Library

Thanks to the generous support of the University of Hamburg, the CSMC was able to purchase an important section of the late Professor Johan Peter Gumbert’s (1936–2016) private book collection in May 2017. From 1979 to 2001, Gumbert was Professor, and later Professor Emeritus, of Western Palaeography and Codicology at Leiden University with a focus on Latin and Dutch manuscripts. As a frequent guest at the University of Hamburg, Professor Gumbert was associated with the CSMC from its very beginning as well as with the COMSt-Network (Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies). The ‘J. P. Gumbert’s Special Collection’, which contains 1,700 works on codicology and palaeography annotated with various handwritten comments by J. P. Gumbert, is available at the CSMC library. These works are catalogued and listed under the shelfmark group ‘MK Gum.’ in the campus catalogue. The annotations and addenda have been registered accurately and comprehensively.

• J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award

Drs René Teijgeler, an internationally renowned researcher and advisor in the field of Critical Cultural Heritage, who passed away in February 2023, has donated part of his large private book collection to the CSMC library. The donation comprises a total of around 600 items. Among them are numerous rare books, journals, and old catalogues whose thematic focus is on the history of books and paper, especially of maritime Southeast Asia and India. The books are being catalogued.

Stephen Serpell, MA, MSc, decided to donate a big part of his book collection focusing on Islamic illuminated manuscripts to the CSMC Library. The first part has already arrived, more will follow (c. 400 titles). These books played an important role in the establishment of the Islamic Painted Page: A Database of Islamic Arts of the Book database by Stephen Serpell. They will significantly enhance the section on Islamic manuscript cultures.

The ‘Cataloguing of Oriental Manuscripts in Germany’ (KOHD) was a long-term research project started in 1958 by the German Research Foundation and continued since 1990 under the responsibility of the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Göttingen (Lower Saxony) with financial support from the federal-state programme. From 2013 until the end of the project in December 2022, Professor Dr Tilman Seidensticker was head of the overall project and editor of the project series ‘Verzeichnis der Orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland’ (VOHD). The cataloguing of Arabic manuscripts was carried out at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. C. 600 of the book holdings there, two thirds of which are important and rare manuscript catalogues, were donated to the CSMC library in 2023. They have been inventorised and partly catalogued now.

In 2024, c. 600 books could be purchased from the collections of Dr Geoffrey Roper, a specialist for the history of printing and publishing in the Islamic world, especially in the Arabic-speaking Near East. He was head of the ‘Islamic Bibliography Unit’ of the Cambridge University Library 1982–2003, editor of the ‘Index Islamicus’ and the ‘World Survey of Islamic Manuscripts’. His collection will expand the library’s segment on the development of print and the contemporary/simultaneous use of handwriting and printing technologies that took place over a long period of time.

The late Professor Dr Johannes Renger (1934–2023), Chair of Assyriology at Freie Universität Berlin for three decades, owned an extensive private library. Big parts of it were donated to the newly established Assyriology Chair at the University of Hamburg, held by Professor Dr Nicole Brisch who joined the Asia Africa Institute and the CSMC in 2023. The books will enrich the Asia Africa Institute Library while a collection of estimated 5,000 offprints will be part of the CSMC Library and are in the process of being inventorised and catalogued. They represent the academic network that Johannes Renger had established almost worldwide and thus exemplify a scholarly and cultural phenomenon that no longer exists in this form, as digitisation has eliminated the need to send individual offprints from anthologies or journals to colleagues and friends. The offprints offered by publishers, with handwritten dedications and notes from senders and recipients as well as other annotations or inserts such as letters, thus constitute a form of academic exchange and communication that has become history.

The CSMC houses a collection of written artefacts, which is made up of various parts and comprises around 200 objects today.

One part consists of objects given to the CSMC Library by private donators or bought for the CSMC Library with the idea to widen the scope of the collection by exemplary written artefacts for the purpose of research, teaching, and exhibits. You find here e.g. palm-leaf manuscripts, a Coptic Arabic liturgical booklet, modern Chinese artefacts like written paper fans or teapots, Arabic contracts on wood from North Africa, or modern written objects by the CSMC’s artists in residence.

Another part consists of a donation by Drs René Teijgeler, an internationally renowned researcher and advisor in the field of Critical Cultural Heritage, who passed away in February 2023. He has bequeathed to CSMC c. 100 written artefacts, mostly from Asia, and a collection of writing support samples, mainly Asiatic paper and palm leaves, in December 2021.

A third part comprises a collection of manuscripts belonging to the Asia Africa Institute at the University of Hamburg. They are stored now at CSMC Library, are in the process of being digitised and described for the online publication of a catalogue. Here you find scrolls from East Africa, palm-leaf manuscripts in Pothi format, or paper leporellos from South and Southeast Asia.