Khalil Sarkis (1842–1915) was an eminent figure in late Ottoman Beirut and an important contributor to the nahḍa, the Arab literary-cultural “awakening” that began in the latter part of the 19th century. Less known to Western scholarship than Butrus al-Bustani, Faris al-Shidyaq, or Jurji Zaydan, he is not usually regarded as a pillar of that awakening. He may not have been, but he certainly was an indispensable brick in its edifice. Born in 1842, when the most exciting changes were still in the future, Sarkis spent all his life in the service of his country's cultural betterment. He is mostly remembered for his newspaper, Lisan al-Hal, which was launched in 1877 and for many decades was one of the most credible Arabic organs. More than a journalist, however, Sarkis was a pioneering printer, a prolific publisher, and the author of nine books. In the last quarter of the 19th century he built one of Beirut's largest printing businesses, which turned out several journals, hundreds of books, and numerous publications. In the 19th-century Middle East, being a printer often meant being a publisher; Khalil Sarkis was both on a grand scale.

What did “publishing” actually mean at that stage, and how did it come into being in the Middle East? In what follows I explore these questions, focusing on the formative period of Arab publishing from the mid-19th century to World War I. The emergence of this new practice was a central facet of Arab entry into the age of printing, a change of major historical implications. I examine it here through the prism of Sarkis's personal career, concentrating on private initiatives as distinct from those of governments and organizations.

As so often happens, the change did not occur evenly throughout the region. Rather, there were two foci of activity: Egypt, where government endeavors in the early 19th century accelerated during the second half, inspiring individual and group efforts; and Lebanon, where local and missionary ventures combined to push a surge of publishing activity. Toward the end of the century, mass migration of Lebanese to Egypt produced a confluence of the two, and by 1900 the region's cultural center of gravity was squarely set on the banks of the Nile. Elsewhere in the area similar developments were scarce. But the sounds from Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria reached other Arab provinces, and educated groups in the towns of Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and even the Hijaz became involved in the new exchange in print across provincial boundaries.

The advent of publishing and other related practices represents a largely overlooked side of the nahḍa. This point requires some elaboration, and I address it before returning to the story of Khalil Sarkis.

THE OVERLOOKED SIDE OF THE NAHḌA

The “Arab nahḍa” is a supple construct meaning different things in different contexts. In a cultural sense it usually refers to the upsurge of literary, linguistic, and journalistic creativity, primarily through the medium of print, which took place in Arabic-speaking provinces toward the end of the Ottoman era. It engaged the society's educated class in a discourse on novel questions, opened up new intellectual vistas, and encouraged the spread of literacy. A broad periodization sets its debut in the first half of the 19th century with a narrower one in the second half. The process lasted, loosely, until sometime in the 20th century, by most accounts until World War I.Footnote ¹Nahḍa is also used in a political sense, to describe outbursts of popular energy designed to attain national liberation, political freedom, or other such ends, with or without relation to cultural antecedents; this last use is beyond our concern here.

The cultural nahḍa as just defined is often mentioned in the literature. Scholars cite it and draw students' attention to it because it underlays many of the shifts that make studying modern Arab history so gratifying. For the most part, however, we seem to be concerned more with those other developments than with the nahḍa itself. Historians allude to it briefly when considering, at more length, changes in Arabic thought, public discourse on questions of identity, or expressions of protonationalism. Students of language and literature mostly explore nahḍa products for changes in literary genre and style. Both historians and literary critics are primarily interested in the movement's “luminaries,” the few well-known exponents of the “liberal age.” Neither group is usually concerned with what the nahḍa entailed beyond inspiring new thought and expressive genres.

There is much more to it, of course. In sheer quantity, the printed output during the nahḍa is striking. A survey by the Jesuit scholar Luis Shaykhu (Cheikho), a historian of Arab printing, lists 1,516 works produced in Beirut and Mt. Lebanon before 1900.Footnote ² The total print run of these titles must have reached many hundreds of thousands of copies. In addition, fifty-five newspapers and journals appeared in this country.Footnote ³ At least twenty-two presses were involved in this production. For Egypt, a study by the Egyptian scholar ʿAyida Nusayr has traced no fewer than 9,538 book titles printed from midcentury to 1900 in more than seven million copies, an astounding leap from the 867 titles she has found for the century's first half.Footnote ⁴ The number of Egyptian periodicals was likewise markedly larger than in Lebanon, totaling 394 between midcentury and 1900,Footnote ⁵ as was the number of Egyptian print shops after midcentury, 105 in Nusayr's lists.Footnote ⁶ I am quoting these figures up until 1900 because Shaykhu and Nusayr put them conveniently at our disposal. But in 1900, Arab printing was in the midst of energetic expansion, as reflected, for example, in the rapid spread of periodicals: 197 new titles in Lebanon and 216 in Egypt from 1901–14.Footnote ⁷ Books continued to appear with comparable zeal, and printing presses were proliferating commensurately.Footnote ⁸

