The art of preserving manuscripts

By Rana Safvi for TwoCircles.net

Ambreen Shariq Khan has grown up amidst rare books. Her father Abdus Sattar has a collection of rare Urdu and Persian books from the Mughal era. Many are first editions.


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I had gone to meet Mr. Abdus Sattar in his house in the walled city of Shahjahanabad, Old Delhi regarding some Urdu books when I met Ambreen.
Her husband is one of the two people in Delhi who do hand-tooled leather binding. It’s an ancestral trade and the other one doing it is a cousin.

They still print the names of the books manually with tiny alphabet blocks which contain a single letter each. The designs on it are also manually printed.

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She was working to preserve a rare handwritten manuscript and I was able to ask her how it was done.

Since these books were handwritten they can’t be chemically treated, as the ink will run. Regular lamination to preserve the page can’t be done, as it would become too stiff and bulky.

What she does is first carefully clean each page of white ants and other impurities, then put each page carefully inside tissue cloth, then put a bit of some special fluid on top of the cloth so as to keep the ink from running.

Preserving Manuscripts: art of book-binding

Once the pages have been secured in the tissue cloth they are lightly dampened with moisture and then are dried in the sun and later the sides trimmed.

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This particular book had come from a library and was in quite a bad shape.
Ambreen and her team had cleaned and tissue wrapped 226 pages.

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After this they would go to her husband’s workshop for leather binding.

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As a lover of books I salute Ambreen and her team for preserving our heritage.
In today’s world of automation and machines it is a pleasure to see beautiful work done so meticulously and painstakingly.


Created with flickr slideshow.


Rana Safvi is moderator of #shair on Twitter. She blogs at http://www.ranasafvi.com/

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