A discussion of where, why and how parchment material was preserved in the Middle Ages, distinguishing broadly between books kept in libraries and documents kept in archives. The distinction between outgoing and incoming archives and a case study of two documents of the emperor Frederick II.

A detailed analysis of the medieval material in the Municipal Library at Chartres destroyed in the US air raid of 1944. This serves as an introduction to many aspects of the intellectual life of the Middle Ages. Discussion of work on the intellectual world of Chartres and of the birth of American Romantic medievalism.

Focusing on the eighteenth century, this chapter uses the surviving books from the manuscript library of the Buffalo Agency to reveal how Ibadi intellectual, religious, and commercial life in Ottoman Cairo intersected with that of their non-Ibadi contemporaries. Beyond funding the endowment for students at the Buffalo Agency, Ibadi merchants were also often the ones responsible for gifting or commissioning the books in its library. The books themselves included roughly equal numbers of Sunni and Ibadi titles. It traces the relationship of Ibadis with the famous (Sunni) al-Azhar Mosque and how the library of the Buffalo Agency reflects this relationship. In all cases, from the production of books to their endowment and use by students, Ibadis mirror the social and religious trends of their Sunni contemporaries in the Ottoman period.

The conclusion draws together the threads of the three key fields of colonial knowledge and shows some of the later trajectories of these rich archives. Australian data proved central to key ideas that were fomented during the nineteenth century, and which continue to affect contemporary society. Debates about civilisational orders, and about the role of science and religion in relation to the extension of imperial power and economic privilege, were widespread. The distinctive nature of the Australian colonial experiment continues to make important contributions to global debates about the history of humanitarianism and human rights, apologies and reparations sought by colonised and displaced peoples for the wrongs of imperialism and colonial governance, and the uneven distribution of wealth, up to the twenty-first century.

This chapter explores the reconstruction of intellectual sites in the aftermath of the war and the attempts to replace the knowledge that had been lost in warfare. It focuses on the reconstruction of the university libraries of Louvain and Belgrade and pays particular attention to not only the physical rebuilding of buildings but also the reconstruction of knowledge itself through the replacement of their collections. It also explores the reconstruction of Tokyo Imperial University in following the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. While the latter took place beyond Europe, it aroused great public sympathy and became part of the wider process of symbolic rebuilding. The chapter argues that cultural reconstruction was not just about replacing or repairing heritage sites that had suffered war damage but also about providing of the tools for the production and dissemination of new knowledge and symbolically pushing back against the ‘collapse’ of civilization.

This final chapter follows the journey of Jerban student Sālim Bin Yaʿqūb (d. 1991) from Tunisia to Egypt, where he lived at the Buffalo Agency in the twilight years of its existence in the 1930s. The chapter draws on a diverse body of materials including manuscripts from his private library, his research notes, and a recorded interview from the 1980s with him about his time in Cairo. He spent much of his life in the decades following his return from Egypt to Tunisia preparing materials for a book just like this one. Bin Yaʿqūb’s story is thus at once that of the gradual disintegration of the Agency and its library and the earliest attempt to preserve the memory of the Ibadi community in Cairo and the Buffalo Agency before it disappeared. Although he died before writing it, the idea for his book both inspired and laid the foundation for this one.

Late modernism in the US, lasting roughly from 1945 to 1960, is characterized by two simultaneous yet contradictory developments. In one, the techniques and, to a lesser extent, themes of international literary modernism continued to infuse America’s literary bloodstream, diversifying, spreading, and becoming part of the common artistic vocabulary, particularly for underground or countercultural movements. But at the same time, the major institutions of elite culture in the US such as publishers, universities, book-review magazines, and even foundations and the government gradually and then wholeheartedly adopted it in the 1950s and rewrote its history to create a kind of “official” modernism. If late modernism was a set of techniques bereft of a mission, Cold War modernism then voided the modernist project of any urgency or sociopolitical critique, reframing it as the highest expression of the self-satisfied liberal society that avant-garde modernism had always reviled.

Collecting and collector culture remain important aspects in the contemporary graphic novel, sustaining a relationship to the past that is tangible in material objects. While the representation of collectors is well known, this chapter charts a somewhat different aspect of collectors and the archives they assemble: it is less interested in graphic novelists as collectors than in their indebtedness to previous collections and the new uses they invent for them. This chapter attends to an earlier moment in the history of comics, one that precisely framed collecting as part of a media-historical conversation and in a context of changing ideas about cultural value, preservation, reproduction, and access, studying its long-term implications for understanding the archival impulse in the graphic novel today.

