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I will first introduce my topic of study talking if it is introductory slides, so please bear with me for a moment.

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Images with real manuscripts and bags and boxes will certainly follow.

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A prerequisite for studies in Persian manuscripts is, of course, the preservation of these manuscripts, their continued safekeeping and accessibility.

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This sometimes is a difficult balancing act. Use poses risks and even careful use may cause damage.

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Yet without consultation and being physical, these manuscripts would lose part of their value.

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In the film collections, a wonderful team of conservators takes care of the manuscripts and they make their use possible,

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whether in exhibitions for digitisation or physical consultation in the reading room.

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You've probably watched the video about the conservation of luxury manuscripts of the HARRISTON and seen a glimpse of what that work entailed.

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A prerequisite for conservation is a thorough understanding of the materials and techniques with which these composite objects are made.

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Without that foundational knowledge of an object, one cannot make an informed conservation decision.

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And as it turns out, we cannot learn many of these things during our formal training,

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especially not when we are working with manuscript collections from the Middle East, Asia or South Asia.

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Most of us who work in Western institutions were trained in conservation programmes that

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focussed on Western books that have different characteristics and different conservation needs.

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It is absolutely fair to say that most of what I know I have actually learnt from the

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books themselves and often when confronted with material issues that I don't understand,

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I do turn to the books to see what can be learnt.

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Manuscripts are incredibly rich material informants, we can ask questions such as,

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why was this manuscript made like this and why were these materials used this way?

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We get insight into the social and social cultural context and we can, for example,

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figure out which materials in a certain period and region were readily available or perhaps cause and which were in fashion.

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The objects teach us how craftsmanship developed, how technological knowledge spread, and also what was valued and copied in other cultures.

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And that is why it is important to preserve historic collections,

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retaining as much of their physical features and material characteristics as possible,

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including traces of use, and it also explains why I felt I needed to study the Persian manuscript collection,

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the book in libraries,

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although my work with the Islamic collection in the Leiden University library has taught me a great deal about this book making tradition,

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the collection is relatively has relatively few Persian bindings, especially lacquered ones.

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And most of these have, over the course of their lives, been repaired.

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The behaviour of the Harvey Fellowship actually offered two wonderful possibilities.

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First, the access to a large body of Persian bindings.

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And second, an opportunity to exchange experiences directly with the colleagues of the Conservation Department.

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Lockable findings have been studied for their artistic value, and there are a few studies addressing the making of the painted and lacquered layers.

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The damages that can occur to the lacquer surface is one of the conservators worries,

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as you can see here, my specific concern was the construction of bindings with lacquered boards.

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Here is an example of a specimen with damages to the joints previously repaired with pressure sensitive tape,

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but in other examples, you would be able to see repair repairs of the joints with strips of leather or paper, for example.

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In a joint, repairs often obscure the original construction,

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but certainly also indicate that the board attachment with this type of finding is particularly vulnerable.

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And in order to stabilise such a structure, a conservator needs to know what needs to be preserved.

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You may wonder now why this is even a topic of study. Do we not already know how these findings are constructed?

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But to show you what the gaps in our understanding are,

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I will first take you quickly through the making of a full leather bookbinding, the type that preceded the leather binding.

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So it all starts with the selling of the gathering's,

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usually with the link stitch and then the textbook spine is lined traditionally with leather or a piece of textile.

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The structures then strengthened with the NBN slowing. Tie downs are taken over with a core and through each gathering,

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and despite making it a coherent structure onto which the secondary and then so often in the SHIVRAM pattern.

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A typical technique in the Islamic world to construct a binding is a two piece technique.

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Each board was covered in a separate piece of leather, individually applied to the text block, overlapping on the spine.

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Then the joint structure is secured by using this fine line extension, which is pasted onto the inside of the board.

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And the interior would then be finished with a W or often a decorative paper or perhaps an ornament, that piece of leather.

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With liquor boards, we find a complication.

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Even though the text block construction is the same and the letter boards are prepared in a similar way with a

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piece of leather attached to one side to be pasted onto the spine for accurate positioning and to flexible joint.

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However, the joints needed a different treatment because the interior of a board is often beautifully decorated with a painting.

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And obviously the Bhupinder did not want to paint this fine line extension on top of this.

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The material was therefore cut away. Leaving the board attachments without this additional strength, Senator.

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Well, it seems that practical and sensible Bookbinder would have chosen an alternative solution, but the evidence of how this car's.

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Perhaps not really surprising, it appeared that many of the numerous findings in the book also had been repaired or even been rebound

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over the course of history so that they no longer offer clues as to their original construction.

