Includes essays on the history of printing in Hebrew, Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, and Arabic, and Turkish, in Europe and the Middle East.

Ayalon explores the birth of Arab printing, publishing, dissemination methods, and mass readership during the formative phase from 1800 to 1914.

Print culture, in both its material and cognitive aspects, has been a somewhat neglected field of Middle Eastern intellectual and social history. The essays in this volume aim to make significant contributions to remedying this neglect, by advancing our knowledge and understanding of how and why the development of printing both affected, and was affected by, historical, social and intellectual currents in the areas considered. These range geographically from Iran to Latin America, via Kurdistan, Turkey, Egypt, the Maghrib and Germany, temporally from the 10th to the 20th centuries CE, and linguistically through Arabic, Judæo-Arabic, Syriac, Ottoman Turkish, Kurdish and Persian.

The first-ever book-length history of Arab graphic design PROSE AWARD WINNER, ART HISTORY & CRITICISM Arab graphic design emerged in the early twentieth century out of a need to influence, and give expression to, the far-reaching economic, social, and political changes that were taking place in the Arab world at the time. But graphic design as a formally recognized genre of visual art only came into its own in the region in the twenty-first century and, to date, there has been no published study on the subject to speak of. A History of Arab Graphic Design traces the people and events that were integral to the shaping of a field of graphic design in the Arab world. Examining the work of over eighty key designers from Morocco to Iraq, and covering the period from pre-1900 to the end of the twentieth century, Bahia Shehab and Haytham Nawar chart the development of design in the region, beginning with Islamic art and Arabic calligraphy, and their impact on Arab visual culture, through to the digital revolution and the arrival of the Internet. They look at how cinema, economic prosperity, and political and cultural events gave birth to and shaped the founders of Arab graphic design. Highlighting the work of key designers and stunningly illustrated with over 600 color images, A History of Arab Graphic Design is an invaluable resource tool for graphic designers, one which, it is hoped, will place Arab visual culture and design on the map of a thriving international design discourse.

With the advent of new digital communication technologies, the end of print culture once again appears to be as inevitable to some recent commentators as it did to Marshall McLuhan. This book charts the elements involved in such claims through a method that examines the iconography of materials, marks and processes of print, and in this sense acknowledges McLuhan's notion of the medium as the bearer of meaning.

In the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s nineteenth-century reforms, as guilds waned and new professions emerged, the scholarly ‘estate’ underwent social differentiation. Some found employment in the state’s new institutions as translators, teachers and editors, whilst others resisted civil servant status. Gradually, the scholar morphed into the public writer. Despite his fledgling status, he catered for the public interest all the more so since new professionals such as doctors, engineers and lawyers endorsed this latest social role as an integral part of their own self-image. This dual preoccupation with self-definition and all things public is the central concern of this book. Focusing on the period after the tax-farming scholar took the bow and before the alienated intellectual prevailed on the contemporary Arab cultural scene, it situates the making of the Arab intellectual within the dysfunctional space of competing states’ interests known as the ‘Nahda’. Located between Empire and Colony, the emerging Arab public sphere was a space of over- and under-regulation, hindering accountability and upsetting allegiances. The communities that Arab intellectuals imagined, including the Pan-Islamic, Pan-Arab and socialist sat astride many a polity and never became contained by post-colonial states. Examining a range of canonical and less canonical authors, this interdisciplinary approach to The Making of the Modern Arab Intellectual will be of interest to students and scholars of the Middle East, history, political science, comparative literature and philosophy.

In the Middle East, translation movements and the debates they have unleashed on language, culture and the politics and practices of identity have historically been tied to processes of state formation and administration, in the form of patronage, policy and publishing. Whether one considers the age of regional empires centered in Baghdad or Istanbul, or that of the modern nation-state from Egypt to Iran, this relationship points to the historical role of translation as a powerful and flexible tool of cultural politics. "Nation and Translation in the Middle East" focuses on this important aspect of translation in the region, with special emphasis on translation movements and the production of modernity in a historical context defined by European imperialism, enlightenment universalism, and globalization. While the papers assembled in this special issue of "The Translator" each address specific translation histories and practices in the Middle East, the broader questions they raise regarding the location and the historicity of translation offer a fruitful intervention into contemporary debates in translation studies on difference, fidelity and the ethics of translation. The volume opens with two essays that situate translation at the intersection of national canons, post colonial cultural hegemonies and 'private' market or activist-based initiatives in Egypt and Turkey. Other contributions discuss the utility of translation paradigms as a counterweight to the dominant orientalist historiography of modern print culture in the Arab World; the role of the translator as political agent and social reformer in twentieth-century Egypt; and the relationship between language, translation and the politics of identity in the multi-ethnic and multilingual Islamicate contexts of the Abbasid and Mughal Empires. The volume also includes a general bibliography on translation and the Middle East.

This selection of papers by scholarly specialists offers an introduction to the history of the book and book culture in West Asia and North Africa from antiquity to the 20th century. The flourishing and long-lived manuscript tradition is discussed in its various aspects - social and economic as well as technical and aesthetic. The very early but abortive introduction of printing - long before Gutenberg - and the eventual, belated acceptance of the printed book and the development of print culture are explored in further groups of papers. Cultural, aesthetic, technological, religious, social, political and economic factors are all considered throughout the volume. Although the articles reflect the predominance in the area of Muslim books - Arabic, Persian and Turkish - the Hebrew, Syriac and Armenian contributions are also discussed. The editor’s introduction provides a survey of the field from the origins of writing to the modern literary and intellectual revivals.