Figures alone do not always tell us much. But the appearance of thousands of printed works in millions of copies where nearly none had existed several decades earlier surely signifies a major cultural shift. Covering every conceivable brand of writing, from religious tracts to romantic novels, this was a far more massive output, by many more people, than the works of familiar nahḍa luminaries. Treasures of the time-honored literary legacy, hitherto existing in a single manuscript or handfuls of them, came to be “published,” namely, brought to the public domain as widely circulated books, serialized items in periodicals, and affordable pamphlets. Newspapers and journals in particular represented a stark innovation: printed in a novel format and disposable after reading, they addressed issues previously beyond the horizon and offered interactive platforms for public exchange. Among the numerous products were those seminal works commonly associated with the nahḍa—a fairly small share of the whole—which played a pivotal role in molding modern Arab worldviews and self-perception: new Arabic-language lexicons and grammars, tracts on East–West relations, treatises advocating political reform, and journals preaching patriotism and freedom. With these came myriad lesser publications of diverse quality and taste, along with endless printed ephemera—posters and handbills, commercial forms, holiday greeting cards, train and theater tickets, and so forth—which we hardly ever consider because they are so trivial. By their growing ubiquity, these went a long way toward habituating people to the written word.

Produced within a short historic moment, this impressive yield entailed many other innovations. New forms of publicizing and disseminating came into being, from newspaper ads to modern bookstores. New forms of entrepreneurship appeared, which in turn gave birth to occupations unknown before: typesetters, proofreaders, wholesale book dealers, subscription agents, newspaper vendors, shippers, peddlers, reading-room foremen, and more. The outpouring of printed pieces encouraged the emergence of reading audiences, which cultivated new modes of reading and communicating information. These developments formed the threads that made up the lively fabric of the nahḍa.

In seeking to assess the significance of this “awakening,” our study stands to benefit from a close probe of the fabric for its constituent threads. This is indeed true of every historical inquiry, and the Arab nahḍa seems to offer a fertile ground for such a microhistorical exploration. In deconstructing this broad cultural development, at least three sets of issues should be examined: the mechanisms of turning handwritten texts into mass products and diffusing them; the texts themselves: their quantities, formats, contents, and emphases; and the consuming audience: their size, sociocultural profile, dynamics of expansion, and various modes of reading. Addressing these questions is essential if we are to assess properly the nahḍa's social and political implications. They should be scrutinized against the backdrop of political, economic, educational, and technological changes. In the present study I probe a limited issue that falls within the first set of questions noted here: the advent of Arabic book publishing in the Middle East.

PUBLISHING IN THE NAHḌA—WHOSE INITIATIVE?

Arabic printing in the Middle East, having begun hesitantly in the 18th century, gathered momentum only in the 19th.Footnote ⁹ Once it began in earnest, many players with different agendas joined the enterprise of turning written texts into mass products.

Private individuals were not the first to print in the Arab provinces. Governments and missionaries had preceded them. Government publishing was designed primarily to improve state control and as such is of little interest to us here. One conspicuous exception to this instrumental approach was the printing venture of Mehmet ʿAli (Muhammad ʿAli) in Egypt: under his command, several hundred books, often unrelated to the government's immediate needs, were translated or newly authored and printed.Footnote ¹⁰ This extraordinary initiative came to a halt even before Mehmet ʿAli exited the stage at midcentury. State printing in other Arab provinces came later and continued to the end of the century and beyond, on the whole playing a marginal role in the nahḍa.

Printing by Christian missionary societies was more important. Missionaries had long considered pious literature a prime proselytizing tool and had been printing in Islamic countries since the 17th century. In 19th-century Syria and Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq, Protestant and Catholic missionaries set up presses for educational and propaganda ends. Their contribution to the Arab cultural awakening in general, and to the development of publishing in particular, was manifold: they trained local printers, provided inspiration to local publishers, offered their shops for printing private works, and produced their share of the cultural-scientific output in Arabic.Footnote ¹¹

