Manuscript Awesomeness

In this, the second to last semester of Grad School, I am taking a Medieval Manuscripts Class.  I know, it's totally awesome.  We basically study the construction, design, history, and context of manuscripts from the 6th century through the late middle ages.  It's like I've died and gone to heaven and someone is giving me school credit for it.

When Max and I were in New York I insisted that we go to the New York Public Library- twice actually.  I didn't know if they had any exhibits going on, but I thought it was worth a shot.  When we got pas security I looked up to find a sign that read

"Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.  Scriptorium This Way"

What?  A scriptorium?  (The scriptorium is the room where monk scribes copied manuscripts and did the illumination and decoration)  Turns out we had stumbled into an exhibit on the "founding religious manuscripts of the three Abrahamic faiths" complete with scriptorium.  I spent most of my time in the scriptorium watching videos about making ink and parchment and doing medieval calligraphy.  This little backlit table below was set up so people could trace calligraphy from the various languages involved in the exhibit.

These other pictures help illustrate the book making process.  The first pictures are bottles of pigment that were traditionally mixed with egg white (called tempera) or gum arabic to produce flowing inks and paints.  It looks awesome, but somehow I doubt that 6th century monks had hot pink ink.  They did have a surprising amount of colors at their disposal, but I don't think hot pink was one of them.  The color pigments come from things that occur in nature - trees, rocks, dirt, plants, rust, special kinds of fungus, etc.  There is a long soaking and grinding and sifting process that takes place before you get to this stage.   

This is a piece of parchment as it stretches on a frame.  But let's back up.  In preparation for my final on Wednesday, I'll just give you some of the juicy bookmaking details.  Parchment was used for "books" after things like clay, wax, or stone tablets.  You make parchment, which comes from the skin of an animal, by soaking the skin in a solution of lye, sometimes alum, sometimes oakgall (little knots on trees left over from insects) - there are a variety of things.  This helps the hair fall off.  Then you scrape the skin with a sharp knife, soak it again, scrape it again and then stretch it out to dry on a frame.  While on the frame you scrape it again, making sure to remove all of the hair.  Lastly, there is a kind of polishing done on the parchment by rubbing pumice or the flat side of knife over the skin.  It was also common to treat the parchment with something that would help ink stay put on the skin later in the bookmaking process.  By the end the very thin skin is folded, cut, marked and text is copied onto it.  

They also had a display about paper.  Paper is made by separating the fibers of an existing thing, a plant or a tree, or natural fibers like the ones below, by soaking it in water, beating the pulp to break fibers apart, running the sludge through a screen and then leaving the newly formed fibers to dry and bind into a new sheet of paper.  There was a little egg shaped burnisher made out of a rock that we could try and burnish the paper with to give it a better look.  Very hard stuff.  

Wow.  I've really nerded up the place.  I'll leave the other mysteries of bookbinding for another day.  But if you want to learn more about the exhibit and watch the awesome videos, you can follow the library's link.  NewYork Public Library: Three Faiths

But Where Do They Belong?

I was searching today for news about Saad Eskander, the Director of the Iraqi National Library and Archive, and to me, library hero of the century.  After the 2003 U.S invasion of Iraq the national library was heavily looted.  "About 60 percent of the records and documents of modern Iraq were lost, along with virtually all historical maps and photos, and perhaps 95 percent of rare books" Eskander reported.  And we're not just talking about telephone company records from Basra, we're talking the treasures of one of the worlds oldest and most influential civilizations.  Things of immense worldwide significance as well as being at the core of the Iraqi Identity.  In response to not taking the appropriate and previously utilized precautions when facing the possible destruction of cultural artifacts during times of war then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield said "Stuff Happens". 


If you can't tell, it makes my blood boil and I can't think about it for very long.


But what's so important about a bunch of old books?  If that's what a library is to you, then I can't convince you that it matters.  But to me, a library like this represents the heart, soul, and historic identity of a people.  It's utter destruction mirrors that of the Iraqi people, but it's resurrection could bring about great progress in the reunification of Iraq - from a symbolic perspective as well as a practical one.  Eskander has worked tirelessly to make this happen.  He has spoken not only of the rebuilding of the collection, but also of what a functioning national library could mean as a model for other institutions. "I want to make the library a democratic model of how Iraq should be. From the start I hired Sunnis, Kurds, Shias, women, men. The national library must be a place - perhaps even the most important place - where Iraqis from many different groups come together."


But anyway, I found this article today in the Los Angeles Times regarding the final resting place for a trove of rare Jewish books found in the Iraq library at the time of the invasion and sent to DC temporarily.  The Jewish community in Iraq is very ancient and almost non-existent today.  Eskander wants the books to be returned to Iraq because they represent a crucial part of Iraq's heritage (and that's where they came from) but Jewish groups in American and Israel say that they are the property of the Jewish people first and foremost and should be returned to Israel, partly out of concern for their safety.


So where should they go?  They came from Iraq and it make sense that they should go back.  But to these Jewish groups, that nature of the books as Jewish far out ways any claim on their Iraqi-ness.  It's a really telling example of how Israel sees itself, I think.   In fact, the mission of the Jewish National and University Library (Israel's National Library) is to collect all things Jewish and/or related to Hebrew.  It's a goal that supersedes country sovereignty and borders - but that becomes problematic when we are talking about a once shared history now greatly fractured. 


It's sticky.