What's in the grey boxes in Rare Book Room bay 36? A recent cataloguing project has revealed an eclectic mix, as Rupert Baker reports.
For as long as I can remember, our Rare Book Room has harboured an obscure collection on shelves 1 and 2 of bay 36. Housed in plain grey boxes marked only with a single pencilled number on the spine, the grouping has always been referred to as the ‘Arabic’ Books, the quotation marks hinting at a certain ambiguity. So, what’s in the 32 mystery boxes?
Well, we’ve long been aware of some highlights in the collection. Back in 2011, we put on an ‘Arabick roots’ exhibition, which looked at the rich scholarly traditions of the Arab and Muslim world, showing how Arabic and Persian texts were esteemed by early Royal Society Fellows such as Robert Boyle and Edmond Halley. This exchange worked both ways: an external scholar we recruited to work on the exhibition picked out the book in box 28, the ‘Kitab Jihan-numa’ (‘displaying the world’), for its spectacular maps, drawn from a synthesis of European and Ottoman geographical knowledge. We took a few images for our Picture Library at the time, including colourful renderings of the globe (picture at top of article) and the celestial hemispheres:
The atlas was produced in Constantinople in 1732 by Ibrahim Müteferrika, the first Muslim printer to operate a press with moveable Arabic type. We knew there were several other Müteferrika books in the collection, as well as three from an even older and more celebrated printing press (more on these later), but – lacking knowledge of Arabic scripts in the Library team – we’d never got round to cataloguing the collection in detail, or delving into its more obscure corners. To remedy this, we brought in an expert from an antiquarian book dealer and turned his notes into online catalogue entries, allowing you to see the full, eclectic extent of our ‘Arabic’ Books collection for the first time. The results, to say the least, were… interesting!
For starters, item 1 in the collection (above), a book of Persian poetry published in Bombay in 1862, bears the tantalising subtitle ‘The garden of divine ecstacy’ (sic). Box 2 contains more poetry, a compilation by the ‘celebrated Iranian calligrapher and stone carver’ Mirza Mohammad-Ali Sanglakh, with equally enticing sections entitled 'The constellation of bright stars' and 'The casket of jewels'.
Books of Syriac, Arabic and Persian grammar follow, authored by some notable names – respectively, a seventeenth-century Bishop of Tripoli, a director of the East India Company, and the first King of Oudh. We then find an 1867 Calcutta publication on adoption law written in Bengali, two more boxes of Persian verse by the noted Sufi poet Saadi Shirazi, a Persian paraphrase of a much older set of Sanskrit fables, and two books in Syriac on liturgical practices in the Maronite Church, one of which – shown below – was published in Rome in the late sixteenth century, and came to the Royal Society via the library of the Secretary of State for India. I told you this was an eclectic mix!
The books at the higher-numbered end of the collection are mostly the products of the aforementioned Ibrahim Müteferrika press in Constantinople. Printed in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, they were published between 1729 and 1741 and feature a tome on military tactics written by Ibrahim himself. There are eleven Müteferrika books in total, including the hand-coloured atlas we saw earlier and a book on navigation; other topics are mostly of a historical nature, ranging from chronicles of ancient Egypt and the Abbasid Caliphate to a series of works on the history of Turkey.
While much work remains to be done on provenance – how and why the various strands of the ‘Arabic’ Books were acquired – this Müteferrika sub-collection obviously arrived in the Royal Society as a set. All the books have a small round ‘Secretary of State for India Library' gilt stamp at the top of their (often crumbling) spines, and plates inside their front boards showing a more-or-less continuous run of shelfmarks from a previous library arrangement. They also contain manuscript letters, in French, which seem to be attempts to summarise the contents of each book – here’s an example from ‘No. 6’, the ‘Gulshan-i khulafa’ book on the Caliphs:
Saving the best till (almost) last, the celebrated printing press I mentioned earlier is the Medici Oriental Press in Rome, established in 1584 as the first in Europe dedicated to printing books in Arabic typeface. We already had one Medici Press volume in our online catalogue (a 1594 edition of Euclid’s 'Elements' shelved in our ‘Fine Bindings’ collection), and this project has enabled us to bring three more into the light – the books had been itemised in our 1681 catalogue of Norfolk Library books, but never brought forward into the digital age:
- A 1592 work of Arabic grammar by Ibn Adjurrum.
- The celebrated ‘Canon of medicine’ by Avicenna (Ibn Sina), in a sumptuous 1593 edition.
- Also from 1593, the ‘Universal geography’ of Muhammad al-Idrisi (above), with a subtitle which rather charmingly translates as ‘the jaunt of a man who loves recollecting capital cities, regions, countries, islands, towns and distant lands’.
Bound in lavish contemporary red Morocco featuring repeating ‘mosque’ and other designs inlaid in gold, we’re planning to split these three books off from the rest of the collection and reunite them with the Norfolk Library Euclid in ‘Fine Bindings’.
Medici Press books (L-R): Avicenna, al-Idrisi, Ibn Adjurrum
The last ‘Arabic’ book, and possibly the least – if only because it’s a tiny part of a much larger work and we really don’t know much about it – is an unbound and undated fragment of a Chinese history book, first published in China in 1084 (though our printed pages are much later, likely nineteenth century). Another language to add to the list, alongside Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Syriac and Bengali, and another reason to think of a new name for this collection, as ‘Arabic’ really doesn’t cover all the bases. We’re still mulling this over – any ideas?
We’d love to open up these volumes to further scrutiny now the records are online – this was probably the most challenging cataloguing project I’ve been involved with in the Royal Society Library, so I’m hoping it has useful pay-offs in future. If you squint, you might just be able to see in my earlier ‘shelves’ photo that each box now has an author and title written on the spine, rather than just a number, so they’ll be much easier to retrieve for any readers coming to the Library and requesting them.
I should also point out that our online catalogue only displays a certain number of fields, which means that our ‘internal’ bibliographic records contain much more detail on provenance, inscriptions, bookplates and other copy-specific information, which we’ll be more than happy to share with interested parties. So please do spread the word to any scholars of your acquaintance who are researching the Arab world, Turkish history, historical bibliography, printing, Maronite rites, or ‘gardens of divine ecstasy’ – all welcome, within reason!
