Organizer: Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellow in Critical Bibliography, Rare Book School

Type/Location: Virtual

Description:

The eastward diffusion of lithographic technology in the nineteenth century—specifically on a hand press—was not a clean, linear historical process. In Batavia, for instance, the earliest known lithographic hand press was initially imported by Dutch missionaries in 1826. However, technological acclimatization of lithography to indigenous Muslim sensibilities in the Malay world was a drawn-out parallel process; influenced less by literature that Protestant missionaries printed (which emulated the visual idiom of Malay manuscripts) and more by the waves of print-technological change happening in Ottoman domains, the Arabian Peninsula, and the commercial bazaars of the Indian subcontinent. This presentation aims to highlight localized innovations developed in the unique cultural environs of the Malay world, and will specifically examine methods, technical processes, and materials used in Malay lithography. Importantly, it aims to shed light on the actions of anonymous individuals that labored in the production of these printed objects; and the moments where Islamicate, Muslim-Malay, and Western traditions of bookmaking and printing dovetailed and co-existed.

Speaker:

Wei Jin Darryl Lim is a Singaporean historian of books and printing. His research focuses on regional histories of the book in Southeast Asia, the global histories of printing, and the technical aspects of print technology. His doctoral thesis, completed at the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, University of Reading, examined the global and transregional networks of lithographic printing in the Malay world. Darryl was the American Printing History Association’s Mark Samuels Lasner Fellow (2019), and an Early Career Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London (October 2022–23).

This event is jointly organized by SoFCB junior fellows, Rianne Subijanto (Communication Studies, Baruch College, CUNY) and Sonia Das (Anthropology, NYU).

Registration:

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