 Description
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"This booklet is connected with some of the items of great interest and beauty in the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books of the British Library, formerly part of the British Museum. Historically, the collections of this Department date from 1753, when the British Museum was founded. Among the items in the collection of Sir Hans Sloane acquired by the Museum in that year were twenty Tamil palm-leaf manuscripts – then valued as a botanical ‘curiosity’.
Thus, writing materials of the East featured in the Museum’s collection from its inception. Though the Department of Oriental Manuscripts & Printed Books caters primarily for a scholarly clientele, many of its items are also of general interest, some could even correct many a long held prejudice: the first mechanically produced book is, for example, not the Gutenberg Bible but a Chinese translation of a Buddhist work printed in ad 868. indeed literacy itself – as the present booklet illustrates – the bedrock of our modern technology, came to Europe from the Orient; in the field of human achievement it is often difficult to draw a clear dividing line between East and West.
Examples of most of the materials dealt with here can generally be seen in the British Library’s exhibition galleries in the British Museum building."
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