Private individuals first entered the field in the 1850s. Some of them regarded publishing as primarily a way of making a living, a trade with a promising potential notwithstanding the limited market. The market would become increasingly viable, they optimistically assessed, with the spread of literacy, a process palpably under way in the latter part of the century. The new pursuit also offered a bonus: satisfaction in contributing to the community's good through exposing the public to cultural and scientific treasures. Such a reward seldom sufficed for drawing individuals into the business, but it served as an additional incentive. (It might have been more important to the few literary and scientific associations set up in Lebanon and Egypt at the time with the declared aim of advancing society. However, although contributing to the nahḍa in many other ways, these associations had a marginal role in Arab publishing.Footnote ¹²) Individuals who engaged in publishing were in many cases press owners who had initially sold printing services and then moved into book or journal publishing for greater gain. Bookshop owners likewise shifted from retail to production. In addition, there were those who were neither printers nor booksellers but who entered the field for similar material considerations or for other motivations. I examine these different patterns separately for the sake of clarity while bearing in mind that the actual scene was anything but orderly.

As was the case with Khalil Sarkis—the publisher to whom we now return—there was much diversity in the dealings of people involved in publishing. Printers acted as booksellers, and enterprising individuals changed their roles in the book business as they moved from one product to another.Footnote ¹³ Sarkis was at once a printer, a book dealer and distributor, a journalist who promoted his publications in his own newspaper, and an author. He epitomized the nahḍa publishing enterprise with its many colors.

PRINTERS AS PUBLISHERS

Khalil Sarkis is not known to have left an autobiography nor are personal papers of his known to exist. Compilers of Arab celebrity biographies did not deem him important enough to include in their volumes. His life story comes down to us through numerous references by his colleagues and, indirectly, through casual personal comments in his own works.Footnote ¹⁴ While still a pupil at the American missionary school in Beirut, we are told, he was fascinated by the mission's press and used to spend time there as a helping hand and later as an apprentice. Once he graduated, he joined the press full time and became an expert printer. He subsequently acquired renown in that trade, casting letters for his colleagues' presses throughout the region. The midcentury years, a fateful period for Lebanon, was also a time when new horizons were beckoning to the gifted and creative. In 1868, at age twenty-six, Sarkis opened his own press in partnership with another graduate of missionary schools, Butrus al-Bustani, by then a prominent public figure and reputed intellectual.Footnote ¹⁵ In the nine-clause contract they signed, the two men agreed to name the press Matbaʿat al-Maʿarif (Educational Press), to invest 15,000 qurush each (a considerable sum then), to appoint Sarkis as director for a monthly salary of 450 qurush, and to set up a letter-casting plant and a book outlet along with the press.Footnote ¹⁶ The partnership became a family business when Sarkis married al-Bustani's daughter Louisa sometime later.

Matbaʿat al-Maʿarif was not the first private press in Beirut. In addition to three printing shops owned by Christian institutions,Footnote ¹⁷ six private presses had opened during the previous decade, reflecting the dynamic atmosphere of the Tanʾimat.Footnote ¹⁸ A central undertaking of the Sarkis-al-Bustani venture was publishing the three famous al-Bustani family journals, al-Jinan (Gardens) and al-Janna (Garden or Paradise), both from 1870, and al-Junayna (Little Garden), from 1871. But printing them did not keep Matbaʿat al-Maʿarif fully busy, even with the additional jobs it performed for other businesses. The partners could thus do what other printers in Beirut had been doing for a while and what members of the trade had been doing ever since Johannes Guttenberg—publishing books.

An incomplete list of titles printed in Matbaʿat al-Maʿarif during its six years under Sarkis's management (1869–75) contains twenty-three titles (plus a few with an unclear publication date). Among them are works by the two partners: volumes of al-Bustani's famous Arabic dictionaries, Muhit al-Muhit and Qutr al-Muhit, and a book by Sarkis, entitled Taʾrikh Urshalim (History of Jerusalem). There are also several school texts, works on history, poetry collections, and an edition of al-Hariri's Maqamat.Footnote ¹⁹ A yield of twenty-three books, perhaps a few more, in six years was consonant with the general output during that incipient phase of printing: it was close to the thirty titles turned out during the same period by veteran printer Yusuf al-Shalfun in his al-Matbaʿa al-ʿUmumiyya (opened 1861) and apparently more than the output of every other press in Beirut.Footnote ²⁰ A close analysis of subjects is beyond the scope of the present study, but the general categories were a portent for much of what nahḍa publishers produced in later years.