This chapter centers on the controversy between Lord Wellesley (1798–1805) and the Company’s Court of Directors over the College of Fort William. It shows that this controversy turned fundamentally on the danger Wellesley’s pet project posed to the Company state. The college served to aggrandize the governor-general at the directors’ expense and to establish his own legitimacy with multiple audiences. It would do this not through conciliation but through the projection of an image of grandeur consonant with a kingly territorial sovereignty. In a sign of the threat posed by Wellesley’s ideas, the directors continued to fear them long after his departure. Ongoing disputes over books, natural history, and scholar-officials suggested that his “revolution” was far from finished.

The Minerva Press brand was officially retired in 1820, but its reputation, influence, and significance as an avatar of literary excess persisted long past that end-point. Not only did its erstwhile publisher, A. K. Newman, continue a robust publishing business under his own name in the same premises for more than a decade, but derogatory references to the Press in popular media continued to rise in the decade following its demise. The epilogue begins with an account of the last two Minerva novels, belatedly published in 1821, and traces the press’s influence from them through its reputation in the 1830s and 1840s, concluding with a discussion of the fate of these countless works, long unwanted by copyright libraries, and an account of the publisher Henry Colburn, whose large-scale publishing business attracted many of the same criticisms in the 1820s and 1830s as Lane and Newman’s had done at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The epilogue concludes in the present day, examining recent reappearances of the Minerva Press in historical romance novels and exploring the affinities between popular fiction then and now.

The Mamluks’ patronage of literary and scholastic arts inspired written products remarkable for theirdiversity. During the era of Mamluk rule, bureaucrats, jurists, essayists, poets, scholars, and theologians generated legal compendia, religious commentaries, political treatises, trust documents, literary anthologies, historical chronicles, manuals of diplomatic and statecraft, and handbooks of urban/rural topography. These works have enabled contemporary researchers to revise long-standing interpretations of traditional disciplines, and to reconsider subjects previously regarded as inaccessible due to a presumed lack of sources. Topics addressed: literary theory, popular culture, historical method, rural life, gender relations, and religious diversity. Since the Sultanate presided over the central Islamic lands during their transition from the medieval to early modern periods (7th/13th-10th/16th centuries), the insights provided by these sources, and their revisionists, are reshaping the field of Islamic History. The chapter analyzes the context of patronage of literary products by the Mamluk ruling class, and other social groups with the means and inclination to do so. It considers the audiences reflected in their contents, the evolution of languages in which they were written (primarily Arabic, but representation of Persian and Turkish as well), their principal genres (poetry/prose), and the development of Historiography.

There is a tremendous need for disease-modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The pharmaceutical sector has expended considerable resources on AD drug discovery, yet to date have obtained regulatory approval for only one agent that slows AD progression. This has led to increased interest in identifying new AD drug targets and disease mechanisms. Academic laboratories can play a meaningful role in the validation of AD drug targets and the identification of molecular probes that modulate these targets. We discuss here how academic researchers can contribute to the AD drug discovery process. This includes examples of assays that have been used for AD small molecule screens within academic laboratories, and discussions on assay optimization for compound screening, the selection of molecular libraries, and the iterative process of compound optimization to identify molecules suitable for advancement to in vivo pharmacokinetic, safety, and efficacy testing. Finally, we outline how academic researchers might work with pharmaceutical partners in AD drug discovery, and note the pros and cons of such collaborations.

The growth of consumption in the eighteenth century helped produce new cultural practices associated with the Enlightenment. Books were a special sort of consumer good. Their proliferation and variety encouraged multiple modes of reading that changed the relationship not only between reader and text but between self and society. While novels invited “intensive reading” and encouraged the belief in an inner emotional world, books, newspapers, and ephemeral literature stimulated “extensive reading” and the formation of a vibrant public sphere. Although the public sphere was not as bourgeois, rational, and oppositional as Jürgen Habermas claimed, the circulation of print did broaden and intensify public discussion of reformist projects. Consumption also shaped Enlightenment sociability. The material environments of Enlightenment sites of sociability facilitated socio-intellectual interaction. Men and women ate meals at salons, sipped coffee at cafés, and sported new fashions in public gardens, giving rise to robust conversational publics. Such polite sociability softened social hierarchies insofar as it created a broad cultural elite among the nobility and certain professional groups, but it also created new forms of exclusion on the basis of wealth and property. Although plebeian sociability sometimes intersected with that of elites, it often unfolded in the separate arenas of the tavern, street, and marketplace. Gender, too, remained a vector of exclusion, though wealthier women devised ways to participate in salons and attend public gatherings.