Smyrna to Rhodes to... London? One of those book trade moments earlier this week, when a friend was sorting the kind of miscellaneous box (otherwise mostly of maps) which any bookseller given time and space seems capable of generating. Now filed at home for a quiet day. [Ha!]

Flattered, delighted (and now, relieved) to have presented on kabikaj inscriptions with Abigail Bainbridge at Care & Conservation of Manuscripts 20, in the Queen's Hall at the Royal Danish Library for its final day (and final session).

An English / Malay broadside for a very early (1888) bangsawan performance in Singapore - a local(ish) effort as opposed to a touring company from Bombay.

كبيكج !
Ya Kabikaj!

A project- click the link to learn more:
eepurl.com/i7zXwQ

My List X, short as ever, with four items only:

18th-century folk tales of Nasreddin, Hoca or Molla

Abu Nuwas: wine-soaked Abbasid homoerotic verse

illustrated Urdu satire by Insha' in manuscript

& a cyanotype Qajar calligraphy album

Back to front for perhaps the oddest decorated paper on a binding I've handled. Nothing quite like it traced, though obviously European decorated papers on Ottoman bindings nothing new at all.

Cyanotype Qajar court calligraphy, anyone? A sheet of Kufi letterforms, neatly annotated, from an extremely unusual album compiled about 1899 in Tehran...

Perhaps the only book I've handled where I could suggest within a year when it was bound and where - exchange tables printed in London in 1776, from the library of an Englishman with the East India Company in Bengal who retired to England in 1778. [With his manuscript notes and additions.]

ex libris / seal impression - either way, a sign of ownership left by Layth 'Abd al-Aziz al-Mudhaffer, one of many in the annotated and inscribed group of books I've had the pleasure of cataloging and selling en bloc this summer.

New catalogue!

Urdu & Persian Literature from India: Shahnameh and Shakespeare in Urdu, illustrated Gulistan editions, a merchant's Lucknow private press, and the poetry of Bahadur Shah II, the last Mughal emperor.

www.ngmcburney.com/s/CURRENT-Ur...

“The gravestone of an ordinary citizen could get an article as detailed as a monumental mosque; a thief from an impoverished neighborhood could be profiled with the same attention as an Ottoman sultan.”

www.nybooks.com/online/2023/...

A first post for this place: "London's Oriental Bookshops" - from the March/April 1992 issue of Aramco World, apt in parts and seriously period elsewhere. I was 4 when this came out and there are still plenty of people featured here whom I know.

archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/199202...