Acknowledgements
The Social Codicology workshop would not have been possible without the financial support and the organizational assistance of the staff at NIMAR, the International Office of Freie Universität Berlin, and the Centre Jacques Berque in Rabat. I furthermore wish to thank Adrien Delmas, the Sbīhī Library in Salé, Mohammed Krombi, and the Moroccan embassy in Berlin. The open access costs were generously sponsored by the Oosters Instituut, Freie Universität Berlin, and NIMAR. I am also indebted to Konrad Hirschler and Ulrike Freitag for covering the editing costs of this volume from their budgets.
I would like to especially thank Léon Buskens, for suggesting that we organize a series of annual social codicology workshops, and for plotting the first inaugural one in Rabat during our dinners in Dar es-Salam, Berlin, and Leiden. He left no stone unturned to host us with gracious hospitality in Rabat, and I look forward to many more conversations and social codicology workshops in the future. Moreover, I would like to thank my brilliant copy editor, Ingrid Austveg Evans, as well as the always optimistic and wonderful Abdurraouf Oueslati and Amatallah Aqlan from Brill. I thank Annabel, Said, Anwar, Zahir, Sarah Holz, and Ingrid for their help with translating the social codicology abstracts, as well as the reviewers for their details and helpful comments and suggestions.
Finally, I would like to thank my students, the next generation of critical thinkers, for essentially deconstructing my course, Islamic Book Culture: from Manuscript to MacBook, and questioning it without exception. Our discussions inside and outside the classroom have been instrumental in conceptualizing this volume. It has been a privilege to learn from you. You give me hope for the future.