“It is the true Arabia … there can never be another picture of the whole, in our time, because here it is all said, and by a great master” T. E. Lawrence Setting off from Damascus in 1876, Charles Doughty travelled for 21 months across the deserts of Arabia, through regions almost entirely unknown…
A Medieval Islamic Bestiary
We have a new addition to the Fine Arts Library’s collection of facsimile editions of illuminated manuscripts. The facsimile in this case reproduces the Kitāb al-Manāfi‘ al-Ḥayawān (The Book on the Usefulness of Animals), a collection of texts classifying and describing the varieties of wild and domestic animals, compiled by the medieval Arab scholar Ibn…
A Boston merchant-adventurer and his illustrated souvenir of the Smyrna trade, ca. 1838
One of the Fine Arts Library’s most unusual recent acquisitions is a lovely little volume of hand-colored engravings and lithographs. The volume consists of 25 plates depicting people and places in Turkey, Greece and the Levant. Once we had the book in hand, we were faced with the problem of how to record this new…