Filing away as yet another example of how much handling a sufficient volume of almost any object will teach you something (and that the process never really stops) - on to that next decade, I suppose!

... (not least because I've not seen any contemporary Italian books with decorated papers of this charming modernist potato print quality.)

The first time I handled this book (a different decade in my life), I rather optimistically suggested this paper was Italian, but in the intervening years I've seen enough early Bulaq imprints with very similar papers to think there was a local production of decorated papers...

One suspects the port's counterpart may no longer exist, given the tribulations inflicted on Smyrna after this.

You can see the stamps and inscription of the Italian port officer at Rhodes on the right - the island in 1920 an Italian colonial possession, while Smyrna in turn was under Greek occupation, though the Ottoman state apparatus and documentation continued in use, quite literally documented here.

[You can see where the counterpart for the sanitary administration at Smyrna was torn free along a perforated edge at the left.] It's worth noting this is an enormous document - here it's resting on a folio-sized portfolio.

This is one half of a bilingual (French/Ottoman Turkish) bill of health (sans plague, &c) given to the Santa Marina, a small sailing ship carrying ballast and meat, with a Greek captain, crew of six under an Italian flag, issued on 17 June 1920, when she called at Smyrna en route to Rhodes.

Our paper, refined by the process of preparing it for Copenhagen and presenting it to a knowledgeable and generous audience, will appear in a more structured form in the conference proceedings. Stay tuned.

Illustrated here: one further example of hand-talking on my part, the live cherry blossom installed in the theatre for the day, and a farewell view of the Black Diamond.

Ties neatly in with the first separate appearance in book-form of this tale in Singapore print that same year...

Not the kind of thing you see every day (in fact, the only one I've ever seen in the trade, and only one remotely comparable institutional example traced so far, though this is exactly the kind of thing which survived by being folded up and forgotten.)

With Abby Bainbridge:
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For a whirlwind visual tour with brief notes only, try:

www.ngmcburney.com/s/List-X-NGM...

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In my latest list - if for some reason you're not already receiving these, and would like to do so, feel free to email [email protected]!

The contents: short folk tales of Hoca Nasreddin in Turkish, all on Italian export paper, marked with crescent moons as per, whose marks correspond to papers used in Ottoman documents in the last quarter of the 18th century. Which is to say: pre printed editions!

(I wonder if, like some of the pastedowns on early Bulaq imprints, this might be a more local effort though, in the early 19th c.)