But Sarkis seems to have aspired to more. In 1875 he quit the partnership with his celebrated father-in-law, leaving the press to al-Bustani.Footnote ²¹ He started a new press all his own, on the upper level of the Ayyas family wakāla (business compound) in Beirut's Zuqaq al-Blat quarter, naming it al-Matbaʿa al-Adabiyya, or Imprimerie des Belles-Lettres. In October 1877, having obtained a license, he launched his semiweekly Lisan al-Hal, which immediately became one of the country's leading newspapers and remained so for a full century.Footnote ²² This debut coincided with the onset of rough times for free speech and publishing in the empire: sultan ʿAbd al-Hamid II, ever distrustful, employed censorship and punishment to muzzle exponents of new ideas, scaring many of them away. But Sarkis, smart and cautious, managed to keep afloat and even prosper, constantly modernizing his business equipment to the professional cutting edge. Al-Matbaʿa al-Adabiyya grew into a manifold enterprise: casting letters, selling printing services, and producing Lisan al-Hal and several other journals owned by Sarkis's colleagues.Footnote ²³ It also turned out hundreds of books, which were sold in the press's bookshop.

Speaking to a festive audience in 1902, on the Lisan's twenty-fifth anniversary, Sarkis reviewed his press's production. He revealed that during a period of eighteen years (unspecified), al-Matbaʿa al-Adabiyya had turned out 650 works on “literary, scholarly, religious, agricultural, and industrial” matters, with a total print run of 1.29 million copies, in addition to journals and other items.Footnote ²⁴ A list elaborating this striking output is not extant, and unless it surfaces (which is quite unlikely) our knowledge of what the press printed is bound to remain partial. Segments of it, however, may be reconstructed by exploring book collections in and out of the region, where many works of the press eventually landed. My search of the WorldCat bibliographic databaseFootnote ²⁵ turned up 192 different Arabic titles printed by al-Matbaʿa al-Adabiyya from 1876 to 1914. I recovered another 213 titles by browsing three additional sources: the Egyptian National Library (Dar al-Kutub) catalogue;Footnote ²⁶ Yusuf Iliyan Sarkis's monumental opus, Muʿjam al-Matbuʿat, claiming to comprise all Arabic books printed worldwide until 1928 (although less comprehensive than that, it does list many thousands of items in its 1,028 double-column pages);Footnote ²⁷ and Shaykhu's survey, enumerating 180 of Sarkis's products through 1900.

On the whole, then, these sources tell us of 405 books or booklets published by al-Matbaʿa al-Adabiyya, 310 of them by 1900 and 95 from 1901 to 1914. Representing a sizeable slice of Sarkis's claimed output of 650 books, these figures lend credence to that claim.Footnote ²⁸ This known part of his production already places him as one of Lebanon's most industrious, if not the largest, printers of the time. If Nusayr's findings for Egypt are trustworthy, Sarkis's business was more productive than any private press in that country as well, at least until 1900.Footnote ²⁹

Once again, a close scrutiny of this aggregate list for contents and trends must be left for another study, but some general observations are offered here. It comprises works from the old Arab literary heritage and modern items. Among the former are classic masterpieces, some appearing in local print for the first time: Alf Layla wa-Layla; Kalila wa-Dimna; the epics of ʿAntara bin Shaddad, Sayf bin Dhi Yazan, and Bani Hilal; Hariri's Maqamat; al-Suyuti's Miftah al-ʿUlum; and Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima. Modern works, original and translated, include poetry collections (dīwāns); novels and stories; books on language, history, and philosophy; and school texts. A substantial proportion of this rich rainbow are modestly sized pieces, skinny booklets in small format, typically individual stories or minor collections of poems, apparently reflecting the publisher's cautious strategy and his desire to render works affordable to an audience with humble means (we will return to these considerations later).

How did Sarkis choose his projects, and who else was involved in each choice? In the more simple cases, his press collaborated with authors who had approached him with works they wanted printed; he served as a technical link in a publishing chain initiated by others. More important for our purposes are publications of which Sarkis was the architect. A savvy intellectual and keen businessman, he identified classic or modern works that looked at once culturally worthwhile and profitable and fed them into the production line. Sometimes he assumed editorial duties, a task well befitting his skills, or he collaborated with a colleague—as he did, for example, with Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's Kalila wa-Dimna, which he published in 1884. As the title page reveals, it was a joint project of Khalil al-Yaziji, who “edited, corrected, and annotated it,” and Sarkis, who printed it. Sarkis also authored some of the books he issued, as was typical of individual publishers at the time. Among his works were a six-volume set of school readers, a tract on manners and ethics, and a charming cookbook, Tadhkirat al-Khawatin wa-Ustadh al-Tabbakhin (Ladies' Guidebook and Master-Chef), with hundreds of recipes “in manners of the East and West.”Footnote ³⁰

