18th century | Cotsen Children’s Library

The other day I was perusing the catalog, looking at records in some of Cotsen’s smaller language collections. When I searched for our holdings in the Turkish language, I found something really surprising and rare (okay you caught me, I was looking for blog post material). Cotsen’s Turkish language holdings are relatively small compared with other languages in the collection. But we still hold around 130 items, mostly pamphlets and educational material printed in the 1980’s and 90’s, some earlier 20th Century material, and one copy of Musavver tarih-i hayvanat (Encylopedia of Wild-life) printed in 1892 (Cotsen 102716).

So you might imagine my surprise when I came across this book in the catalog: Tarih ul-Hind il-Garbi; el musemma bi-Haidis-i nev; the first illustrated book printed in the Turkish language and the Muslim world.

Rebound in blind-tooled morocco, probably 20th Century. Cotsen 3134. — Rebound in blind-tooled morocco, probably 20th Century American. The leaves of Cotsen’s copy, probably rearranged when rebound, were collated in 1980 and found to be out of order, especially at the beginning and end of the text block. Since Ottoman Turkish reads right to left, this mistake is understandable. Page citations below follow these reviewed pagination marks when available. *Tarih ul-Hind il-Garbi*… Constantinople: Ibrahim Muteferrika, [1730]. (Cotsen 3134)

Tarih ul-Hind il-Garbi; el musemma bi-Haidis-i nev (The History of the India of the West according to recent discoveries) was printed in 1730 (1142 AH) by Ibrahim Müteferrika in Konstantiniyye (Constantinople, not changed to Istanbul until 1929). Muteferrika is an honorific title meaning “court-steward”, which Ibrahim received between 1705 and 1711. Though his original name remains unknown, he was born in Kolozsvár, Transylvania between 1672 and 1675 as a Unitarian Christian who only later converted to Islam.¹

An Arabic Quran had been printed in Italy as early as 1537. Jewish and Christian millets (minority religious communities within the Ottoman Empire abiding by separate legal courts) had already been operating presses by Müteferrika’s times. But he would prove to be a true reformer; becoming the first Muslim printer and the first to print with movable type in the Ottoman Turkish language (written in a Perso-Arabic script until the Latin alphabet was adopted in 1928).

Agitating against a manuscript culture over eleven hundred years old, Müteferrika lobbied for a state supported printing press in 1726. Facing initial heavy opposition from court appointed calligraphers and a few Ottoman Ulama (religious authorities), he was granted permission to print non-religious and non-legal works the next year. By 1729, Müteferrika issued his first printed work: Kitab-ı Lügat-ı Vankulu (Sihah El-Cevheri), an Arabic and Turkish lexicon. The press ran until 1742, and in just fourteen years he printed seventeen works totaling 13,200 volumes. Most volumes, including Tarih ul-Hind il-Garbi (Müteferrika’s fourth work), were printed in 500-copy editions and only received one printing.

Müteferrika’s publishing choices, some of which he authored himself, demonstrate his diverse knowledge and the interests he developed during his official capacity as an Ottoman diplomat. He published books on history, geography, astronomy, translation, military matters, and polemics for the modernization of the Ottoman state. Tarih ul-Hind il-Garbi, demonstrates his interest in the first three subjects.

Originating from a Turkish manuscript by an unknown author written around 1580, the book opens with a short discussion regarding cosmology, particularly the geocentric vs. heliocentric models of the universe, and then moves on to a general geographical discussion. Though rebound to the back of our copy (in this case meaning the left-hand side), this section includes beautifully executed plates:

Geocentric model of the universe. Fold-out chart [95]

spread[93] — Map of the known world. Spread [93]

spread[94] — Western and Eastern hemispheres. Spread [94]

The bulk of Tarih ul-Hind il-Garbi, however, focuses on Central and South America; the regions’ 16th Century conquest by Spain, their peoples, places, flora, and fauna. This material consists entirely of translations taken piecemeal from five 16th Century Spanish volumes about the conquest of the New World. The content of these five volumes was probably made available to the original Turkish author via Italian translations. Venetian printers, after all, were among the few European traders who had access to Turkish markets for much of the late Medieval and Renaissance eras.²

Possible title pages or chapter headings for these different sections. Leaves [4] and [1] respectively.

Müteferrika’s choice to publish Tarih ul-Hind il-Garbi as his first illustrated book is significant. Given that much of the source material borders on fantasy (many of the original Spanish authors never even visited “New Spain”) the woodcuts executed by an unknown artist working solely from the descriptions in the text are highly imaginative:

Mermen in an altercation with locals. Leaf 49 recto — Mermen in an altercation with locals. Leaf 49, recto.

Waterfowl . . . and some other kind of four legged bird? Leaf 55 verso

Hunting. Perhaps a jaguar in the top right? Leaf 86, recto

The bountiful New World, where women grow from trees. . . Leaf 15, recto

The illustrations appear to be chosen for their wow factor, depicting images of the most unusual and foreign aspects of this unknown land. In the Muslim world, Tarih ul-Hind il-Garbi remained the definitive text about the New World for a culture that would share only limited contact with these far away lands until the 19th Century.

woodcut5verso — Hunting a tree demon? With your trusty lama (who may be under attack by a bird)? Leaf 5, verso

woodcut[89]verso — Two birds with what might be a jobo and banana tree. Leaf [89] verso

In 1745, three years after Müteferrika’s print shop closed for good, he died. Whether or not his press was closed due to political and religious pressure, remains speculative. What is known, however, is that for almost forty years after Müteferrika’s death, Muslim printing died with him. Besides a re-issue of his first work in 1755, printing would not be re-introduced to Constantinople and the Muslim world until 1783.

