I will first introduce my topic of study talking if it is introductory slides, so please bear with me for a moment.
Images with real manuscripts and bags and boxes will certainly follow.
A prerequisite for studies in Persian manuscripts is, of course, the preservation of these manuscripts, their continued safekeeping and accessibility.
This sometimes is a difficult balancing act. Use poses risks and even careful use may cause damage.
Yet without consultation and being physical, these manuscripts would lose part of their value.
In the film collections, a wonderful team of conservators takes care of the manuscripts and they make their use possible,
whether in exhibitions for digitisation or physical consultation in the reading room.
You've probably watched the video about the conservation of luxury manuscripts of the HARRISTON and seen a glimpse of what that work entailed.
A prerequisite for conservation is a thorough understanding of the materials and techniques with which these composite objects are made.
Without that foundational knowledge of an object, one cannot make an informed conservation decision.
And as it turns out, we cannot learn many of these things during our formal training,
especially not when we are working with manuscript collections from the Middle East, Asia or South Asia.
Most of us who work in Western institutions were trained in conservation programmes that
focussed on Western books that have different characteristics and different conservation needs.
It is absolutely fair to say that most of what I know I have actually learnt from the
books themselves and often when confronted with material issues that I don't understand,
I do turn to the books to see what can be learnt.
Manuscripts are incredibly rich material informants, we can ask questions such as,
why was this manuscript made like this and why were these materials used this way?
We get insight into the social and social cultural context and we can, for example,
figure out which materials in a certain period and region were readily available or perhaps cause and which were in fashion.
The objects teach us how craftsmanship developed, how technological knowledge spread, and also what was valued and copied in other cultures.
And that is why it is important to preserve historic collections,
retaining as much of their physical features and material characteristics as possible,
including traces of use, and it also explains why I felt I needed to study the Persian manuscript collection,
the book in libraries,
although my work with the Islamic collection in the Leiden University library has taught me a great deal about this book making tradition,
the collection is relatively has relatively few Persian bindings, especially lacquered ones.
And most of these have, over the course of their lives, been repaired.
The behaviour of the Harvey Fellowship actually offered two wonderful possibilities.
First, the access to a large body of Persian bindings.
And second, an opportunity to exchange experiences directly with the colleagues of the Conservation Department.
Lockable findings have been studied for their artistic value, and there are a few studies addressing the making of the painted and lacquered layers.
The damages that can occur to the lacquer surface is one of the conservators worries,
as you can see here, my specific concern was the construction of bindings with lacquered boards.
Here is an example of a specimen with damages to the joints previously repaired with pressure sensitive tape,
but in other examples, you would be able to see repair repairs of the joints with strips of leather or paper, for example.
In a joint, repairs often obscure the original construction,
but certainly also indicate that the board attachment with this type of finding is particularly vulnerable.
And in order to stabilise such a structure, a conservator needs to know what needs to be preserved.
You may wonder now why this is even a topic of study. Do we not already know how these findings are constructed?
But to show you what the gaps in our understanding are,
I will first take you quickly through the making of a full leather bookbinding, the type that preceded the leather binding.
So it all starts with the selling of the gathering's,
usually with the link stitch and then the textbook spine is lined traditionally with leather or a piece of textile.
The structures then strengthened with the NBN slowing. Tie downs are taken over with a core and through each gathering,
and despite making it a coherent structure onto which the secondary and then so often in the SHIVRAM pattern.
A typical technique in the Islamic world to construct a binding is a two piece technique.
Each board was covered in a separate piece of leather, individually applied to the text block, overlapping on the spine.
Then the joint structure is secured by using this fine line extension, which is pasted onto the inside of the board.
And the interior would then be finished with a W or often a decorative paper or perhaps an ornament, that piece of leather.
With liquor boards, we find a complication.
Even though the text block construction is the same and the letter boards are prepared in a similar way with a
piece of leather attached to one side to be pasted onto the spine for accurate positioning and to flexible joint.
However, the joints needed a different treatment because the interior of a board is often beautifully decorated with a painting.
And obviously the Bhupinder did not want to paint this fine line extension on top of this.
The material was therefore cut away. Leaving the board attachments without this additional strength, Senator.
