[BKARTS] A Call to Action for Letterpress Printers

["Peter D. Verheyen" <verheyen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A Call to Action for Letterpress Printers

210 BCE
The Chinese Emperor, Quin Shi Huang, burned most 
of the extant books of the time and executed many of the
leading scholars in his kingdom.

1483
Printing was forbidden to the Turkish population 
by command of the Sultan Bajazet II and again, in 1515 by Selim I.

1562
Friar Diego de Landa conducted an auto-da-fe in 
Mani, when he burned 27 books in Maya writing, leaving only 4
Mayan books for scholars to puzzle over.

1933
20,000 books are burned by the Nazis in a Berlin 
public square. Books that Goebbels referred to as holding ?....the
unclean spirit of the past.?

1981
Sri Lankan policemen and other government 
sponsored enforcers set fire to the Jaffina Public Library destroying
97,000 volumes, including many culturally 
important and irreplaceable manuscripts.

1992
During the Bosnian War, the Oriental Institute 
was attacked and 5263 bound manuscripts were destroyed along with
hundreds of thousands of Ottoman documents.

On March 5th 2007, a car bomb was exploded on 
Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. Mutanabbi Street is 
in a mixed Shia-Sunni area. More than 30 people 
were killed and more than 100 were wounded. This 
locale is the historic center of Baghdad 
bookselling, a winding street filled with 
bookstores and outdoor book stalls. Named after 
the famed 10th century classical Arab poet, 
al-Mutanabbi, this is an old and established 
street for bookselling and has been for hundreds 
of years. Mutanabbi Street also holds cafes, 
stationery shops, and even tea and tobacco shops. 
It has been the heart and soul of the Baghdad 
literary and intellectual community.

Any group that wants to control a people also 
wants to control the content of every printed 
page, and they inevitably come to regard any 
other unsanctioned page as a possible threat. 
Those that targeted Mutanabbi Street were? are, 
as much affronted by any novelist or poet as they 
are by any political or religious tract. They 
want ultimate control, and they will kill as many 
as they need to, until no other voice but their 
own leaves the printed page. Oppression extracts 
not just a terrible human toll, but it also 
subtracts the words and images of the 
writers/artists who hold and express the cultural memory of any people.

This is our starting point: where language, 
thought, and reality reside; where memory, ideas, 
and even dreams wait patiently in their black 
ink. We are extending our call to letterpress 
printers to contribute a personal response to the 
bombing on Mutanabbi Street. To date, we have 
received 42 broadsides which may be viewed at the 
Florida Atlantic University/Jaffe Center for Book Arts site:

www.library.fau.edu./depts/spc/jaffe.htm We would 
like to add to our existing archive, to bring the 
total to 130 broadsides, which is the approximate 
number of people killed and wounded on Mutanabbi Street that day.

For further information contact: Coordinator of 
Mutanabbi Street Broadside Project II, Lisa Beth 
Robinson, at robinsonli@xxxxxxx or Beau 
Beausoleil at overlandbooks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Mutanabbi Street starts here.

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