8vo. 153 pp., half-title, 3 maps, b/w illustrations, publisher’s original wrappers, bookplate R. Burrell verso front cover, otherwise copy in very good condition, from the series Islam & Occident Volume II, biblio, Annexe, Edition Masoneuve et Larose, Paris, 1984.

Synopsis

An important research on Early Arabic printing in the West during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author gives a synoptic account of the progress of Arabic printing, expressed mainly in terms of the personalities involved. It is a wide ranging survey of the progress of European Orientalism in those centuries, as measured by its printed output of Arabic texts, starting with the Fano prayer book (Kitab Salat al-Sawa’i) of 1514. The important Annex (pp 135-146) is a chronological list of the 204 Arabic books, printed between 1514 and 1799, upon which this work is based and followed by the shelfmark at the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris.