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!]

Illustrated here: one further example of hand-talking on my part, the live cherry blossom installed in the theatre for the day, and a farewell view of the Black Diamond.

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...

Rear pastedown: lifted.

Rear pastedown: lifting.

Bound in the same functional fashion, most likely by the same hands, as his extensive working library of Persian manuscripts (dispersed before my time, alas). Clock the flap in the image above, which is where it ought to be for a book read right to left!

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...