[STRANGENESS OF THE NEW WORLD / PLATE FROM THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED BOOK OF THE MUSLIM WORLD / THE HUNTING IN AMERICA] [Woodcut plate showing a hunting scene from the New World (America) by an archer...

N.A.

[Darü’t-Tiba’atü’l-Ma’mûre (Müteferrika Printing House)], [Kostantiniyye (Constantinople)], AH 1142 = [1730].

COMPLETE TITLE: [NEW WORLD’S STRANGE PLATE FROM THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED BOOK OF THE MUSLIM WORLD / THE HUNTING IN AMERICA] [Woodcut plate showing a hunting scene from the New World (America) by an archer, a jaguar, a strange crocodile and horse on a riverside, from the fourth incunable and the first illustrated book printed in Islamic world].

Original woodcut plate with letterpress text. Demy 8vo. (21 x 14 cm). In Ottoman script (Old Turkish with Arabic letters). Marginal wormholes with a slightly affected illustrated block on the upper left. Age toning and foxing, a couple of stains on the margins. Otherwise, a fair/good leaf. 

An important and exceedingly rare woodcut print showing a hunting scene from the New World (America) by an archer, probably a jaguar, a strange crocodile and horse on a riverside, from the fourth incunable and the first illustrated book printed in Islamic world titled “Tarih ul-Hind-i Garbi; el musemmâ bi-Hadis-i nev” [i.e., The History of the India of the West according to recent discoveries] by Ibrahim Müteferrika in 1730. Müteferrika was the first Muslim to run a printing press with movable Arabic type in 1729. The book is an example including the multiple firsts in the literature: It is the first book on the discovery of America, the first illustrated book, and the fourth incunable, of the Islamic world. 

This woodcut plate on leaf 86 (on the recto) of the book depicts a riverside hunting scene, an archer-hunter surrounded by strange creatures resembling jaguars, crocodiles, and horses.

“The book focuses on Central and South America, the regions’ 16th Century conquest by Spain, their peoples, places, flora, and fauna. The material consists entirely of translations taken piecemeal from five 16th-century Spanish volumes about the conquest of the New World. The content of these five volumes was probably made available to the original Turkish author via Italian translations. Venetian printers, after all, were among the few European traders who had access to Turkish markets for much of the late Medieval and Renaissance eras.

Given that much of the source material borders on fantasy (many of the original Spanish authors never even visited “New Spain”) the woodcuts executed by an unknown artist working solely from the descriptions in the text are highly imaginative.

The illustrations appear to be chosen for their wow factor, depicting images of the most unusual and foreign aspects of this unknown land. In the Muslim world, Tarih ul-Hind il-Garbi remained the definitive text about the New World for a culture that would share only limited contact with these faraway lands until the 19th Century.” (Cotsen’s Covert Collections: The First Illustrated Book Printed in Turkey, Ian Dooley).