Description

A rare Persian lithographed book with five illustrations, printed in the Qajar period, contains a popular story of Yusuf, an Islamic version of the story of Joseph.

The book is charmingly bound in blue paper with a coat of arms, belonging to a Russian factory. The blind stamp in the margins inside was made by Татаровской протасьева Фабрика [Tatarovskoy Protasyev Factory], situated between Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow and founded after a local peasant Ivan Aleksandrovich Golyshev found larger sources of lithographic stone in 1858 and started his production of luboks, Russian popular broadsides. The factory was mostly making paper and lithographs for neighboring firms. They probably also traded with books, with our example being one of them. After the import from Persia, our book probably received a blind stamp from this Russian trader and a binding, bound in the leftovers of one of their prints.

Our catalogue September 2022, listed another example with a similar binding from the same provenience. CatSep22.pdf (pahor.de) No. 11.

Provenience: From a collection of a French orientalist, translator, politician and book collector Charles-Henri-Auguste Schefer (1820 – 1898). His collection and estate were sold in 1898 and 1899. A hand written-note with the title and the name of the author, inserted in the book, is typical for this collection and is attributed to Schefer.

References: Not in: Ulrich Marzolph, Narrative Illustration in Persian Lithographed Books, 2001.