Enclosing Knowledge and Power: A Pusaka Manuscript from Yogyakarta, Central Java

Early Printed and Rare Books

Flying Squirrels and Delicious Garlic: Animals and Plants in an Illuminated Early-Modern Miscellany of Ancient Japanese Poetry

An early-modern scholar selected ancient Japanese poems that mentioned plants and animals and created an illustrated woodblock-printed anthology. The poems, which showcase the diversity of human engagement with the natural world in ancient Japan, come alive through the masterfully created images.

Middle Eastern Special Collections

Printing for a Manuscript Culture: Early 20th-Century Books from Yemen’s State Press

Leiden University Libraries hold a rare collection of the earliest books produced with printing technology in Yemen during the first half of the twentieth century. Their material features reveal how these works were made—and how reading practices transitioned from manuscript to print culture.

Gone is different from dead

In 1997, Jacq Vogelaar—who was mainly known as an experimental prose writer and as a literary critic—published a poetry collection for the first time in over thirty years: Klaaglied om Ka, which was released as a bibliophile edition with notable illustrations. What prompted this poetic comeback?

Middle Eastern Special Collections

Contemporary Iran and Modernisation Through the Lens of an Album

Among the treasures in the Special Collections sits a remarkable photo album, Or. 25.777, purchased in 2000 from McBlain Books in the USA. Its twenty-five photographs document the inauguration of a hospital in 1955 in Shiraz, showing Iran’s 1950s modernization.

Middle Eastern Special Collections

Mapping Medieval Scholarship: Arabic Audition Certificates from the Leiden Special Collections

Traces of use in old books—annotations, marginal glosses or coffee stains—reveal how readers engaged with texts through the ages. Certain Arabic manuscripts include notes that reveal the social history of their readership.

Manuscripts, Archives and Letters

Coptic words in Pallas’ Universal dictionary

The Coptic collection in the Leiden University Libraries throws light on the way a Prussian scholar compiled a ‘universal dictionary’ for a Russian Empress in a time that comparative linguistics was still in its infancy.