Binding the Globe: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Hybrid Books

Book production struggled to keep up with the changing world of the sixteenth century. With the explosion of cartography, travel writing, and cataloguing, bound manuscripts, albums of engravings, printed texts, and atlases proliferated in all configurations. Through several case studies, this paper demonstrates the way in which the book form was at times augmented, manipulated, and customized in order to document the complex cultures of other lands. An edition of the Alphabetum arabicumat the Newberry Library printed by the Stamperia orientale in Rome in 1592 using black and red ink with woodcuts and type includes a manuscript addendum of French and Latin translations of Arabic texts. Various manuscript editions of the Turkish Tarih-i Hind-i garbi (A History of the Indies of the West) from circa 1600 reveal a different type of hybrid book, one not necessarily physically or materially altered or mixed but rather an amalgam in conception; The Tarihborrows from European travel writing and maps to tell the history through word and image of the Americas in Ottoman Turkish. Finally, Robert Dudley’s Arcano del Mare(Sea Atlas), published in 1646 in Florence, combines map, text, calligraphy, and printed image to document the waters of the world and their navigation. No two editions are alike, making clear that owners customized theses atlases. These hybrid books ultimately reveal the malleability of both the conception of the world and the configuration of the book in the late sixteenth century.