Originally produced to accompany the ground-breaking exhibition in the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz in 2002, this is a lavishly illustrated catalogue of around 90 carefully chosen historic and rare printed items in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other Middle Eastern languages. As well as detailed descriptions of the exhibits, there are 15 essays, written by experts, on historical, cultural and technical aspects of the printing of texts in Arabic and other scripts over the last 1000 years.
This was the last book designed and produced by the late Theo Smets, a German master typographer specialising in the scholarly use of non-European scripts.