7

PREFACE

The enormous wealth of material that can be found in the Special Collections of Leiden University Library represents much more than an accumulation of individual items, brought together over four centuries. Each of the Leiden collections, whatever its scope and nature, tells a fasci nating story, about the vicissitudes of time and place, trends and directions in research, political, cultural and intellectual exchanges, tastes and predilections of scholars and librarians, conditions of the market as well as institutional and financial resources. In particular with regard to its Oriental holdings, the University Library can boast of a long and unbroken tradition of collection building, which began early in the seventeenth century, with the gift of the Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and Ethiopian books and manuscripts - 208 in all - of Josephus Justus Scaliger at his death in 1609, and is pursued to this day. The Oriental collections thus reflect the lasting interest, academic and other, in the Netherlands for the peoples and cultures of North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The Leiden tradition of acquiring books and manuscripts in this field may have a long history, yet it is far from coherent and uniform. This is amply shown by the ensemble of Turkish manuscripts, which in spite of its relatively modest size, constitutes an important section of the Legatum Warnerianum, the collection of Oriental manuscripts in the University Library. Up to 1800 the manuscripts arrived as a rule as part of scholarly libraries, which had been bequeathed or sold to the University. These man uscripts have been described in the first volume of this catalogue, pub lished in 2000. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, acquisitions were increasingly made through a variety of new channels, for example via the transference of manuscripts from other Dutch institutional collections such as the library of the Koninklijke Academie van Wetenschappen in Amsterdam, or by means of the expanding purchasing activities of the library’s curators at auctions and on the antiquarian book market both at home and abroad. This development is clearly visible in the second volume of the catalogue, published in 2002, which describes the Turkish manu scripts acquired between 1800 and 1970. The present, third, volume, which describes recent additions from the period 1970-2002, shows that old and new ways of acquisition could quite well exist alongside each other. A large part of the catalogue deals with the 131 manuscripts from the library of the German Turcologist Franz Taeschner (1888 or 1896-1967), professor at the Westfalische Wilhelms- Universitat in Münster, which was acquired through Brill’s antiquarian