Contemporary sources indicate that the books printed at Bulaq were appreciated in Turkey and found a market there, while the presence today of copies of these books in numerous libraries and private collections in Turkey is another clear indication of this. Dr. Perron, the director of Egypt’s School of Medicine, mentions in letters to friends that speak of the school and the press that the press printed the books that were officially set for compulsory use by educational institutions, that books were also printed at the expense of private dealers, and that the latter, not finding a large market in Egypt, would send them to larger markets, in Istanbul, Izmir, Thessalonika, and the other Arab provinces, to guarantee sales.28 In Perron’s letter of 1840, along with allusions to the sense of disappointment that was felt as a result of the military defeats and Egypt’s economic straits and references to the considerable decline of printing of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian books in Egypt, we find him sharply criticizing the Bulaq Press for difficulties he had met with when he requested the printing of al-Fayruzabadi’s Arabic dictionary.29 On the reasons for this, he says that there were at the time three printing presses in Istanbul and that the cost of printing a book there was much less than in Egypt. He then states that the movement of books for sale from Cairo to Istanbul was no longer as it had been but now went the other way, from Istanbul to Cairo.30 We must treat such statements with caution, given Perron’s personal animus against the press outlined above, since all the evidence points to the fact that books printed in Egypt were in fact not only sold in Turkey but sold well there. When we examine the subjects of the twenty-four Turkish books that have survived and that were printed at the expense of private concessionaires between 1839 and 1884 as well as the names of these concessionaires themselves, we realize that these books were printed specifically to address a broad segment of the reading public in Turkey rather than a limited number of readers in Egypt. The list of books from the Egyptian press that were on sale in 1874 in a shop belonging to a well-known bookseller called Tombekici Hasan in Bahgekapi in Istanbul,31 as well as the presence of copies of these books in numerous private collections there, indicate without a doubt that these books found a good market there even at that late date.32 However, given that the nature of the trade in and movement of books between Istanbul and Cairo has yet to be made the topic of a special study, it is difficult to say more on the subject.
World History