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Another interesting observation was that a large group of these findings collected by the brothers,

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William and Ghostly, are actually bindings of much older manuscripts,

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some of them using a kind of prefab boards, and I quote, painted it with considerable neatness and admirably varnished.

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Purchased in Isfahan, and we can read, as we can read in their travel accounts or Williams travel accounts,

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this group of Lekic boards can be recognised by their similar designs, even though the colour schemes could very.

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The resulting bindings are hybrid structures using Western spine constructions and white leather in a joint.

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A small number of manuscripts, however, did survive with a traditional chequerboard attachment undisturbed.

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They not only show us that their spines could be decorated so that gold is painted

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and because that is something that is not usually found in Islamic bookbinding.

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So that was an interesting point.

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But we can indeed also see that the bookbinding had an alternative approach to the board attachment and the inner joint finishing.

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Another interesting find was that many items, especially in the collection, were kept in protective bags, and here are some examples.

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These banks have a protective function, but they were probably also added out of regard to underline the value of these manuscript's.

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Now, with these specific banks, it's difficult to determine where and when they were made exactly,

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and they all seem to originate from the 19th century and appear to be modelled on historic examples.

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And we do have iconographic evidence of such banks, for example, this painting in a manuscript dating to 15 52.

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The scalp flap and white dog edge of the larger bag does not match the appearance of the book or the way in which manuscripts are usually depicted.

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And I think Jake Benson for pointing that out to me when we talked about this topic several years ago.

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And to exemplify what I mean with that, I've added a snapshot from the book Persian Painting the art of the Book and Portraiture,

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because here in this detail, you can actually see that there's a book depicted on the left side.

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It has you can see the white of the textbook edges and then on the right side, that must be the back in which this manuscript was kept.

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And interestingly, you can see that the upper corners in that depiction are open, whereas the lower corners are closed and these open corners.

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Hinting at the fact that this actually has an envelope flap that can be opened.

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And in these to slightly older miniatures, too, we can see a few items that I believe to be a bag.

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You ornamentation again of these items does not correspond with decorative patterns of tools, bindings, it should be noted, though,

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that these banks could, of course, also have been used for items other than manuscripts such as scribe's utensils or notebooks.

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How exactly to making use of enclosure's developed in the following centuries?

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It's very hard to say with our current knowledge and there is not much documentary evidence to go on.

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The pictorial evidence is important,

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we will also have to study the original artefacts and the examples in the bottling collection stimulated my interest in this topic.

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In the Leyden collection,

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we only have one such bag made of the striped silk that was used to protect this lot two volume Koran dating to the early 17th century.

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Sadly, only a few textile banks seem to have survived, though examples may be invisible when they have not been described in catalogues.

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From later centuries, many more enclosures have survived, such as pouches, satchels and slip cases.

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And for me, or one of my most recent projects, I focussed on the slipcase, the type of enclosure that is mostly associated with the Ottoman world.

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And it turns into a collaborative project together with David Plummer and Paul Hepworth.

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Apart from having numerous examples of this type of traditional enclosure, we also have further pictorial evidence,

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for example, this wonderful engraving in the tabloids, Unicol The Ottoman.

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In the pile of manuscripts, we can also clearly distinguish slip cases and we can also make out that they have a manuscript release,

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Trepp, as we've called this component, when describing slipcase in detail.

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These tracks help lifting and retrieving the manuscripts from the slipcase,

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and their depiction accords with the actual examples, which are usually textile ribbons.

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Edward William Lang, the 19th century pioneering Egyptologist,

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also provided a sketch that included a slipcase and interestingly, we can see that in his drawing,

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the slipcase does not have a manuscript release, Trepp, but something that we David Plummer perhaps than I have called an insert slap.

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Really strap.

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This small strip of leather does not help to retrieve the book from the case, but only gives access to the book by opening the insert flap.

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This type is found frequently on the 19th century slipcase.

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It is clear from the elementary evidence and our first exploration in various connexions that slip cases were made in very large quantities.

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We still do not know whether these enclosures were made in bookbinding workshops or specialised natalya's in or outside the library's.

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And similar questions concerning the other type of enclosures, the Satchel's and banks are still waiting to be addressed.

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Concluding, I'd like to say that the study of these material details not only leads to an improved conservation approach,

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it also leads to a better understanding in the context in which of the context in which manuscripts were made and used.

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And that may be valuable even to a wider audience than manuscript scholars.

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It surely is important that elections such as those in the Bucheon are and remain accessible not only digitally but physically as well,

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and the Baha'i Fellowship offered a wonderful opportunity to make use of that accessibility.

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Thank you.