Like Aldus Manutius and William Caxton, the masters of Europe's incunabula age, and like so many of their professional heirs down to the 19th century, Khalil Sarkis was at once a printer-publisher, editor, writer, and bookseller. Like their 15th-century vocational forefathers, he and his Arab colleagues had to build the production and distribution machineries and create their own markets. Needless to say, there were differences between the European publishing antecedent and the Arab experiment: cultural, philosophical, and organizational disparities affected the pace, scope, and manner of making written texts a mass commodity in each of these societies. Above all, the Arab consumer market displayed less zeal and more circumspection toward printed products, a mighty hurdle that checked development. Nonetheless, the emergence of Middle Eastern publishing had much in common with that of early modern Europe. Large pools of classic texts existed in both periods and places, and new works were produced continuously. It was up to the printer's intuition and feel for public taste to choose publishable pieces that would serve readers' interests and his. If a learned man, he turned to the great works of his society's written heritage, relying on their eternal value to guarantee circulation and profit. To select recently authored works to that end, he used his business acumen. He printed them whole, in part, as sections in anthologies, or in all of these forms and reprinted them repeatedly according to demand. The printer-publisher secured a license when one was needed; took charge of printing, copyediting, and binding; advertised the work in his own paper if he had one or in a colleague's if he did not; and distributed the work through a bookshop that was or was not his own. The more ambitious businesses also publicized their books out of the province or region and recruited agents to circulate them there.

OTHER ENTREPRENEURS

Other than printers, the people most commonly involved in bookmaking were bookshop owners. Bookshops concern us in two ways—as a breeding ground for publishing initiatives and as diffusion channels.

Khalil Sarkis owned a press and a bookshop, and both were inextricable parts of his publishing venture. But booksellers who were not printers were also drawn into publishing, inspired by their experiences in the trade. Bookshops, an ancient business adapted to modern needs, comprised a broad range of sizes and resources. Engaging in publishing would have been dangerously adventurous for the smaller ones and indeed inconceivable. However, owners of larger places, usually driven by a quest for material gain, often followed a course similar to that of printer publishers. They identified a text as classical or contemporary, with a marketable potential as a whole or in part, secured a publication license, had the book edited, took it to the printer and binder, advertised it in the press, and sold it in their own shop and elsewhere. For example, a seventy-six page dīwān of the 8th-century poet Shams al-Din al-Tilmisani (alias al-Shabb al-Zarif) was produced “at the expense of al-hajj Lutfallah al-Zahhar, owner of the Wataniyya bookstore” in Beirut, who had it published by Sarkis's press (1885) and sold it in his own shop. It was published again “at the initiative and expense” (bi-ʿināyat wa-nafaqat) of al-Maktaba al-Ahliyya in the same city (1909), where it was also sold (yubāʿ fihā). ʿAbd al-Rahim al-Buraʿi's opuscule Mawlid al-Nabi (forty-seven pages), printed in Egypt in the early 20th century, was “published at the expense of Muhammad Imbabi al-Minyawi, bookseller [kutubī] at al-Azhar square in Cairo” and printed at “Matbaʿat al-Maʿahid near al-Jamaliyya.” In all of these instances the bookseller-publisher had no printing equipment of his own and had to buy the services of a press. Scores of works by contemporary or historic authors were produced this way, with bookshops acting as publishers, as we are told by their title pages.Footnote ³¹

A note in a work that ʿAbdallah al-Rifaʿi, owner of the Rifaʿiyya bookshop in Tripoli (Syria), published “at his expense” is worthy of attention.Footnote ³² The last two pages of the twenty-four-page booklet feature an ad promoting the shop, a common practice then. It listed seven other works by the same author that the shop had published previously. In addition, the announcement stated that al-Maktaba al-Rifaʿiyya possessed another seventeen manuscripts by that same writer that it intended to publish, and sponsors were invited to underwrite their production (“Whoever wishes to print any of these works may do so through an arrangement with us”). The texts to be printed had been selected, then, and the bookseller had to raise funds to defray the costs.

Who responded to such a call and for what motives? This brings us to yet another kind of initiative, one by individuals who engaged in publishing without being either printers or booksellers. Once again, a common incentive was simply profit. One could take up offers like that of ʿAbdallah al-Rifaʿi, the Tripoli bookseller, to share costs and revenues.Footnote ³³ Prospective sponsors also launched their own initiatives: they traced a text, paid for its production, printed their name on the title page as sponsor, and hoped for receipts that justified the investment. Books financed this way in Lebanon usually carried the formula “ṭubiʿa bi-nafaqat . . .”; in Egypt such entrepreneurs were known as multazimūn, namely, those licensed to publish a given work, and the product was presented as “ṭubiʿa bi-iltizām . . .”Footnote ³⁴ Numerous books from this period in both places feature such formulae on the front page or in the colophon.

