Incunabula
Bibliophile. The history of writing and of the book - across ALL cultures - from cuneiform tablet to papyrus scroll to codex to Kindle. Слава Україні! 🌻
View on 𝕏Threads
This is the Rongorongo script of Easter Island. Rongorongo lacks an accepted decipherment but is generally presumed to encode an earlier stage of Rapa Nui, the contemporary Polynes...
Not all the Afrikaans written in Arabic script at the Cape was for religious purposes. This is an election pamphlet for the 1884 campaign of Anders Ohlsson, a famous beer brewer fr...
“Fat little brown mouse” has become “little brown mouse”. “‘Here’s your little boy,’ she said. ‘He needs to go on a diet’”, becomes “Here’s your little boy.” In Esio Trot, in 2022...
Serendipitous data transmission over centuries occurs of course in libraries, but the Tripitaka Koreana is a single uniformly produced series of texts, and the obsessive levels of...
At first glance, a Chinese instruction manual of some kind. But look again more closely: everything here - every single word - is in ENGLISH. This is "An Introduction to Square...
Approximately 2,600 woodblock-printed books from the Chojo Tripitaka survive, mostly in Japan. About 200 books survive in Korea and most of them are registered as Treasure or Natio...
Another view of "A Repertory of Welsh Manuscripts and Scribes". There's only a limited hardback printing and unless it's reissued or supplemented with an online version, it's the k...
This stamp is about 18 cm long by 14 cm across. A related, but much smaller hand-shaped stamp in brass and dated 1154 AH (1741-42 AD) is in the Nasser D. Khilili Collection and is...
This is a message recorded in 1938 by Mukalap, one of the last speakers of !Ora, a now extinct Khoekhoe language once spoken over large parts of the northwest Cape. He implores peo...
There is now no toleration at all of indigenous Uyghur literature, and there's been almost no printing of any type in Uyghur permitted by the Chinese authorities since 2017. Turd...
The 1540-2 edition of "The Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge" is extremely rare - the @britishlibrary and @magdlibs in the Pepys Library have copies, but there isn't one in pri...
Laz has no official status in either Turkey or Georgia and no written standard. It's used only for familiar & casual speech; for literary and business purposes, Laz speakers use th...