Well, it seems that practical and sensible Bookbinder would have chosen an alternative solution, but the evidence of how this car's.
Perhaps not really surprising, it appeared that many of the numerous findings in the book also had been repaired or even been rebound
over the course of history so that they no longer offer clues as to their original construction.
Another interesting observation was that a large group of these findings collected by the brothers,
William and Ghostly, are actually bindings of much older manuscripts,
some of them using a kind of prefab boards, and I quote, painted it with considerable neatness and admirably varnished.
Purchased in Isfahan, and we can read, as we can read in their travel accounts or Williams travel accounts,
this group of Lekic boards can be recognised by their similar designs, even though the colour schemes could very.
The resulting bindings are hybrid structures using Western spine constructions and white leather in a joint.
A small number of manuscripts, however, did survive with a traditional chequerboard attachment undisturbed.
They not only show us that their spines could be decorated so that gold is painted
and because that is something that is not usually found in Islamic bookbinding.
So that was an interesting point.
But we can indeed also see that the bookbinding had an alternative approach to the board attachment and the inner joint finishing.
Another interesting find was that many items, especially in the collection, were kept in protective bags, and here are some examples.
These banks have a protective function, but they were probably also added out of regard to underline the value of these manuscript's.
Now, with these specific banks, it's difficult to determine where and when they were made exactly,
and they all seem to originate from the 19th century and appear to be modelled on historic examples.
And we do have iconographic evidence of such banks, for example, this painting in a manuscript dating to 15 52.
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.
And I think Jake Benson for pointing that out to me when we talked about this topic several years ago.
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,
because here in this detail, you can actually see that there's a book depicted on the left side.
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.
And interestingly, you can see that the upper corners in that depiction are open, whereas the lower corners are closed and these open corners.
Hinting at the fact that this actually has an envelope flap that can be opened.
And in these to slightly older miniatures, too, we can see a few items that I believe to be a bag.
You ornamentation again of these items does not correspond with decorative patterns of tools, bindings, it should be noted, though,
that these banks could, of course, also have been used for items other than manuscripts such as scribe's utensils or notebooks.
How exactly to making use of enclosure's developed in the following centuries?
It's very hard to say with our current knowledge and there is not much documentary evidence to go on.
The pictorial evidence is important,
we will also have to study the original artefacts and the examples in the bottling collection stimulated my interest in this topic.
In the Leyden collection,
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.
Sadly, only a few textile banks seem to have survived, though examples may be invisible when they have not been described in catalogues.
From later centuries, many more enclosures have survived, such as pouches, satchels and slip cases.
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.
And it turns into a collaborative project together with David Plummer and Paul Hepworth.
Apart from having numerous examples of this type of traditional enclosure, we also have further pictorial evidence,
for example, this wonderful engraving in the tabloids, Unicol The Ottoman.
In the pile of manuscripts, we can also clearly distinguish slip cases and we can also make out that they have a manuscript release,
Trepp, as we've called this component, when describing slipcase in detail.
These tracks help lifting and retrieving the manuscripts from the slipcase,
and their depiction accords with the actual examples, which are usually textile ribbons.
Edward William Lang, the 19th century pioneering Egyptologist,
also provided a sketch that included a slipcase and interestingly, we can see that in his drawing,
the slipcase does not have a manuscript release, Trepp, but something that we David Plummer perhaps than I have called an insert slap.
Really strap.
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.
This type is found frequently on the 19th century slipcase.
It is clear from the elementary evidence and our first exploration in various connexions that slip cases were made in very large quantities.
We still do not know whether these enclosures were made in bookbinding workshops or specialised natalya's in or outside the library's.
And similar questions concerning the other type of enclosures, the Satchel's and banks are still waiting to be addressed.
Concluding, I'd like to say that the study of these material details not only leads to an improved conservation approach,
it also leads to a better understanding in the context in which of the context in which manuscripts were made and used.
And that may be valuable even to a wider audience than manuscript scholars.
It surely is important that elections such as those in the Bucheon are and remain accessible not only digitally but physically as well,
and the Baha'i Fellowship offered a wonderful opportunity to make use of that accessibility.
Thank you.