Now Online: A Digital Exhibition of treasures of the art of the book from Columbia University’s Manuscript Collection

In the School of Wisdom: Persian Bookbinding ca 1575-1890.

Curated by: Matthew Elliott Gillman - Ph.D. candidate, Department of Art History & Archaeology, Columbia University

“al-Qurʾān. Cover,” Columbia University Libraries Online Exhibitions, accessed September 27, 2020, https://exhibitions.library.columbia.edu/exhibits/show/school_of_wisdom/item/11431.

This digital exhibition reprises a physical one held in Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, in the Chang Octagon, between October 2018 and March 2019. Its restaging might pose an irony, given that the show’s concept and title, drawn from a lyric poem, concerns ephemerality. Translating this experience to the web nevertheless offers an opportunity to underscore its very theme.

Few of Columbia's seven hundred or so Islamic codices have bindings older than 1800, whether the text was copied a millennium or just a century earlier. The exhibition highlights examples of new and especially replacement bindings from the early modern period, supporting practices of collecting and memory.

You can now view the “In the School of Wisdom” digital exhibition here.