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For as long as I can remember, our Rare Book Room has harboured an obscure collection on shelves 1 and 2 of bay 36. Housed in plain grey boxes marked only with a single pencilled number on the spine, the grouping has always been referred to as the ‘Arabic’ Books, the quotation marks hinting at a certain ambiguity. So, what’s in the 32 mystery boxes?

Well, we’ve long been aware of some highlights in the collection. Back in 2011, we put on an ‘’ exhibition, which looked at the rich scholarly traditions of the Arab and Muslim world, showing how Arabic and Persian texts were esteemed by early Royal Society Fellows such as Robert Boyle and Edmond Halley. This exchange worked both ways: an external scholar we recruited to work on the exhibition picked out the book in box 28, the ‘’ (‘displaying the world’), for its spectacular maps, drawn from a synthesis of European and Ottoman geographical knowledge. We took at the time, including colourful renderings of the globe (picture at top of article) and the celestial hemispheres:

The atlas was produced in Constantinople in 1732 by , the first Muslim printer to operate a press with moveable Arabic type. We knew there were several other Müteferrika books in the collection, as well as three from an even older and more celebrated printing press (more on these later), but – lacking knowledge of Arabic scripts in the Library team – we’d never got round to cataloguing the collection in detail, or delving into its more obscure corners. To remedy this, we brought in an expert from an and turned his notes into online catalogue entries, allowing you to see for the first time. The results, to say the least, were… interesting!

For starters, in the collection (above), a book of Persian poetry published in Bombay in 1862, bears the tantalising subtitle ‘The garden of divine ecstacy’ (sic). Box 2 contains , a compilation by the ‘celebrated Iranian calligrapher and stone carver’ , with equally enticing sections entitled 'The constellation of bright stars' and 'The casket of jewels'.

Books of , and grammar follow, authored by some notable names – respectively, a , a , and the . We then find an written in Bengali, by the noted Sufi poet , a of a much older set of , and on liturgical practices in the , one of which – shown below – was published in Rome in the late sixteenth century, and came to the Royal Society via the library of the Secretary of State for India. I told you this was an eclectic mix!

The books at the higher-numbered end of the collection are mostly the products of the aforementioned Ibrahim Müteferrika press in Constantinople. Printed in the , they were published between 1729 and 1741 and feature a written by Ibrahim himself. There are in total, including the hand-coloured atlas we saw earlier and a ; other topics are mostly of a historical nature, ranging from chronicles of and the to a .

While much work remains to be done on provenance – how and why the various strands of the ‘Arabic’ Books were acquired – this Müteferrika sub-collection obviously arrived in the Royal Society as a set. All the books have a small round ‘Secretary of State for India Library' gilt stamp at the top of their (often crumbling) spines, and plates inside their front boards showing a more-or-less continuous run of shelfmarks from a previous library arrangement. They also contain manuscript letters, in French, which seem to be attempts to summarise the contents of each book – here’s an example from ‘No. 6’, the ‘Gulshan-i khulafa’ book on the :

Saving the best till (almost) last, the celebrated printing press I mentioned earlier is the in Rome, established in 1584 as the first in Europe dedicated to printing books in Arabic typeface. We already had one Medici Press volume in our online catalogue (a  shelved in our ‘Fine Bindings’ collection), and this project has enabled us to bring three more into the light – the books had been itemised in our 1681 catalogue of Norfolk Library books, but never brought forward into the digital age:

• A by Ibn Adjurrum.

• The celebrated ‘’ by , in a sumptuous 1593 edition.

• Also from 1593, the ‘’ of (above), with a subtitle which rather charmingly translates as ‘the jaunt of a man who loves recollecting capital cities, regions, countries, islands, towns and distant lands’.

Bound in lavish contemporary red Morocco featuring repeating ‘mosque’ and other designs inlaid in gold, we’re planning to split these three books off from the rest of the collection and reunite them with the Norfolk Library Euclid in ‘Fine Bindings’.

Medici Press books (L-R): Avicenna, al-Idrisi, Ibn Adjurrum

The last ‘Arabic’ book, and possibly the least – if only because it’s a tiny part of a much larger work and we really don’t know much about it – is an unbound and undated , first published in China in 1084 (though our printed pages are much later, likely nineteenth century). Another language to add to the list, alongside Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Syriac and Bengali, and another reason to think of a new name for this collection, as ‘Arabic’ really doesn’t cover all the bases. We’re still mulling this over – any ideas?

We’d love to open up these volumes to further scrutiny now the records are – this was probably the most challenging cataloguing project I’ve been involved with in the Royal Society Library, so I’m hoping it has useful pay-offs in future. If you squint, you might just be able to see in my earlier ‘shelves’ photo that each box now has an author and title written on the spine, rather than just a number, so they’ll be much easier to retrieve for any readers coming to the Library and requesting them. 

I should also point out that our online catalogue only displays a certain number of fields, which means that our ‘internal’ bibliographic records contain much more detail on provenance, inscriptions, bookplates and other copy-specific information, which we’ll be more than happy to share with interested parties. So please do spread the word to any scholars of your acquaintance who are researching the Arab world, Turkish history, historical bibliography, printing, Maronite rites, or ‘gardens of divine ecstasy’ – all welcome, within reason!