[LITURGY, GREEK RITE.]

Kitab al-injil al-sharif al-tahir [Evangelion translated into Arabic].

[Shuwayr, Monastery of St. John the Baptist, 1776, reissued 1861]. Folio, pp. [iv], 316, Arabic text printed in black and red, with four lithographed portraits of the Evangelists; numerous elaborate printer’s ornaments in the text; a fine copy in contemporary blind-stamped Shuwayr morocco. Produced for the use of Arab-speaking members of the Greek Catholic (Melchite) Church, this Evangelion comprises the Gospels arranged for reading throughout the liturgical year. This is a reissue of the original 1776 sheets with the addition of four lithographed portraits of the Evangelists (with subscriptions in Greek).‘In 1733 in as-Suwayr, a town in the Lebanese Kisrawan Mountains, a printing press was set up – with the support of the Jesuits – in the Greek Catholic monastery of Saint John the Baptist, which was the real “pilot workshop” of indigenous Arab typography. This was the main workplace of ... Abdallah az-Zahir (died 1748), a Syrian Catholic who had left Aleppo because of differences with Atanasiyus ad-Dabbas and the Byzantine Orthodox Church and found refuge, together with other brothers of the faith, in as-Suwayr. The typographic style of the monastic printing press bears the unmistakable hallmark of az-Zahir. Instructed in the goldsmith’s art by his father, he later taught himself additional arts such as engraving, painting and woodcarving. Using these skills he drafted elements of book design, often evidently inspired by European originals. But az-Zahir’s indisputably greatest contribution was that he supplied the Suwayr workshop with his own Arabic types and thereby gave the monastery its really valuable asset’ (Dagmar Glass and Geoffrey Roper, ‘The printing of Arabic books in the Arab world’ in Middle Eastern languages and the print revolution, Gutenberg Museum, Mainz, 2002, pp. 179–180).Nasrallah, L’imprimerie au Liban, p. 44. Darlow & Moule 1661 and Schnurrer 360 record the 1776 printing.

• GBP 3,600.00 > 其他币种价格
• 订书号：: C251

• 书商: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. (GREAT BRITAIN)