Making Book History in Timbuktu

Abstract

In this chapter I introduce themes relevant to book history in Africa, with my material coming from a specific region in the arid interior north-western part of the continent which has a centuries-long tradition of books. These themes become clear through a discussion of the book copying, buying, collecting and, of course, the reading and writing activities, of three bookmen in Timbuktu that stretch from the early part of the twentieth century until 2013. I start from the present and more recent experience in the early twenty-first century. There is a contemporary scholar in Timbuktu (born in 1955), still very much busy, closely reading texts and writing; his now deceased teacher, an Arabic grammar specialist, manuscript copyist and scholar in his own right; and finally, and perhaps most importantly, the man introduced in the last part of this chapter, the zealous collector, the father of the teacher of our contemporary scholar, whose date of birth is usually given as 1864 and who passed away in 1955 (the year of the birth of the scholar I introduced at the start of this chapter). These three twentieth-century figures could be cast very broadly as ‘types’ in the book and scholarly world of Timbuktu and the larger north-western region of the continent.