Printing · a Light

The first printed Arabic Qur'an survives in a single copy

Paganino and Alessandro Paganini printed an Arabic Qur'an in Venice between August 1537 and August 1538, the first anywhere produced with movable type. It was a commercial venture, apparently aimed at markets in the Ottoman lands, and it failed. The typesetting was full of errors, some of them mangling the Arabic beyond use, which made it worthless to any Muslim buyer. For centuries it was thought every copy had been destroyed, and a story circulated that the pope had ordered them burned. In 1987 the scholar Angela Nuovo found a surviving copy in the library of the Franciscan friars on the island of San Michele in Venice, where it had sat for four hundred years.

Venice · 1537 to 1538, rediscovered 1987