The article uses the example of the Islamic holdings of the Columbia University Libraries to explore how at the end of the nineteenth century the emergence of Near East Studies departments at North American universities was accompanied by the establishment of collections of manuscripts in Arabic script. I argue that the analysis of these largely ignored American collections illustrates the interdependence between book collecting, book production, and the book trade between the 1890s and the 1960s, providing new insights into the manuscript-to-print transition. The rare holdings of Columbia University show a marked preference for the acquisition of dated manuscript copies of identified texts, while books printed in Muslim societies beween 1800 and 1914 are underrepresented in the collection.
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Walid A. Saleh, The Formation of the Classical Tafsīr Tradition: The Qurʾān Commentary of al-Thaʿlabī, d. 427/1035 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 207.
See, for example, Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The textbook includes four plates illustrating manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (33, 69, 107, 108, cf. viii), while in the third and final section (157–186), Robinson relies on indirect literary evidence to describe “How historians worked.” Yet he does not connect the indirect literary testimony with the concrete material evidence of any manuscript, and thus his captions do not even offer a date for the illustrated codices.
Marianne Sanua, “Gottheil, Richard James Horatio,” in American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000: http://www.anb.org/articles/08/08-01843.html; cf. Joshua Bloch, “Richard James Horatio Gottheil 1862–1936,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 56 (1936): 472–479. In 1887, Gottheil was appointed to the first endowed chair of Jewish studies in the United States, dedicated to Semitic languages and Rabbinical literature.
William W. Malandra, “Jackson, Abraham Valentine Williams,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, Dec. 2007: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jackson-abraham-valentine-williams; cf. Edward Delavan Perry, “Abraham Valentine Williams Jackson,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 58 (1938): 221–224. Prior to Jackson classes in Sanskrit were offered within the context of Indo-Germanic linguistics. Jackson became adjunct professor of English in 1891, and was promoted to a chair of Indo-Iranian Languages and Literatures in 1895.
Abraham Yohannan, “A Manuscript of Gul ū Naurūz: A Seventeenth Century Persian Romance, in the Library of Columbia University,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 23 (1902): 102–108. The call number (MS pers. X892.8 R86) is not stated in the article. In 1890 Avery and his wife had established the library of Columbia’s Department of Architecture in memory of their son Henry O. Avery (1852–1890). In 1902, Avery donated this formal copy to Columbia Libraries.
Nicholas N. Martinovitch, “Arabic, Persian and Turkish Manuscripts in the Columbia University Library,” Journal of American Oriental Society 49 (1929): 219; Martinovitch excluded from his handlist of 47 codices the Avery manuscript already described by Yohannan, and concluded—wrongly—that the complete collection comprised 48 manuscripts.
Nicholas N. Martinovitch, A Catalogue of Turkish and Persian Manuscripts Belonging to Robert Garrett and Deposited in the Princeton University Library (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1926). The catalog is obsolete for the Garrett manuscripts that Princeton University Library received in 1942. I am indebted to Don Skemer for this information.
Georges ʿAwwād, “Al-Makhṭūṭāt al-ʿarabiyya fī dūr al-kutub al-amrīkiyya,” Sumer 7 (1951): 237–277, esp. 261–264. Since he provides call numbers, he gives for 11 manuscripts with an X call number and 12 Smith-Plimpton manuscripts. For the eight manuscripts with an X call numbers already on Martinovitch’s handlist, ʿAwwād limited himself to additional comments. But in four cases the listed call number does match the described manuscript, and I have not yet been able to solve this matter.
A. Süheyl Ünver, “Islamic Manuscripts in the Columbia Libraries,” Columbia Library Columns 8, no. 3 (May 1959): 34; unfortunately, the five-page sketch (31–35) does not include call numbers.
Nicholas N. Martinovitch, “Crusius or Orosius,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 51 (1931): 171.
Friedrich Rosen, Persien in Wort und Bild: Mit 165 meist ganzseitigen Bildern und einer Landkarte im Anhang (Berlin: Franz Schneider, 1926), 130.
For Arabic chapbooks, see Latif Khayyat, “The Style and Contents of Arabic Folk Material in Chapbooks Found in the New York Public Library,” Fabula 28/1 (1987): 59; and Ulrich Marzolph, “Still the Same Old Jokes: The Continuity of Jocular Tradition in Early Twentieth-Century Egyptian Chapbooks,” in The Other Print Tradition: Essays on Chapbooks, Broadsides, and Related Ephemera, eds. Cathy Lynn and Michael Preston (New York: Garland, 1995): 163–164. The “world of cheap print” in colonial Bengal is described by Anindita Ghosh in Print Areas, eds. Gupta and Chakravorty: 169–196. Twentieth-century Persian and Urdu chapbooks are surveyed in Ulrich Marzolph, Dāstānhā-ye šīrīn: Fünzig persische Volksbüchlein aus der zweiten Hälfte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994); and William L. Hanaway and Mumtaz Nasir, “Chapbook Publishing in Pakistan,” in Studies in Pakistani Popular Culture, eds. W.L. Hanaway and Wilma Heston (Lahore: Sang-e Meel Publications and Lok Virsa Publishing House, 1996): 339–615.
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The article uses the example of the Islamic holdings of the Columbia University Libraries to explore how at the end of the nineteenth century the emergence of Near East Studies departments at North American universities was accompanied by the establishment of collections of manuscripts in Arabic script. I argue that the analysis of these largely ignored American collections illustrates the interdependence between book collecting, book production, and the book trade between the 1890s and the 1960s, providing new insights into the manuscript-to-print transition. The rare holdings of Columbia University show a marked preference for the acquisition of dated manuscript copies of identified texts, while books printed in Muslim societies beween 1800 and 1914 are underrepresented in the collection.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 750 | 83 | 5 |
Full Text Views | 371 | 6 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 183 | 22 | 0 |