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Incunabula

@incunabula

27 Jun

An African intellectual giant - like so many from the colonial era, now largely forgotten: Saïd Cid Kaoui, a Berber born in 1859 in Amizour in Algeria, wrote the first comprehensive Tuareg language dictionary, which was published in 2 folio volumes in Algiers in 1894 & 1900. 1/

Denied the modest funding he'd requested from the French administration, Cid Kaoui published both volumes - over 1300 pages in total - at his own expense. They were not typeset, but painstakingly lithographed from Kaoui's manuscript draft, by the Algiers printer A. Jourdan. 2/

Cid Kaoui died in 1910. Because the dictionary was printed (on poor quality paper) in Algeria, not in France, his magnum opus never had the wide circulation it deserved. But he, and his dictionary, should be remembered today: this is ground zero for Tuareg linguistic studies. 3/

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Incunabula

@incunabula

26 Jun

Perhaps the greatest photographic hoax of the 20th century.

This is a complete and very early set of all five photographs of the Cottingley Fairies, taken by Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, and printed from negatives produced by Edward Gardner around 1920. 1/

Each image is circa 195 x 145 mm, individually mounted on brown card in a brown card folder. 2/

The photos caused a sensation in 1920, fuelled especially by the widespread public fascination with the occult in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, and fooled even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who seems to have gone to his grave believing them to be genuine. 3/

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Incunabula

@incunabula

22 Jun

@BeineckeLibrary

Everything the @BeineckeLibrary does is usually so impressive, but I find their "Global Books" initiative jarring. It feels like they are positioning "Global Books" as an interesting curiosity, as opposed to the main event, Western books and mss. 1/
beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/hi…

Major institutional libraries should be looking at books in the first place as a cross-cultural global phenomenon, of which Western books are just a subset - and in many eras a smaller and much less important subset than books from other geographic regions and cultures. 2/

None of this is criticism in any way of the PhD-candidate student who has been handed a job that should have been done at the very top institutional level.

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Incunabula

@incunabula

20 Jun

The best box-makers in France (which means imo the best box-makers anywhere) are Atelier Moura in Lyon. They're *extremely* slow, very expensive, and their work is incomparable. This box, for a rare 15th century Druze manuscript, has the Druze star inlaid in multicolored morocco.

The Druze largely avoid iconography, but use 5 colors ("5 Limits" خمس حدود khams ḥudūd) as a religious symbol: green, red, yellow, blue, and white. Each color represents a metaphysical power called ḥadd, literally "a limit", a distinction that separate humans from animals. 1/

Each ḥadd is color-coded as follows:
Green for ʻAql "the Universal Mind/Intelligence/Nous",
Red for Nafs "the Universal Soul/Anima mundi",
Yellow for Kalima "the Word/Logos",
Blue for Sabiq "the Potentiality/Cause/Precedent", and
White for Tali "the Future/Effect/Immanence". 2/

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Incunabula

@incunabula

19 Jun

Hebrew palaeography help needed!
I'm trying to better localize and date these two leaves from a large Masoretic bible, and would very much appreciate the opinion of some of the Hebrew paleographers here. They have been tentatively dated to the late 11th or early 12th century. 1/

The leaves were recovered from the binding of a 16th century German book. The angular script has been compared with the Aragonese bible codex, once Valmadonna, MS. 2, which is circa 1100 CE, although that hand has a noticeable leftwards slope which is not present here. 2/

Here is the reverse of both leaves (they are in a double sided frame, so the versos are slightly obscured by the mount).
Any help or thoughts from some of the Hebrew manuscripts experts here would be very much appreciated! 3/

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Incunabula

@incunabula

16 Jun

Jakob Jakobsen's "An Etymological Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland", published in two vols in 1928 & 1932, still stands as the unrivalled source book of information on the origins & usage of the now extinct Norn language. The work first appeared in Danish in 4 vols. 1/

Dr. Jakob (Jákup) Jakobsen, (1864 - 1918), was a Faroese linguist and scholar of literature. His "Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland" was based on Jakobsen's fieldwork in Shetland during 1893-95 and first appeared in Danish in four volumes between 1908 and 1921. 2/

Norn is a North Germanic language once spoken in Orkney & Shetland until the islands were pledged to Scotland by Norway in 1468–69, after which it was gradually replaced by Scots. Norn became extinct in 1850, after the death of Walter Sutherland the last known native speaker. 3/

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