Was sponsoring publication a smart business investment in the late 19th-century Middle East? That many of these individuals, probably most of them, were involved in such projects only once suggests not.Footnote ³⁵ Although production costs were slight, so were the gains one could expect if successful. The reader market was small and unfriendly due to widespread illiteracy and indigence that disqualified large parts of the community as potential consumers. Unless one owned a prosperous press or bookshop and could produce individual titles relatively inexpensively, the chances for profiting from publication were small.Footnote ³⁶

Although profit may well have been the default motivation for sponsoring publication, there were other incentives. An idealistic desire to contribute to the edification of society was a familiar mark of the nahḍa, inspiring many writing, translation, and publishing projects. Some affluent people sponsored authors and journalists and redeemed rare manuscripts by publishing them.Footnote ³⁷ Publishers frequently claimed to be driven by such noble aims: “I am but a servant of the government and our beloved homeland. I have devoted all my powers to this sacred service,” Khalil Sarkis stated when reviewing his accomplishments over the years.Footnote ³⁸ There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of such asserted patriotism, even when coupled with material considerations. Patriotic sentiments were paralleled by religious ones, and those who harbored them had the community's well-being in mind while producing and disseminating texts. Sentiments of this last kind had informed missionary publishing activities since much earlier and inspired similar initiatives by Islamic societies in the 20th century. They also appeared during the nahḍa. The printing of a book “at the expense of a group of Hijazis and Syrians from a transcribed copy in the collection of Shaykh al-Islam Hasan Husni effendi” seems to have been prompted by a wish to facilitate diffusion of the rare copy among believers rather than by a quest for material gain.Footnote ³⁹ Such was the case with the famous shaykh Abu al-Huda al-Sayyadi al-Rifaʿi, head of the Rifaʿiyya order in late 19th-century Istanbul, whose many writings were published by members of the order apparently out of reverence for their master.Footnote ⁴⁰

Finally, another incentive not to be underestimated must have been the human urge for self-publicity, even at the cost of printing a book that might not sell. Few admitted to being so driven. But we may well assume that some who underwrote book publication were impressed by the amplifying power of print and invested the modest sum only to see their name on a title page.

MINIMIZING RISKS AND EXPENSES

The formidable economic obstacles created by illiteracy and poverty have already been alluded to. Publishers naturally sought ways to minimize their risks. One way was to produce modest works at meager cost: thin booklets in small format, cheap to make and relatively easy to sell—similar to 17th- and 18th-century European chapbooks. Typical was a thirty- to sixty-page softcover piece printed on poor paper and often error ridden, its coarse appearance bespeaking the economic constraints affecting its production. It could be a short story or play, an abridged novel, a selection of old or modern poetry, a casual chapter in history, a religious tract, or any other text made to fit the format. A considerable share of Khalil Sarkis's turnout—perhaps one half—consisted of such thin, inexpensive pieces suited for the small market. More research is needed before we can say whether this ratio typified the overall nahḍa harvest, but the pervasiveness of the phenomenon is beyond question.

A June 1880 note in Lisan al-Hal announcing the upcoming publication of the epic Alf Layla wa-Layla in a three-volume edition calls upon readers to “subscribe”—to pay in advance and receive the volumes as they appeared.Footnote ⁴¹ This brings us to another method of making books at a reduced risk: subscription, an arrangement allowing publishers to plan production according to expected sales. The publisher declared his contemplated project before starting production or in its early stages and offered advantageous terms (discounts, comfortable payments) to buyers committing themselves beforehand. Actual printing often started only after a sufficient number of subscribers had been assembled to cover expenses and ensure profit. Born in 17th-century England, the practice spread into Europe and North America, where it was widely applied until the 20th century. It became routine in effectuating large projects such as multivolume encyclopedias (including the Britannica and Grande encyclopédie), dictionaries, and large sets of literature and poetry, as well as more modest works.Footnote ⁴² The method was pursued for individual ventures and, most popularly, in “reading club” deals involving multiple titles and long-term commitments by publisher and customers. On the whole, the option to share expenses with future customers encouraged publishing initiative and thus contributed to the development of the industry wherever applied.

