This week's #Tweetistorian is back. The poll has brought only correct answers! Let's talk about why. #bookhistory ~tw 1/10 https://twitter.com/HistorianofIran/status/1264830562449186816

What you regard a manuscript (MS) depends on your definition and, to a certain extent, on what you expect from it.
In modern print culture, a MS is the form your book takes before it is published (even though few people submit a handwritten version anymore). ~tw 2/10

The word MS itself does refer to something handwritten (manus - hand / script - written), so that's answer no 3 out of the way.
Once upon a time, writing was published in handwriting (or by reading it out loud). I have put together some thoughts: https://thecamel.hypotheses.org/2068  ~tw 3/10

Thus, a centuries-old text would have been a MS at one point, even if people encountered it as a print or a performance.
Yet, today we often encounter these same texts in a different format than the MS and often forget about that history. ~tw 4/10

We read those texts in a printed book or journal, maybe even as a digital edition? Frederick Elwert and Walter Edward Young, e.g., have published such an edition of al-Samarqāndī's *Kitāb ʿayn al-naẓar*. ~tw 5/10

https://pages.ceres.rub.de/ayn-al-nazar/ 

We also need to remind ourselves that the MS pages on our screen are only "digital surrogates" ( @RiedelDagmar). They are not the real thing and while they allow us to read and admire pages, they obscure much of the book aspects. ~tw 6/10
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Source:
https://researchblogs.cul.columbia.edu/islamicbooks/2012/08/14/digitalsurrogates/

Finally, a MS can be a stack of paper. It's not as neat as a bound book but then many MSS and printed books circulated often unbound first and again at different times. There were reasons aplenty why binding would not make sense. But we encounter those pages bound! ~tw 7/10

K. Hirschler suggests that in Hadith transmission, single quire or single (folded) sheet (folia/bi-folia) texts/MSS were part of living practices. They were bound only once those practices had seized to attract much attention. ~tw 8/10 https://twitter.com/visitHMML/status/1221542216344264705?s=20

Recycling, up-cycling, down-cycling were all a thing in premodern book culture. Pages were "stored away" (as in the Geniza) or reused as writing surfaces or to make bindings. Thus #bookhistory has to take archival practices into account. ~tw 9/10 https://twitter.com/QifaNabki/status/1126585854019940352?s=20

Let's conclude this Thread on #bookhistory with another poll. The next thread will be about Ibn Ṭūlūn, an author I have been working on for some time. Let's locate him first in time and space: Where and when did Ibn Ṭūlūn live? (this time, only one right answer.) ~tw 10/10