. The \ufb01rst number of this twice-weekly, bilingual (Bengali and English) paper was published in May 1818. According to a calculation made by the missionaries themselves, a total of 2,120,000 items of print in 40 languages were issued by the Serampore Press from 1800 to 1832. Along with the mission\u2019s own publications, the Press also \ufb01lled orders from Fort William College. During the \ufb01rst two decades of the 19th century, the col- lege played a crucial role in producing grammars and lexicons in all the major Indian languages, a task carried out by Indian and European scholars.","562 | history of the book in the indian subcontinent Altogether, 38 such works were produced in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Urdu, Braj, Bengali, Marathi, Oriya, Panjabi, Telugu, and Kannada. Another impor- tant category was ancient Indian tales and verses, translated for classroom use into modern languages, especially Urdu and Bengali. The college\u2019s publications programme had a twofold aim: to produce textbooks for its students, and to encourage scholarly editions of books with no immediate pedagogical value. Besides the Mission Press, two other presses printed for the College. The \ufb01rst was the Hindustanee Press of John Gilchrist, which specialized in Persian- Arabic printing, especially in nasta\u2018l\u012bq. The second was the Sanskrit Press of B\u0101bur\u0101m \u015aarmm\u0101, the \ufb01rst Indian to own a press in Bengal (he was succeeded by Lallul\u0101l in 1814\u201315, who was also a teacher at the college). In 1808 the college noted: a printing press has been established by learned Hindoos, furnished with com- plete founts of improved Nagree types of different sizes, for the printing of books in the Sunskrit language. This press has been encouraged by the College to under- take an edition of the best Sunskrit dictionaries, and a compilation of the Sunskrit rules of grammar. (Das, Sahibs, 84) The College\u2019s publications did not have much impact beyond the classroom and European circles. This lack was \ufb01lled by the Calcutta School-Book Society (founded in 1817), which began to commission and publish some of the earliest secular school textbooks in Bengali and English. Its establishment coincided with that of the Hindu College in the same year. For more than half a century, the CSBS published hundreds of titles for \u2018cheap or gratuitous supply . . . to schools and seminaries of learning\u2019. Signi\ufb01cantly, the Society\u2019s charter stated that it was not its design \u2018to furnish religious books: a restriction however very far from being meant to preclude the supply of books of moral tendency\u2019 ([Calcutta School Book Society, iii]). From 1821, the Society was assisted by a monthly grant from the government; a few years later it acquired its own press and depository at Lallbazar. In 1823, the Calcutta Christian Tract and Book Society was set up to supply books to missionary-aided vernacular schools. Within a short time it had published a large number of tracts whose press runs often went into \ufb01ve \ufb01gures. A similar role was played by the Christian Vernacular Literature Society. But the man who had the most impact on the textbook trade was the scholar and reformer \u012a\u015bvaracandra Vidy\u0101s\u0101gar. While a teacher at Fort William College, he started the Sanskrit Press in 1847, along with his colleague Madanmohan Tark\u0101la\u0158k\u0101r. Both men produced Bengali primers which became legendary: the former\u2019s two-part Bar\u0158aparicay (1855) and the latter\u2019s \u015ai\u015bu\u015bik\u0174\u0101 (1849). Their popularity can be gauged from the fact that in 1890, the 149th and 152nd editions (respectively) of the two primers were issued. Vidy\u0101s\u0101gar reformed Bengali typography into an alphabet of 12 vowels and 40 consonants and designed the so-called Vidy\u0101s\u0101gar saat or type case, for greater ease of composition. By the middle of the 19th century, printing had spread to Assam, with Baptist missionaries setting up a press there and starting the \ufb01rst Assamese periodical,","history of the book in the indian subcontinent | 563 Aru\u0158oday, in 1846. After a slow beginning, Dhaka exploded into print in the second half of the century, with the Girish Press printing more than 500 titles by 1900. The trade in Bengal had become suf\ufb01ciently large to require biblio- graphical control. James Long, a philologist and ethnographer, compiled three bibliographies of printed works in the 1850s, the \ufb01rst of their kind in India. His Descriptive Catalogue of Bengali Works (1855) contained 1,400 entries on books and periodicals in Bengali. A high proportion of the titles were accounted for under such categories as textbooks, translations, dictionaries, grammars, law books, and religious literature, but the trade in popular books \ufb02ourished as well. This was commonly\u2014and often pejoratively\u2014known as \u2018the Bat-tala trade\u2019, in reference to the north Calcutta location where such books were mostly printed. According to Long, Few Bengali books are sold in European shops. A person may be twenty years in Calcutta, and yet scarcely know that any Bengali books are printed by Bengalis themselves. He must visit the native part of the town and the Chitpoor