Cotsen Children’s Library

When people ask me to name my favorite book in the collection, there’s never have a good answer on the tip of the tongue. But If a heartless desperado were holding my cat for ransom and the conditions for her release were to name to a favorite book, I might be able to do it as long as I stuck to alphabet books.

One of my favorite alphabets is L’alphabet personnife ou Les lettres rendues sensibles par les figures de 25 enfants in action et portant le nom des 25 lettres elles-memes [The Personified Alphabet or the Letters Animated by the Figures of 25 Children in Action Bearing the Names of the Letters]. Cotsen just purchased the first edition of 1801, where it joins a copy of the 1809 third edition.

Its author, the teacher Anne-Francois-Joachim de Freville, is a rather interesting person, even if he is not an immortal of French children’s literature. Freville’s most famous works were two collections of anecdotes about extraordinary real children. Vies des enfans celebres (1798) included the story of Irish youngster Volney Becker, who saved his father from a shark and was bitten in half while being lifted to safety on a boat. Vies circulated in English translation under the title The Juvenile Plutarch between 1801 and 1820. The second collection, Beaux traits du jeune age (1813), closes with an ambitious proposal for a pantheon to be built to honor the memory of notable children. He was arrested for Jacobin sympathies during the French Revolution but acquitted by the tribunal and kept his head. During the Directory, he continued to produce books that incorporated a range of educational games like the one below designed to turn children into active participants in their education.

A.-F.-J. Freville, Jeu d’alphabet, chiffres, et symbols.

L’Alphabet personnifie is perhaps the most ingenious and charming of them all and its design suggests that Freville was no ordinary teacher. Like many enlightened educators who came after John Locke, Freville tried to invent ways to reduce the drudgery associated with learning to read. Of course, he recommended using illustrated texts for that purpose, but on a different and more ambitious plan. While it was true that children enjoyed illustrated alphabets of animals in their primers, he observed, they usually retained more information about the animals’ appearance and characteristics than they did of the letters of the alphabet, the real object of the exercise.

A better approach, Freville argued, was to anthropomorphize the letters, because children would take greater interest in the symbols if they resembled children the same age as themselves engaged in enjoyable activities (the different costumes and hats were also supposed to be a source of amusement). The skillful use of alliteration increased the fun of learning, as well as an way of organizing the visual material so that it was more likely to impress associations on children’s minds. Verbs are the heart of Freville’s method, which is somewhat unusual, as alphabets are more likely to focus on substantives or nouns rather than actions.

Here is the letter “A,” impersonated by a boy watering [arrose]. When the children turn to the description of the plate, they will discover that it contains other objects beginning with the letter A: “Le petit Arlequin, arrose un Artichaut, fleuri dans son jardin” [Little Harlequin waters an artichoke blooming in his garden]. But if they look at the picture again, they will find even more objects whose names begin with “A” the description omits–“abeille” [bee] and “arraignee” [spider] to mention just two. The engraver signed his name below the greenery in the lower right and I think it says “J. Le Roy.”

This being a French alphabet, the pleasures of the table must be shown. Here is “B” for “boit” [drink] and “M” for “mange” [eat].

And the noblest of the fruits also makes an appearance in “V” for “vendange” [grape harvest]. More French fruits can be seen in a previous post on a new acquisition.

Plenty of ways to work off the food and drink are also illustrated, such as “H” for “hache” [chop] and “N” for “nage” [swim].

The boy is also shown practicing his handwriting in “E” for “ecrit” and playing in “J” for “joue.”The two editions are not identical. A careful comparison established that the reading exercises had been revised, but the differences are to complicated to describe here. A more amusing change was made to the plate for the letter Z. In the 1801 edition, “Z” pursued the zebra through the woods completely naked, whereas in the 3rd edition, he is draped in a diaphanous robe for the hunt, still with no shoes.

Perhaps the revised plate is having a little fun at the expense of the merveilleuses, the fashion victims of their times, who fancied dresses so sheer that they left very little to the imagination….

1799-Cruikshank-Paris-ladies-full-winter-dress-caricature

An English satirist like Isaac Cruikshank was probably not the most objective observer of French fashion…

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… ↩︎

Cotsen Children’s Library

Princeton University

Curator’s Choice: A .J. F. Freville’s French Puzzle-picture Alphabet

Cotsen’s Covert Collections: The First Illustrated Book Printed in Turkey