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1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928 and 1930. One manuscript, Cod.Or. 12.430, was a gift and has a dedication to Taeschner inscribed by the bookseller. (Taeschner also bought three Arabic and three Persian manuscripts from him.) Three Turkish manuscripts (Codices Or. 12.431-3) were acquired in Cairo in 1930-1; at least two of these had belonged to the library of Nürüddm Mustafa Pa§a; another was copied from an early 17th-centuiy manuscript of the Tevarih of ‘A§ik Pa§azade found in the al-Azhar Library in Cairo in the latter year, 1931, probably commissioned by Taeschner himself (Cod.Or. 12.440). (Another two Arabic manuscripts were also obtained from the same source.) A few individual items were obtained from German booksellers: Harrassowitz (in 1924, Or. 12.365) and Lafaire (1929, Or. 12.428). Another three were acquired from scholars: Max Meyerhof (1926, Or. 12.426); Franz Babinger (1929, Or. 12.427); and Georg Jacob (1931, Or. 12.429). Three manuscripts had originally been, or belonged to, vakfs (Codices Or. 12.341, 12.370, 12.438) - an Arabic manuscript, Cod.Or. 12.462, was donated as a vakf to a school in Üsküdar founded by the chief black eunuch Ya'kub Aga in 1090 (1679-80). The Taeschner collection which was thus built up throughout the years covered a broad range of genres and subjects, from Korans to works on musicology, from chronicles to divans, and from stories to archery. Absent are works on mathematics and natural science. There are two brief texts on medicine. Only a small number of the texts acquired seem to have been used by Taeschner - and annotated with pencil - for his scholarly work, foremost among these treatises on futuwwa (brotherhoods) and guilds as well as geographical works. As is clear from Taeschner’s notes on contents found on separate slips of paper in some mansucripts, he was not always aware of the type of text found in them. The collection contains a surprising number of rare and of, seemingly, unique items; among the latter category are Codices Or. 12.338 (possibly an autograph)! 12.340, 12.341, 12.346, 12.352-3 (two autograph copies of the Tdrih-i Lutfi) 12.394, 12.396(2,3), 12.397(1), 12.406(1), 12.408(2,3), 12.414-6, 12.421(1), 12.422(2), 12.427(4,5), 12.429(4), and 12.439(2). A further six pilgrimage manuals (Codices Or. 12.375-81) are equally undocumented in secondary literature. One of them (Or. 12.380) is an autograph of the early 19th century. Among the category of unique items should also be reckoned personal notebooks and miscellanies (mecmd'as), or combinations of them - this is the type of manuscript best represented in the collection by far - kept by, often, Ottoman officials or (obscure) poets, with administrative annotations, draft or model letters, verses, songs and other texts: Cod.Or. 12.359, 12.368, 12.372, 12.399-404’, 12.410-2, 12.418, 12.420, 12.425-6, and 12.434. Curiously, Or. 12.401 consists of a collection of poems gathered by Besfm which are mostly in celebration of the career of the poet and state offical, Halïmi, in the 1750s. Apart from a number of expensively produced manuscripts with elaborate multi-coloured headpieces