road, their Pater Noster Row, to gain any information on this point. The native presses are generally in by-lanes with little outside to attract, yet they ply a busy trade. (Ghosh, 118) One of the pioneers of this new literature was Ga\u0158gaki\u015bor Bhatt\u0101ch\u0101rya, consid- ered the \ufb01rst Bengali printer, publisher, bookseller, and newspaper editor. After beginning his life as a compositor at the Mission Press, in 1818 he set up his own Bangal Gezeti Press, and was also responsible for printing the \ufb01rst illustrated book in Bengal, Bh\u0101ratcandra\u2019s Annad\u0101mangal, in 1816. Tales, light verses, and farces were common examples of Bat-tala printing, and Long recorded with disapproval that many of these dealt with erotic themes, \u2018equal to the worst of the French school\u2019 (Ghosh, 87). Long\u2019s reservations not- withstanding, the Bat-tala trade was thoroughly indigenous, unmediated by missionary or reformist values. Yet, it was not until the mid-century that the Bat-tala trade assumed a truly commercial character. In 1857, Long listed 46 presses in the area\u2014along the Garanhata, Ahiritola, Chitpur, and Barabazar roads\u2014which printed a wide range of genres such as almanacs, mythological literature, farces, songs, medical texts, and typographically distinct Muslim- Bengali works. This last category is particularly remarkable for the way in which it retained some of the protocols of the MS book. In fact, many Bat-tala produc- tions show a divided commitment to MS and printed forms of the book, espe- cially in the disposition of the title-page, whose paratextual excess seemed to signal some kind of confusion about proprietorship, authority, and entailment. Although the production values of Bat-tala literature often left a lot to be desired, there is no doubting the energy and vitality of its genres. Bat-tala pub- lications consciously distanced themselves from the moralizing and reformist agenda of print, and dealt unabashedly in subgenres such as erotica, scandals, current events, doggerel, and songs. These proved so irksome to the reformist lobby that they pushed for and, in 1856, succeeded in having an Act passed to","564 | history of the book in the indian subcontinent prevent the public sale or display of obscene books and pictures. Shortly after- wards, Long reported with some satisfaction that three people had been arrested for selling an obscene book of songs by D\u0101\u015barathi Roy, and that 30,000 copies of the book had been sold at the price of four annas. The Supreme Court imposed a \ufb01ne of Rs. 1,300 upon the vendors, then a considerable sum. This post-publica- tion censorship was in fact the \ufb01rst of a number of of\ufb01cial measures to impose some kind of restriction on print\u2014an initiative that would gain urgency after the failed 1857 uprising by the sepoys and the consequent takeover of India by the British Crown. Matters reached a crisis with the furore over the English translation of D\u012bnabandhu Mitra\u2019s N\u012bl-darpa\u0158a (The Indigo Planting Mirror), a play \ufb01ercely critical of indigo planters. Following a successful libel action by the planters, Long went to jail (for a month) for his role in facilitating the transla- tion. It was therefore not surprising that the Indian Press and Registration of Books Act (1867) mandated that all publications in British India be registered. The Act was a watershed in the history of Indian printing and, in hindsight, an acknowledgement that print had truly become a part of everyday life in India. 4 The other presidencies: Bombay and Madras Printing came to Goa in as early as 1556, but bypassed Bombay (now Mumbai), fewer than 500 miles away. The Marathas of the Peshwa period did not seem interested in printing, although there is some evidence that Bh\u012bmj\u012b P\u0101rekh, a Gujarati trader, set up a press in 1674. After this, there was a hiatus for more than a century until 1780, when Rustom Caresajee printed the Calendar for the Year of Our Lord for 1780, a 34-page publication priced at two rupees. In the last years of the century, the Courier Press was the most important in Bombay. It printed the periodical The Bombay Courier, which was probably started in 1791. An advertisement carried by it in 1797 is thought to be the \ufb01rst in Gujarati characters: its type was cast by a press employee named Jijibh\u0101i Chh\u0101pghar. Robert Drummond, who wrote a Grammar of the Malabar Lan- guage in 1799 and for whom Jijibh\u0101i also cast type, hailed him as an \u2018ingenious artist who, without any other help or information than what he gleaned from Chamber\u2019s Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, succeeded in completing a font of the Guzzeratty types a few years ago\u2019 (Priolkar, 73). The \ufb01rst Maratha characters are likewise thought to have appeared in an advertisement in the Bombay Cou- rier in July 1802. The \ufb01rst Gujarati press proper was established in 1812 by Fer- dunji M\u0101rz\u0101b\u0101n, who used to visit his friend Jijibh\u0101i at the Courier Press, and was inspired by his example to start a printing of\ufb01ce of his own. The \ufb01rst book to be printed by Ferdunji\u2019s press was an almanac, in 1814. As in Bengal, missionaries were quick to appear on the scene. In 1813, although they had been