On October 8, 2018, Dr. Brandon Hawk and curator Dot Porter met to talk about these ancient books, and to compare them with manuscripts from the collection of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. This series is a record of those discussions.
LJS 102: Focus on the binding
This video begins the part of our series where we focus on the bindings of the Jedi texts. Our conversation in this video focuses on binding of LJS 102, the early 20th century Ethiopian prayer book which we looked at in Episode 3. We’ll compare this binding to the Jedi texts, and talk about how they are similar, and how they’re quite different.
Online record and digital images of LJS 102: http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/d/medren/9948521743503681
Phil Szostak, The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (https://www.amazon.com/Art-Star-Wars-Last-Jedi/dp/1419727052/)
Images of the “Tree Library” by Seth Engstrom & Rodolfo Damaggio
Mock-ups for six pages from the Jedi books by Chris Kitisakkul
Screenshots from the film and images from The Art of Star Wars are used under the Fair Use doctrine described in Section 107 of the Copyright Act (https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107)
Palm-leaf and paper manuscripts have been produced and circulated in South Asian literary cultures for a long time, going back well before the turn of the Common Era. For centuries, scribes across South Asia produced and re-produced texts on dried leaves of palmyra and talipot palm trees, and occasionally on other materials like birch bark. They wrote in classical and vernacular South Asian languages like Sanskrit, Tamil, Malayalam, and others. Noble families and wealthy patrons often commissioned the production of manuscripts for private libraries, while other manuscript traditions developed to meet educational and ritual purposes. Production of palm-leaf manuscripts continued through the medieval period, when a rise of texts in Persian appeared on the Indian subcontinent under the influence of the Delhi sultans and Mughal emperors from the 13th to the 19th centuries. By the end of the early modern period, palm-leaf manuscript production slowed, while paper manuscript manufacture persisted. The expansion of printing presses in the 18th-19th centuries curbed widespread production of handwritten manuscripts in South Asia.
Today, private and public archives across South Asia house countless palm-leaf and paper manuscripts. Unique manuscript traditions in each region reveal linguistic, scientific, religious, and cultural nuances that, when taken together, reflect the sociocultural diversity of the region. The title of this project uses the Persian suffix –stan, meaning “place of” or “country,” to evoke the rich history of writing on the Indian subcontinent: hence, manuscriptistan, “place of manuscripts” or “manuscript country.” 
The images in the exhibition Manuscriptistan, on view in the Kamin Gallery (Van Pelt Dietrich Library Center, 1st floor) from September 9 – December 13, 2019, offer a photographic documentary of some of India’s captivating manuscript archives. Yet, importantly, it is not a study of the particular knowledge systems contained inside the covers of the manuscripts. It is not, for example, an attempt to show the sheer number of poetic and astrological texts in one archive and the unique collection of medical texts in another. Instead, Manuscriptistan asks the question: What becomes of the manuscript and archive, when the archive and manuscript become art? This is not a study of manuscript contents and subjects, in other words, which scholars have mined for centuries to explain and reconstruct Indian history. Rather, the images of Manuscriptistan represent my attempt to visually apprehend some of the literary objects that I have been seeing since 2003 while doing research in Indian archives. The exhibition creates a visual portrait of what it feels like to be around these objects and in these spaces, and in the end, to capture the simultaneous feeling of understanding and improbability that being around these objects and in these spaces often rouses in me.
Historical, technical, and social aspects of manuscript production in India are folded into many of the images in the exhibit, and in this way Manuscriptistan presents a visual encounter with the history of the “book” and writing in before typography in South Asia. Yet, the project also moves beyond typography and book cultures. I developed and framed these images as invitations to a visual reflection on the aesthetics of the manuscript and archive, as artifact and curated space as such, which I hope will appeal to people whether or not they are aware of India’s manuscript traditions and the ways in which manuscript production influenced Indian intellectual history and education by organizing, preserving, and mediating the ways people create, access, and engage knowledge.
