Ink Making by the Book: Learning a Craft in the Arabic World

: The arts of the book have a great relevance in Islamic culture, not only from a religious perspective, but in literature as well. The proliferation of treatises about bookmaking and calligraphy demonstrates the great interest in the topic. But if we take into consideration the artisanal world revolving around these manuscripts, is there any obvious correspondence between the literary texts and the crafts employed to produce them? What were the treatises used for? Were they studied by apprentices to learn a particular craft or were they ultimately meant to decorate a shelf in an erudite library? This paper focuses specifically on treatises and collections of recipes about the making of inks. The introductions of the treatises in my corpus were studied in order to understand the intentions of the authors and their aims, and the recipes were reproduced to grasp their feasibility. Finally, the manuscripts were examined in terms of their codicological and material aspects to learn about their production and use.