His scholarly and reformist initiative was hard won and influential. He remains a seminal figure in the history of printing and a figure remembered (but largely unheeded in his time) for his attempts to modernize and revitalize a waning empire. Perhaps Müteferrika read the writing on the wall for an empire that was just beginning to show the technological and political stagnation that would earn it the nickname of the “sick man of Europe”, around a hundred years after Müteferrika’s death.

Untranslated inscriptions. First blank [1]

Watson, William J.. “İbrāhīm Müteferriḳa and Turkish Incunabula”. Journal of the American Oriental Society 88.3 (1968): 435–441. Web… ↩︎
Goodrich, Thomas D.. “Tarihi-i Hind-i Garbi: An Ottoman Book on the New World”. Journal of the American Oriental Society 107.2 (1987): 317–319. Web… ↩︎

In January I followed the controversy that erupted shortly after the publication of Ramin Ganeshram’s A Birthday Cake for George Washington, prompting Scholastic Press to recall it. Illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton, the picture book is a tribute to the slave Hercules, a highly skilled chef belonging to Washington, whom Ganeshram imagines happily baking a cake for his master’s birthday dinner. When it became obvious that Cotsen was not going to be able to acquire a copy of the book through the usual channels, Freeman Ng, author and children’s book blogger, was kind enough to donate his copy to the collection.

After reading A Birthday Cake, I went looking in children’s books of the 1790s for Black characters who were servants in private families (that’s the period when Hercules was working in Philadelphia). If any Black domestic slaves did appear in children’s books, I was curious to see how were their circumstances, both physical and mental, were depicted. Were they presented in sufficient detail for us to see if they were aware of their condition? And how were their relationships with their masters portrayed?

Some quick and clever searching turned up a handful of interesting stories. Perhaps I should not have been surprised at my success. Didn’t Lucy Aikin, the niece of Mrs. Barbauld, boycott sugar as a girl out of anti-slavery sentiment? The lawyer Thomas Day pointedly attacked the institution of slavery in his famous novel for children, The History of Sandford and Merton (1784-1789), whose narrative focuses on the reclamation of the spoiled son of a Jamaica plantation owner. During the same period, one of the first slave narratives, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1772) went through nine editions and was translated into Dutch, German, and Russian.

One unknown writer who tried to argue children out of their lack of respect for the victims of the transatlantic business of slavery, was a Miss Mitchell. Her story “Goodness not confined to Complexion or Form,” was published in Tales of Instruction and Amusement (London: E. Newbery, 1795). Miss Mitchell published another three children’s books under her married name, Mrs. Ives Mitchell Hurry. In the Guardian of Education‘s review of Tales, Mrs. Trimmer noted that Mitchell probably wrote it for her pupils, a Miss Harrison and her younger sister A. B. Harrison. The dedication, which is signed from Copford Hall, the beautiful country manor of the Fiske-Harrison family in Essex, suggests that Mitchell might have been governess to the two daughters of John Haynes Harrison and his wife Sarah Fiske Thomas.

The most interesting character in Hurry Mitchell’s “Goodness not confined to Complexion or Form” is the father Mr. Murray, who owns a plantation in Jamaica. At the beginning of the story, the family has just begun living in England so the children can receive a better education than was possible in the Caribbean. He has also brought over several black servants, including a little girl named Janet, whose parents had been in his service for years. On their deathbeds, Mr. Murray promised them that Janet would have a friend in him for as long as he lived.

Janet is supposed to be more companion than servant, but the children Dorothy, Arnold, and Sophia frequently tease and bully her without provocation. As the children of a Caribbean plantation owner (albeit an “enlightened” one), they regard Janet as nothing more than a house slave. After observing his children’s cruelty to Janet, Mr. Murray decides to punish them for making Janet’s unhappy situation more unbearable. First he asks them to explain how they can justify treating the generous and affectionate Janet so cruelly and then picks holes in their logic. Next he reveals that Janet is of much higher rank than the children as the granddaughter of a king, who lost a war against a neighbor and was sold to European traders (a scenario with a basis in historical fact). Mr. Murray makes Dorothy, Arnold, and Sophia apologize to Janet one by one, before announcing that they must participate in a week-long educational experiment designed to show them a thing or two about about their supposed superiority to Janet..

From our standpoint, many critical issues have been left unaddressed in “Goodness.” Perhaps the most glaring contradiction is Mr. Murray himself, held up as a “moral” Jamaica planter, who champions the interests of slaves when nobly born, but never questions the institution. Then there is Janet herself, more a cipher than a fully realized character. On the one hand, she has been given a girl’s name instead of one for a dog (many Black boys in children’s fiction are named Caesar or Pompey), Hurry Mitchell never lets Janet speak for herself. Everything the reader knows about her comes from Mr. Murray. Janet is easily frightened, reacting more like startled animal than the granddaughter of a king. Yet Ives Hurry Mitchell insists that the reader, like the Murray children, acknowledge Janet’s humanity: there is no question that it is right for Dorothy, Arnold, and Sophia to be made to suffer for their treatment of Janet and that by suffering, they will change for the better. So here is the story…