19th century book

[Allen W Thrasher]

Valerie,

I find that lithographed books from India often look as much like mss as like books printed from moveable type.  I think it is not just that the graphemes are somewhat less regular, but that the ink-paper interface (w.w.?) is different from letterpress. Graham Shaw at the British Library has done a study of lithography in India and is still collecting material on it.  Have you shown it to him?  

It is possible, also, that under the inspiration of moveable type books the scribe was particularly careful to be very regular, more so than traditionally the best scribes would be.  I have in my own library an ed. of the Bhagavatapurana published in Pune in the 1970s or 1980s made by a brahmacari by hand and reproduced by photo-offset. You would think it was letterpress, all the more so since the same decorative frame was around the text on each page, done on a transparency and then photographed along with the text.

Allen

Allen W. Thrasher, Ph.D., Senior Reference Librarian
South Asia Team, Asian Division
Library of Congress, Jefferson Building 150
101 Independence Ave., S.E.
Washington, DC 20540-4810
tel. 202-707-3732; fax 202-707-1724; athr at loc.gov
The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Library of Congress.