Books published by Sam Fogg Rare Books

On the far edge of the Christian world, often isolated or overwhelmed by Muslim cultures, the Armenians have produced a distinctive artistic tradition unlike any other. The collection in this book opens with objects from the great medieval periods in Greater Armenia and the Kingdom of Cilicia and later centuries are represented by paintings and books.The artists, including Ghazar, Arak'el of Gegham, Yovanes Gharietsi, Markos "The Illuminator," and Nagash Hovnat'nan, demonstrate to us how they were able to enrich their works by taking the best elements of Persian, Turkish, Greek, and Western European art and absorb and fuse them into a particular Armenian art.

This book is devoted to a monumental and superbly illuminated very large early fourteenth-century Mamluk Qur'an in muhaqqaq script. It constitutes the final part (Juz' 30) of a superb two-volume Qur'an of which the first volume is preserved in the National Museum in Damascus while the second volume, from which the present section originates, is widely dispersed. Remarkably, here the final part of the Qur'an is reunited with its magnificent and richly decorated double finispieces, thus reassembling what must have been among the most striking and lavishly illuminated sections of the entire manuscript.The high degree of inventiveness along with the overall quality of the manuscript point to the work of a master artist. Especially the geometric proficiency suggests the work of Muhammad ibn Mubadir, one of the leading illuminators in Mamluk Cairo at the turn of the thirteenth century. Although little is known of the life of this artist, his illumination in the Baybars al-Jashnagir Qur'an, now in the British Library, and a Qur'an copied in 1306-10 for an unknown patron, now in the Chester Beatty Library, constitute some of the most celebrated achievements of Mamluk Qur'an illumination.

Some books from this collection are very rare.

This catalogue offers a fascinating selection of books from China, Japan, Tibet, Nepal, Burma, Thailand and Java

For more than a thousand years, the paths of the Silk Road formed a complex web of trade, pilgrimage and intellectual exchange.

These works of museum quality, from an anonymous collection (one of the most important currently in private hands), were exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2005.