turned away from Calcutta, a group of Americans were allowed by the governor, Sir Evan Nepean, to open a mission in Bombay. A print- ing of\ufb01ce was started in 1816 with a single wooden press and a single fount of Marathi type, acquired in Calcutta, with which an eight-page scriptural tract","history of the book in the indian subcontinent | 565 was produced in 1817. Over the next two decades, the press steadily grew in size until it employed a staff of 25. It had its own typefoundry, which could cast type in at least nine languages, a bindery, and a lithographic press. Thanks to the ingenuity of a young apprentice, Thomas Graham, by the mid-1830s the press was able to produce vastly improved Marathi and Gujarati type. The 1840s also saw the beginning of printing in Mangalore, on the west coast. A mission from Basle was established there in 1836; the \ufb01rst newspaper in Kannada came from its press in 1843. At the end of the third and decisive Anglo-Maratha War in 1818, British power replaced the Peshwas in Maharashtra. The new regime established the Bombay Education Society, whose task was to produce vernacular textbooks. With the help of a group of shastris, pandits, and munshis (teachers) the soci- ety produced the \ufb01rst Marathi dictionary (Shabdakosh) in 1824. The availabil- ity of Marathi type was a recurring problem, so a government lithographic printing unit was inaugurated with six machines. Printing by lithography was considerably aided by the discovery in 1826 that the Kurnool stone was particu- larly suitable for lithographic use. For a period, lithography was preferred over typographical printing in government circles, principally owing to the large size and crude contours of the available type. As far as private initiatives were con- cerned, the Parsi trading community took the lead in setting up printing presses. Consequently, a commercial print culture in western India \ufb01rst developed in Gujarati, rather than in Marathi. Veena Naregal has suggested that the slow growth of a Marathi print culture was largely due to high-caste repugnance towards the manual labour associated with the print trade. In the mid-19th century, two men changed the face of Marathi printing. In 1840, Ga\u0158pat K\u016cs\u0158\u0101j\u012b built a wooden hand press and started experimenting with ink-making and type design. In order to print the Hindu almanacs that were his stock-in-trade, he designed and cast improved type in both Marathi and Gujarati. Until Bhau Mah\u0101jan established his press in 1843, K\u016cs\u0158\u0101j\u012b\u2019s press was the sole producer of Marathi books outside government and missionary circles. His \u2018pioneering efforts to publish sacred and \u201cpopular\u201d precolonial texts illustrated many trends that were to characterise the emerging sphere of ver- nacular production\u2019 (Naregal, 185). Bhau Mah\u0101jan\u2019s Prabhakar Press printed progressive periodicals such as the Prabhakar and the Dhumketu. The task of typographical reform, on the other hand, was carried on by J\u0101vj\u012b D\u0101d\u0101j\u012b, who had started his career by working at the American Mission Press, and later joined the staff of the Indu-Prakash Press. In 1864 he opened a small typefoun- dry, and he established the Nirnaya-Sagara Press in 1869. Along with his friend Ranoj\u012b R\u0101oj\u012b Aru, he set a very high standard for Marathi, Gujarati, and San- skrit typography. In keeping with the two other presidencies, Madras became the undisputed centre of 19th-century print culture, although mention must also be made of Maharaja Serfoji II of Tanjore. In his palace in 1805, he set up a press that pro- duced eight books in Marathi and Sanskrit. But it was in Madras that a \u2018nexus","566 | history of the book in the indian subcontinent between pundits, printing and public patronage was cemented with the estab- lishment of the College of Fort St George in 1812\u2019 (Blackburn, 74). This was fol- lowed by the establishment of the Madras School Book Society in 1820, to cater for students in missionary-run schools. The SPCK\u2019s Vepery Press continued to be active: along with the Madras Male Asylum Press (established in 1789), it accounted for a major share of periodical printing. At the suggestion of the Vepery Press, the government decided to train local goldsmiths in cutting type. This resulted in the creation of the \ufb01rst Telugu type in India. However, advances in Telugu printing were hampered by confusion over competing renderings: the Telugu used by missionaries, for example, was a mishmash of dialects and styles, to which Hindu scholars paid no attention. This confusion delayed the advent of print in the language by almost half a century. The founding of the College of Fort St George in 1812 marked the entry of the pundits into the world of printing, and initiated a fascinating encounter between the worlds of print and MS. The publishing history of the Tamil epic Tirukkur\u0101l in 1812, for instance, shows how the MS book\u2019s editorial and textual protocols were being exploited to arrive at an authentic version for print. With the pun- dits drafted into teaching at the college, in its \ufb01rst two decades the press pro- duced 27 books, mostly in Tamil and Telugu. More importantly, teachers acquired a familiarity with print that