Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [243]
22. See Bloom, Paper, p. 116.
23. For the prevalence (and design) of libraries, see Godfrey Goodwin, A History of Ottoman Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.
24. See Dov Shidorsky, “Libraries in Late Ottoman Palestine Between the Orient and the Occident,” Libraries & Culture 33, 3 (summer 1998), pp. 260–76. See also Hitzel (ed.), Livres.
25. Müteferrika had already begun to print by 1719. He sent a map of the Sea of Marmara to the grand vizier Damad Ibrahim Pasha, with a note to the effect that “if your Excellency so commands, larger ones can be produced.” For the document from the Sultan setting up the printing press in Constantinople, see “The Firman of Ahmed III, Given in 1727 Authorizing Said Effendi and Ibrahim Müteferrika to Open a Printing House Using Arabic Script,” trans. Christopher Murphy, in Atiyah (ed.), Book, pp. 284–92.
26. He was by then himself the ambassador to the court of France.
27. It has been estimated that from 1455 to 1500 between 6 and 20 million copies of publications were printed in Europe. Six million is a very cautious estimate, and probably about 12–15 million might be a good working figure. Between 30,000 and 35,000 separate editions of books from this half century still survive, representing various versions and reprints of some 10,000 to 15,000 different texts. See the estimates for editions in Europe and the useful analyses of content in southern and northern Europe in Gerulaitis, Printing, pp. 17–18 and 57–129. Hirsch, Printing, pp. 133–5, uses J. M. Lenart’s figures from Pre-Reformation Printed Books (New York: 1935). Assuming that about 500 copies (on average) of each edition were produced, then printing in aggregate 15 million copies is reasonable. So who read or bought all these books? This question has never been answered satisfactorily. The calculations of copies printed are of necessity approximate, hence the wild discrepancies. See also Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard, London: Verso, 1976, p. 248.
28. There had been several attempts to set up printers’ workshops in the Balkan lands, all of which failed. In the centuries of Ottoman rule, only a handful of books were produced in the southern Slav lands. The first were printed in Cetinje in Montenegro in the 1490s by a monk named Makarije. Eight other short-lived presses were later set up, but their total output was eleven slender titles. From the sixteenth century Slavic books were produced in other lands and brought across the frontier. Many were printed by a succession of specialist printers in Venice, beginning with the Vuković family from Montenegro in the early sixteenth century. Another major center developed at the same time in Wallachia; but it was not until the 1770s, when recognizing the demand for texts for the Serbian market, that printers in Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Leipzig competed to supply Serbs both in the Vojvodina and in the lands under Ottoman rule. However, supplies were irregular and many printers could not be bothered with the effort of sending them south of the Danube, where trade was erratic and often risky. See Michel Lassithiotakis, “Le rôle du livre imprimé dans la formation et le développement de la littérature en Grec vulgaire XVIe–XVIIe siècles,” and Nathalie Clayer, “Le goût de fruit défendu ou, La lecture de l’Albanais dans l’empire Ottoman finissant,” both in Hitzel (ed.), Livres.
29. A modern analogy is the way in which the People’s Republic of China has (as of 2002) modernized its publishing industry while at the same time maintaining government supervision. I owe this analogy to a number of my Chinese students, notably Xiaoyang Chen, whose help I gratefully acknowledge on this topic.
30. See Daniel Roche, “Censorship and the Publishing Industry,” in Darnton and Roche (eds.), Revolution in Print, pp. 3–28, and Jean-Pierre Levandier, Le livre au temps de Marie-Thérèse: Code des lois de censure pour les pays Austro-Bohémiens (1740–1780) (Berne: Peter Lang, 1993), and Le livre au temps de