In the School of Wisdom: Persian Bookbinding, ca. 1575-1890

Hātif, Dīvān
Text: Iran, ca. 1780–1850
Binding: early 18th century
Paint, gold, and varnish on papier-mâché boards
MS X892.8 An8

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Old manuscripts were not always updated with a brand-new binding. Occasionally, pre-existing boards could be recycled from other works.

Muhammad Sadiq, a key painter active in the mid-18th century, created especially novel examples. When rebinding an antique Khamsa (Quintet) of the poet Nizami, produced in the early 1620's, he managed to salvage gem-set pieces of openwork filigree from the previous binding, setting them in a new lacquer cover.

This Divan is a marriage of several unusual elements. First is the text itself, the collected works of the poet Hatif (d. 1783). He was an early voice of the “literary return” (bazgasht-e ‘adabi), a slow-building movement which rejected the dense “Indian style” (sabk-e hindi) of Persian-speaking poets like Bedil. He is today remembered for but a single strophic poem, his tarji'-band, although the present volume shows the full range of his output. Scarcely a dozen copies survive, mostly in Iran but also at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The present copy, although lacking a colophon, appears to date from the half-century following Hatif's death.

Curiously, the lacquer boards are roughly contemporaneous in date but not original to the text-block: they are too large, overhanging the pages by several millimeters, and seem to have been recycled from another volume. Meanwhile, their design quietly eschews graphic conventions. The vibrant, top-down garden motif (which gives unusual attention to modelling of curling flower-petals) is set against a deep goldstone ground. This is all bound by a leaf-green stripe, a "statement" color in lieu of the expected repertoire of black, gold, or red.

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In the same fashion, two Qur'ans (pictured below) feature text-blocks and boards that, although originally produced around the same time, were joined at a later date.

The first (MS Or. 92) consists, at its core, of calligraphy from a late medieval Qur'an. As with the "Yaqut" manuscript, the original quires were entirely disassembled and each page remounted in new paper frames; the resulting text-block was then supplied with a new frontispiece. The extant polychrome binding, although possibly created around the same date as this remodeling, is mismatched in size; it therefore seems to have been recycled, at a later time, from another book. Its central stamp is based on the imagined, perpendicular overlap of two citrus-shaped (toronja) medallions in different sizes, which then creates four spurs of negative space. This unique shape seems to have been conceived around the 1750's and can therefore be used to help sequence the volume's intervention history.