would later be employed in a radical reshaping of literary culture. From the third decade of the century, a number of \u2018pundit-presses\u2019 began to appear, such as the Kalvi Vilakkam, founded by the Aiyar brothers in 1834, Tiru Venkatacala Mut\u0101liy\u0101r\u2019s Sarasvati Press, and the Vidya-anubalana-yantra-sala or the Preservation of Knowledge Press of the famous Jaffna Tamil scholar \u0100rumaka N\u0101valar, a remnant of which still exists. Many of these presses played an important role in shaping public opinion, espe- cially during the anti-missionary campaigns of the 1840s. Another important development of the period was the rise of journalism in several languages\u2014 European and Indian\u2014representing almost all shades of political and social opinion. By the middle of the century, printing in Tamil had encompassed almost all major genres, and a standardized orthography was more or less in place. In 1862, the Revd Miron Winslow of the American Mission Press published his landmark Tamil\u2013English dictionary; three years later, the missionary John Mur- doch produced the \ufb01rst bibliography of Tamil printed books. The founts for the dictionary, cut by P. R. Hunt, were a high water mark of Tamil typography. 5 Printing in north India When printing began to spread westward in the \ufb01rst third of the 19th century, it took the lithographic rather than the typographic route. Lithography was par- ticularly suitable for printing in Urdu and Persian, as it was an inexpensive technology, and \u2018reproduced the elegant hand of calligraphers, who in turn found cheap employment\u2019 (Orsini, \u2018Detective Novels\u2019, 437). The problems asso- ciated with the development of Indian types could be bypassed through the new","history of the book in the indian subcontinent | 567 technology of lithography, and by mid-century, Lucknow and Kanpur became the principal centres of lithographic printing in all of South Asia. That is not to say that there was no typography in Hindi publishing. Printing in Devanagari (the script in which Hindi and many Indian languages is written) dates back to the 17th century, but its appearances were sporadic until the Ser- ampore missionaries began to use Devanagari type to print in a large range of north Indian languages and dialects. Of the 2,120,000 volumes issued from the press in its \ufb01rst three decades, as many as 65,000 were printed in Devanagari. There was a good deal of printing in Devanagari at Bombay as well, but primarily in Marathi and Sanskrit. In Europe too, the rise of Indian studies led to the cast- ing of high-quality Devanagari founts, especially in Germany, where Schlegel and Bopp produced editions of the Bhagavadg\u012bt\u0101 and the Hitopade\u015ba in the 1820s. Thanks to the re\ufb01nements in Devanagari, printers in Calcutta and Benares (Varanasi) were able print books in the Nepali language as well. Printing came to Lucknow in 1817 when the Matba-i Sultani, or Royal Press, was established; but printing did not begin in earnest until the coming of lithog- raphy in 1830. That year, Henry Archer, superintendent of the Asiatic Litho- graphic Company in Kanpur, was invited to set up a press in Lucknow. In the beginning, the trade was not commercial, in the sense that books were usually published to an author\u2019s or a patron\u2019s order. Nevertheless, a score or so of litho- graphic presses were operating in the city by the 1840s, chief among which was Mu\u0174\u017eaf\u00e1 Kh\u0101n\u2019s Mustafai Press, which published expensive books as well as popular genres such as masnavis and qissas. The quissas\u2014moral tales, short anecdotes, fables\u2014were \ufb01rst published at Fort William College in Calcutta for pedagogical purposes, but soon became a staple of commercial publishing in Persian and Urdu. A particularly popular title was the Tuti n\u0101m\u0101 (Tales of a Parrot) of which at least \ufb01fteen different editions appeared in Calcutta, Bom- bay, Madras, Kanpur, Lucknow, and Delhi between 1804 and 1883. Largely owing to the activities of schoolbook societies and missionaries, printing also spread to nearby towns and cantonments such as Agra, Allahabad, Meerut, and Lahore. A schoolbook society for the North-Western Provinces, with its headquarters at Agra, was set up in 1838. The same year saw the estab- lishment of a missionary schoolbook society in Benares. Two major blows were subsequently dealt to printing at Lucknow, however. In 1849 the Nawab Wajid Ali Shah imposed a temporary ban on printing, as a result of which many \ufb01rms shifted to Kanpur. This was followed by the sepoy uprising in 1857, leading to further uncertainty in the trade. The one bene\ufb01ciary of this state of affairs was Nawal Kishore Bhargava of Agra, who in 1858 set up the Nawal Kishore Press at Lucknow, in a \ufb01eld virtually devoid of competition. Munshi Nawal Kishore had started his career as an Urdu journalist and had learnt presswork while employed at the Kohinoor Press of Lahore. In Lucknow, he started by printing in Urdu, but soon became the pioneer of Hindi printing in the city. More crucially, he enjoyed English patronage, which meant that the Press received the lion\u2019s share of government custom, especially extremely lucrative textbook","","","","","","","","","","","","","","",""]