Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.
On September 10, Princeton University Library unveiled a new digital and physical exhibition, titled “Forms and Function: The Splendors of Global Book Making.” The exhibition is a feast to anyone interested in book history, and especially those who want to learn about how the formats of a “book” varied through time and space. It is also a rare opportunity for the public to view some of the least known hidden gems in Princeton’s collections.
The exhibition includes manuscripts and printed books from Western, Islamic, East, South and Southeast Asian, and Mesoamerican cultures. There are seventy-four items on digital display, and they represent many materials for book making that may not be familiar to a contemporary and Western audience, including bark, textiles, shell, lacquer, and copper. The earliest produced book on display is an Egyptian clay cylinder from the 6th century BCE, while the latest is an Indian artistic book made with copper plates from 2020.
Three “traditions” of book formats are featured in the exhibition: the codex tradition, the East Asian tradition, and the pothī tradition.
The codices, defined in the exhibition as “single- or multi-gatherings of sheets folded inside each other, with texts on both sides, sewn together, and usually attached onto covers,” gradually replaced scrolls, and became the preferred format for early Christianity but later spread to Central and South Asia and was also adopted by Islamic and Hindu traditions. The exhibit includes an extremely rare early Coptic manuscript of Gospel of St. Matthew, and a palimpsest parchment on which the text was once erased to allow reuse.
Also included is a Chinese edition of Missale Romanvm produced by the Jesuits in 1670 which was printed with woodblock but bound in a European codex format.
The East Asian tradition, which included the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cultures, demonstrates a wide range of mediums and materials to produce reading materials and extensive influence into other Eurasia regions. Among the bamboo slips and Dunhuang scrolls is an inner garment with over 700 “eight-legged” exemplary exam essays written on it, totaling more than half a million miniature characters.
Another rare item on display is a reproduction of ink rubbings that the late-Qing statesman, Duanfang (端方, 1861–1911), made from Egyptian and Greek objects during his diplomatic missions in the early 1900s.
The pothī tradition, heavily influenced by the palm leaf, one of the earliest materials in the region used for writing texts, is no less diverse in terms of materials and formats that supported the texts. The exhibition features an earliest example of paper making from Nepal (1140), on which the popular Pañcarakṣā sūtra (Sūtra of the five protectresses) is written.
Coming after the palm leaves, later materials, such as birch bark, gold, and paper, mimicked its progenitor’s shape. The loose pages were usually stacked to make a bundle. With Brahmanism and Buddhism, the format spread across South and Southeast Asia and reached the Mongols and Manchus through Tibet.
Here is an example of a relatively understudied Dongba manuscript from the Naxi people, an ethnic minority living in China’s Yunnan province.
Beyond the main three themes, the exhibition also showcases some formats that different traditions share: single-sheet, scrolls, and accordion style. One of the highlights from this section is one of the earliest printed texts in the world, the Hyakumantō darani from Nara-era Japan.
The work was commissioned by the court in 764. Printed Buddhist spells were inserted into mini pagodas. These short texts, also known as “mantras,” are verbal formulas and chants for various spiritual purposes. Currently, “tens of thousands of the pagodas and several thousand printed spells still exist.”
Last but not least, the exhibit shines light on even more materials that were used to serve as the media for texts. The hard surfaces of stone, metal, and bones were widely used across the globe. For example, a conch shell with Maya glyphs is on display in this section.
The exhibition was curated by Dr. Martin Heijidra, Director of the East Asian Library at Princeton. The online version includes an interactive timeline and map, where viewers can click on the numbered titles of the items to go to their catalogue records, which has a brief but detailed description of the item and additional readings about the research on each of the items
Online viewers can also download the PDF files of the accompanied catalogue and exhibition brochure. The digital exhibition not only provides an alternative for those who cannot see it in person, but it also gives it another form of life that will extend after the exhibition hall welcomes another array of objects.
Reference:
Martin Heijidra, curator (2025), Forms & Function: The Splendors of Global Book Making https://dpul.princeton.edu/global-book-forms
Tian, Tian. “Duanfang’s Egyptian Rubbings: The First Egyptian Collection in Late Imperial China.” Antiquity 99, no. 406 (2025): 1129–42. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.10098.
Galambos, Imre. “The Chinese Pothi: A Missing Link in the History of the Chinese Book.” The Medieval History Journal 27, no. 1 (2024): 152–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/09719458241231669.
McDermott, Joseph Peter. A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China. Hong Kong University Press, 2006.
Kornicki, Peter F. The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century. Brill, 1998.
Roper, Geoffrey. The History of the Book in the Middle East. Ashgate, 2013.