In Arab publishing, subscription was adopted at an early stage. The elegant term devised for it was ishtirāk, literally participating or sharing, and subscribers were called mushtarikūn. It began with the Arabic press, where subscription was at first the only way to buy papers, and was later applied to book selling. We hear of it in the 1860s, when Butrus al-Bustani launched his large-scale publication projects and relied on prospective buyers to finance them. He began with his two-volume dictionary, Muhit al-Muhit, printed by the al-Bustani-Sarkis Matbaʿat al-Maʿarif; customers paid 200 qurush in advance and after receiving the first volume were asked to pay another installment so as to permit production of the next. “Needless to say, our interest in bringing the project to completion is incomparably bigger than yours,” al-Bustani reassured his customers, indicating that further progress in printing depended on their additional payments.Footnote ⁴³ Advancing with production, al-Bustani periodically offered improved financial arrangements to attract more buyers. He also set a deadline for joining the deal, after which prices rose markedly. “Whoever joins between now and the end of February will pay 4 Majidi liras, provided the money reaches us by then,” he announced in early January 1870. After that, “the gates of subscription will be locked,” and the price would rise to five Majidi liras “at least.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Such rules came to characterize the practice. In 1874, when al-Bustani started his most ambitious enterprise, the multivolume encyclopedia Daʾirat al-Maʿarif, he again financed it with customers' subscriptions. “Printing large books of this type is impossible in any country except through subscription,” he enlightened his clients, urging them to notify him of their intention to buy, since “the number of copies in a publication like this would depend on the number of subscribers.” Customers cooperated; Daʾirat al-Maʿarif had hundreds of subscribers throughout the region who paid their dues regularly and received their volumes on time until al-Bustani's death caused the project to slow down and eventually come to a halt.Footnote ⁴⁵

Prior pledges, advances, and periodic payments by customers minimized risks to the publisher. In large projects involving massive expenses,Footnote ⁴⁶ the arrangement was indispensable. But the method was also applied to modest, single-volume works: a book on the history of Damascus, a commentary on the Ottoman legal code, a treatise on plants and flowers, a manual for tailors, a popular guide to medicine, and many more were all offered to the public through prior subscription.Footnote ⁴⁷ From the 1870s onward, subscription was used regularly both in Lebanon and in Egypt. It should be born in mind that our knowledge of this routine comes mostly from publishers' announcements of intentions, which are often rich in details about the proposed deal but seldom tell us about its actual implementation. Still, their frequency suggests that publishers and would-be publishers considered printing by subscription to be a promising formula, presumably because it had proved effective on many occasions.

A variation of the subscription routine appeared in attempts to start reading clubs along the European example. One such experiment was made by Yusuf Shalfun, owner of al-Matbaʿa al-ʿUmumiyya in Beirut. In 1866 he announced a subscription plan to be run by his press: participants would pay an annual sum of fifty qurush plus postage, for which they would receive a new book every month.Footnote ⁴⁸ It does not seem to have worked, however: we do not hear of it subsequently, nor were there more such offers in the sources explored for this study. Perhaps making a long-term commitment to buying works with titles that were as yet obscure strayed too far from customary notions on books and their use.

REACHING OUT TO THE PUBLIC

Putting unprecedented quantities of writing at the public's disposal necessitated effective channels of diffusion. The introduction of printing to the region occasioned this new necessity and provided a powerful device to address it: the periodical press with its advertising mechanisms. Journal buyers, the social segment both literate and capable of purchasing papers, also formed the natural clientele for books. In addition, the press, a quickly expanding medium, became the best source of intelligence on the appearance, prices, and sales of new works. It often offered advice on how to read them as well.

For publishers who also owned a journal, informing readers of new books was easy. Khalil al-Khuri, founder of the first (and very durable) newspaper in Beirut, Hadiqat al-Akhbar (News Garden), regularly devoted space in it from the outset (1858) to promote books printed by his own press, al-Matbaʿa al-Suriyya. Khuri referred interested buyers to the paper's office (maktab), which thus became an access venue for books—a distribution channel to which we shall return.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such was also the case with Khalil Sarkis during his partnership with al-Bustani: the two advertised the works they printed in the journals al-Jinan and al-Janna, likewise products of their press.Footnote ⁵⁰ When Sarkis later opened al-Matbaʿa al-Adabiyya and Lisan al-Hal, he used the paper as a matter of course to announce new publications; by the early 1880s rarely would an issue of Lisan appear without ads for Sarkis products.

