“Books with this much personality are no longer published,” says Abdullah Uğur, a student employee at the Turkuaz book store located in İstanbul’s Taksim, while referring to the inlay design of an Ottoman Turkish book.
Not only has finding these works become more efficient in recent years but the digitalization of such works into scanned copies, taken on by large universities, has changed the way they are read. This has brought these articles, once hard to find, let alone purchase, to the access of many. Yet Uğur explains that “the feeling of a worn leather binding and the patience required to be careful when turning each page” is not entirely reproducible in newly published books and scanned copies.
The days of free-roaming book peddlers seeking out antique titles and cleaning out family estates are a thing of the past; today the trade has moved to the Internet catalogs of the many book shops that dot the Turkish countryside. “There is no reason to go from village to village any longer asking people if they have antique books,” Emin İşli, owner of the Turkuaz bookstore explains; “if a book is needed by a customer, it can be found with some phone calls.”
Much has changed since the majority of these books were first published over 100 years ago, most significantly the alphabet of Ottoman Turkish, which is composed of a variation of Arabic script. In 1928 it was abolished and in its place the modern Turkish alphabet was adopted as part of a series of reforms enacted by Atatürk.
Resurrected words
Unlike the search for a modern print book that might start at a local bookstore, for this genre the search begins in a rural village mosque. “It used to be that one would meet people in a mosque and pray in order to know each other well and do business ... if visiting a new village to find books,” recalls İşli. But today, the antique book business has taken off, the world is better connected, Ottoman Turkish is studied in universities world wide and rare texts are only a click away.
But accessing a scanned image of a book or reprint, according to İşli, does not come close to owning one. “I appreciate these old books for the design of their covers ... their interior decorative work,” he explains. “It all makes the books and their stories feel closer to you,” adds Uğur.
The resurrection of these lost titles to the world market has attracted the interest of large customers, mainly universities with reputable book collections.
İşli adds that there are still valuable and rare items out there, waiting to be brought to light, but one would have to look east: Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. He explains that the former Iron Curtain countries have impeded the flow of such books across national borders.
Hidden relics
Adding to the personality and singularity of such antique books is the frequent discovery of hidden messages unintentionally left within their pages. Uğur explains that it is common to find small articles, pleasant reminders of the past, pressed in the pages of a book. “We have found money, letters, cards, brochures, flowers and even private love letters,” he says.
Such finds add to the character of antique books and offer fascinating glimpses of lives that have long since ended, explains Uğur. “I am impressed with pressed flowers in the books. They still hold the color they once had when picked so long ago.”
Uğur adds that his favorite find is a series of love letters laced with poetry, “Findings such as this are like a window looking into the past owner’s personal life.”
It is perhaps the personalization of these books, unattainable in modern publishing, that keeps scholars and collectors alike interested in obtaining these texts for much more than the content of their pages.
Although there is a lack of Ottoman Turkish in daily life, the readers of such texts are surprisingly abundant; books are devoured by scholars and collectors not just in Turkey but in the US, France and corners of the world as far as Japan.
As for the future of the field, no concern is expressed. The Ottoman Empire, known for its richness in literature, is still alive according to Uğur. “We won’t be running out of books any time soon.”
