I like a short catalogue and this is that, a stylistic experiment, catalogued as concisely as possible. Ten items: from 1846 to 1920, including illustrated Urdu Shahnameh, Shakespeare in Urdu for the Parsi theatre of Bombay, illustrated Gulistan editions, fine work from a merchant's Lucknow private press, and the poetry of Bahadur Shah II, the last Mughal emperor. None of these titles are common. Some are true rarities.

Five items: 1797 Calcutta-printed satirical etching by James Moffat, a Scottish silversmith; rare Battala woodcut of a raja’s court, complete with musicians, dancers, dogs, and European officers; an astonishingly fresh chromolithographed view of Istanbul, captioned in Russian and Turkish, printed at Kazan in 1885; early bilingual prints by Baconnier, perhaps the finest lithographers active in French colonial Algiers, including Solomon, the famous Quraysh general Khalid ibn Walid, and the wonder-working Sidi 'Abd al-Aziz al-Hajj at Mecca; and a large and striking group of prints from the Fine Arts Press of Cairo, with subjects including Noah and Abraham depicted with their ark and son respectively, Antar ibn Shaddad, poet and knight, born to an Arab father and enslaved African mother, Abu Zayyid al-Hilali, medieval Arab knight and folk hero, the Buraq, pre-Islamic poet Zir Salim, Kulayb, writing a death note in his own blood on a rock, and Saladdin.

Ten items: including an imperial Mughal manuscript of Amir Khusraw Dihlavi’s Persian poetry, bearing the Emperor Akbar’s seal impression, its illustrations completed in the 19th century; a magnificent Qur’an from Harar, copied on Italian paper, endowed to his mother by Hassan bin Adojo, a man of West African descent in Diu, the principal Portuguese port of Gujarat, at the close of the 17th century; perhaps the finest Ottoman lithographed Qur’an I have handled, complete with slipcase; and the proceedings of a fictitious conference at Mecca, compiled by the Ottoman exile and reformer ʻAbd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, proposing Islam as the path to political renewal and the abolition of the Sultan’s rule.

Seventeen items: including a Mughal Gulistan on blue-dyed, gold-flecked paper, copied at Burhanpur in 1692; the first miniature book printed in India; an unrecorded Ottoman photography manual; an important lithographed Qajar history and geography of Fars; Ubaidullah Sindhi’s proposal for an Indian constitution; samizdat Arabic prayer books from Turkey; and a remarkable copy of a 1969 artist’s book, designed & illustrated by Saloua Raouda Choucair, its text a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, inscribed by the editor to Ghassan Kanafani.

Five items: a lithographed Ottoman juz’ endowed in the name of al-Hajj Mustafa Agha, 17th-century Chief Harem Eunuch; a charming, illustrated Istanbul lithograph of al-Jazuli’s Dala’il al-Khayrat; a Cairo broadside in verse with the arms of the Khedivate; an illustrated Istanbul broadside on the Prophet Muhammad’s letter to Muqawqis of Egypt, a treasure of the Topkapi; and a Tunis Qur’an printed on pink paper.

Six items: a remarkable Qajar lithographed scroll intended to protect a pregnant woman, dated 1264 AH (1847/8 CE), with illustrations of King Solomon & jinn; Cairo-printed album of calligraphy by the Daghestani master Celaleddin; fine Qur'an printed in Crimea by the Tatar reformer Isma’il Bey Gaspirali; lavishly illustrated Lahore bookseller's catalogue; and an unrecorded Hong Kong Qur'an edition in Arabic, English, & Chinese.

Five items: an astronomical and astrological manual, early example of Qajar lithographic illustration; a large and detailed plan of the Indus and its canals in Sindh from 1865; an unrecorded Singapore Qur’an, one of only three dated early examples known; an extensively illustrated Urdu edition of the 1001 Nights, from the famous Lucknow press of Naval Kishor; and an English-Persian dictionary, printed by Irish missionaries at Surat for its compiler, Mr Sorabshaw Byramji Doctor.

Five items: a printed edition of works by the controversial Kurdish Naqshbandi Diya’ al-Din Khalid al-Baghdadi (d. 1827); two sets of unrecorded Bombay nasta’liq calligraphy manuals; a polychromatic Maghribi manuscript prayer book; and a rare 1918 map of Baku lithographed at the press of an Azerbaijani nationalist newspaper.

Six items including: a Persian grammar written for the author's children, published by the Calcutta School Book Society; the first translations of Molière's comedies into Arabic; an inscribed copy of the first grammar of Avestan published for use by Bombay’s Parsi community; and a very rare and important manuscript of al-Farabi's Kitab al-musiqi al-kabir, compiled for and annotated by Ottoman musicologist Rauf Yekta Bey.

Five items, spanning five centuries, among them: an unusual Ottoman Qur’an manuscript, probably copied by an imperial illuminator, dated 1576; the first issue of the landmark satirical Persian newspaper Sur-i Israfil; and a miniature Qur’an printed in gold by the Glaswegian impresario of Victorian miniature books, David Bryce.