Because there were more bookmakers than newspaper owners, many of the former paid for the press to publicize their works. The Arab press advertised books with increasing frequency, juxtaposing them with ads for dentists, home appliances, fashion goods, and magic health pills. Most notices were brief, indicating title, author's name, and price, sometimes within a list of multiple items as well as a place of sale. Others were lengthy and ornate—for example, a note in an 1871 Lebanese journal hailing the virtues of a new book in rhymed prose (sajʿ) over two pages.Footnote ⁵¹ By the early 1880s it had become customary for authors and publishers to send copies of new works as gifts to journals, which reported the debut, normally in a laudatory tone. Periodicals in Beirut, such as al-Muqtataf and Thamarat al-Funun, had regular sections for that purpose, as did the Egyptian al-Hilal in the following decade. These promotional notices went a long way toward bringing printed works to the emerging readership's attention. There were more ways of advertising—by using books to announce other works from the same printer or publisher, for example,Footnote ⁵² but no medium seems to have had as much potential effect as press promotion.

Scarce consideration has been given to another vehicle for bringing printed texts to people's attention: their physical presence in the public domain through rapidly proliferating bookshops and vending places. Selling books, we recall, was another part of Khalil Sarkis's publishing enterprise. This was hardly a new calling: before printing, traders bought and sold manuscripts in local markets and across borders, and their businesses were common features of many cities. A person wishing to buy a book approached one of these traders—a warrāq, ṣaḥḥāf, or kutubī—who sold him a copy, obtained it for him from afar, or had it copied from an available text.Footnote ⁵³ By and large, it was a modest trade and somewhat elitist; after all, it dealt with goods whose consumption required training that only few had. With the mass influx of texts after the coming of printing, this occupation changed to meet the new scope of production and demand. This meant an expansion of book businesses commensurate with that of publishing—a development that was a conspicuous facet of the literary awakening.

Bookshops of the printing age came to be named maktaba. In earlier times this term had usually designated a library or book collection, and a book dealership had simply been known as dukkān, maḥall, or makhzin—generic terms for depots of any merchandise. Early book ads indeed referred customers to a dealer's “shop” or flatly noted that the books were to be found “ʿind” (at [the place of]) so-and-so. The seller's name was often given without an address, presumably because his business was publicly known: books were sold in the dukkān of al-khawājā Habib al-Jalakh in Beirut; in the makhzin of al-khawājā Fathallah Tajir in that city; ʿind al-khawājā Dimitri Hamawi in Damascus; or more generally “in shops known for selling books” (al-maḥall al-mashhūr bi-mabīʿ al-kutub). Footnote ⁵⁴ At other times the location was loosely indicated: ʿind ʿAlwan effendi al-Ghurafi in the perfumers (ʿaṭṭārīn) market, ʿind al-khawājāt ʿArab and Milha near Citadel Gate, or in the dukkān of al-sayyid Muhyi al-Din al-Kubba in the butter (sammāna) market.Footnote ⁵⁵ The name maktaba appeared in the late 1870s and became standard only in the 1880s, singling out books among the other goods sold in “shops.”

Khalil Sarkis's bookshop was obviously one of Beirut's largest, and his business was well known to all. Judging by the substantial capital he initially invested in his joint venture with al-Bustani, he was sufficiently well off from the start to build his multipurpose enterprise of printing, publishing, advertising, and selling all under one roof. There were more such big undertakings in the region, among them the book outlets opened by leading newspapers and journals to supplement their other activities. However, most Arab bookshops of the time were markedly smaller than those of Sarkis and the journals. A great many of them were tiny, one-man operations in market alleys whose owners labored to eke out a living by selling printed items—newspapers, journals, and books, in that order—alongside other goods: stationery, postage stamps, school paraphernalia, and items unrelated to printing, such as toys and gifts. For example, Amin Hindiyya's maktaba in Cairo, which in the early 1890s sold “all kinds of Arabic, Turkish, English and French publications,” also carried paper, writing tools, and “a range of goods from Istanbul and Europe: silk buttons, light slacks, tarbushes, and bath robes”Footnote ⁵⁶ —a colorful phenomenon that had typified the emergence of book retailing in other times and places.Footnote ⁵⁷ Numerous such shops popped up throughout the Middle East during the last quarter of the 19th century and subsequently.

Amin Hindiyya was apparently a capable businessman, like Khalil Sarkis, and by the end of the century he began publishing and marketing his own products,Footnote ⁵⁸ representing the more resourceful brand of booksellers who looked beyond small-scale retailing and sought more profitable projects. They acquired printing gear and became bookseller-publishers like Hindiyya, initiated book-subscription programs, started book-lending plans in their shops, or launched other imaginative ventures.Footnote ⁵⁹ Such efforts to render books more accessible (and hence more profitable) were instrumental in drawing public attention to printed texts. Book outlets multiplied dynamically, and by 1914 there were many scores of them in towns small and large throughout the region.