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bookshop in 1970, while the numerous handwritten Albanian-Turkish madrasa schoolbooks were purchased straight from the private collection of the Bosnian scholar Salih Hajibegovic. Other texts, among which numerous unique items, were acquired from a former staff member of the library, Mrs. I. Acker-Van Eijk, who, like a modem Levinus Warner, had bought them in Istanbul in the 1960s and ’70s. With regard to their contents, the manuscripts present a wide variety of genres. Apart from miscellaneous works, there are many texts of a theolog ical and/or juristic nature, schoolbooks, literary anthologies, notebooks, specimens of correspondence, medical manuals and books of recipes, astrological and magical texts, as well as formal documents, such as fer- mans and letters of appointment of western consuls. Among the more exceptional items are a collection of signet impresses, a passport issued at Djedda in 1908 to a pilgrim from Java, and, a stray bird in the collection, the unpublished Italian description of the Ottoman Empire from around 1600. The oldest manuscript described in this volume dates from 1491, the most recent from the beginning of the twentieth century. With this third volume, the catalogue of the Turkish manuscripts in Dutch institutional libraries nears its completion. The project was started in 1998 on the initiative of Dr. Jan Just Witkam, former curator of the Oriental Department, with financial support from the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Dutch National Research Foundation, NWO). The aim of the project was to provide a complete and much more detailed, and at the same time more accessible description of the manu scripts than had been presented in earlier catalogues. The compiler, Dr. Jan Schmidt, has again done a splendid job meticulously listing the contents of the manuscripts, many of which are miscellanies and often contain Arabic or Persian texts besides their Turkish contents. In one instance, even a bookseller’s occasional jotting on the endpaper has been noted. As such the catalogue can stand as a model for similar descriptions of other collections for years to come. The fourth and last volume of this monumental under taking, the description of the Turkish manuscripts in Dutch collections which are not part of the Legatum Warnerianum is expected to appear in 2008. Leiden, August 2006 Kurt De Beider, MA, MLIS University Librarian Leiden University