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Early Malay printing: an introduction to the British Library collection

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Early Malay printing: an introduction to the British Library collection

Annabel Teh Gallop, a curator in the British Library’s Oriental Collections, published this comprehensive introduction to the Library’s holdings of early Malay printed works in 1990. Spanning the period from 1603 to the late nineteenth century, the article uses the collection as a lens to trace the development of Malay printing across Europe, the Malay archipelago, the Middle East, and South Asia, arguing that the British Library’s assemblage represents nearly all the main developments in this history and offers an unrivalled resource for future scholarship.

Summary

Gallop structures her survey around three principal strengths of the British Library’s collection: European Malay imprints (including items from the George III Royal Library), the Abbe Favre collection of nineteenth-century mission tracts purchased in 1888, and material acquired through the Straits Settlements copyright deposit system from 1887 onwards. The narrative begins with the earliest European productions — vocabularies, phrasebooks, and Bible translations geared to merchants and missionaries — and follows the transfer of printing technology to Batavia, where the VOC maintained strict control over output for much of the eighteenth century. The dramatic expansion of the first half of the nineteenth century is then traced through the establishment of Protestant mission presses in Melaka, Penang, Singapore, Bencoolen, Batavia, Ambon, Kupang, and beyond, a spread driven largely by the London Missionary Society and its associates.

The second half of the article shifts focus to the emergence of indigenous Malay publishing, particularly in Singapore, where the Registration of Books Ordinance of 1886 created a systematic record of local production. Gallop highlights the transition from mission-dominated printing to a vibrant commercial industry producing syair, hikayat, kitab jawi, and peranakan translations of Chinese and Indian epics. The figure of Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munsyi emerges as a central protagonist, credited with involvement in nearly every stage of the printing process from type-casting to composition, and styled the “Father of Malay Printing.” The article also documents the surprising geographical reach of Malay printing, including imprints from Bombay, Colombo, and the Middle East, revealing a trans-regional book trade connecting Southeast Asian Malay communities with Indian and Middle Eastern publishing centres.

Primary sources inform the narrative at every level: Gallop draws on colophons, registration records in the Straits Settlements Government Gazette, the British Library’s own acquisition archives (including Richard Garnett’s 1888 recommendation for the Favre collection), and the physical characteristics of the books themselves — typefaces, watermarks, paper quality, and lithographic hands — to establish provenance and date imprints that lack explicit imprint lines.

Key Findings

  • The first Malay book printed anywhere was Frederick de Houtman’s Spraek ende woord-boeck (Amsterdam, 1603), a Dutch-Malay phrasebook based on his two years of captivity in Aceh; the British Library copy bears his autograph signature (p. 86).
  • The first complete Malay Bible in jawi script was published in five volumes at the Batavia Seminary Press in 1758, using Arabic types donated by the VOC printer Rudolf Wetstein in 1742 (p. 92).
  • The Abbe Favre collection, purchased by the British Museum in 1888 for £93 8s 2d, comprised 344 items including 150 Malay tracts printed mostly at Batavia, Melaka, and Penang between 1819 and 1846, originally assembled by the collector Henricus Christiaan Millies (p. 93).
  • Under the Registration of Books Ordinance 1886, printers in the Straits Settlements were required to deposit three copies of each publication with the Colonial Secretary’s office, one of which went to the British Museum; this system produced the greatest single strength of the Library’s early Malay collection (p. 107).
  • Of over 1,700 separate editions of 830 titles traced by Ian Proudfoot for the Malaysia-Singapore region between 1817 and 1920, 81% were published in Singapore (p. 105, n. 34).
  • The Syair Indera Sebaha by Muhammad Hassan bin Nasaruddin, derived from the Urdu musical drama Indar Sabha (Lucknow, 1853), reached its fourth edition by 1901 — a remarkable commercial success for a Malay syair — with illustrations that Gallop links to a Bombay edition facsimiled in Leipzig in 1892 (pp. 108–109).

Conclusion

Gallop’s definitive takeaway is that early Malay printed books have long been treated as the “poor relations” of Malay manuscripts, receiving far less scholarly attention and fewer high-quality catalogues. She argues that the field urgently needs the forthcoming comprehensive bibliography by Ian Proudfoot, and beyond that, systematic technical studies of typefaces, bindings, papers, inks, and decoration, as well as commercial and social histories of the printing craft. The British Library’s collection, she contends, is uniquely positioned to support all such research.

Context

  • The article draws primarily on the British Library’s own holdings (Oriental Collections, Department of Printed Books, and the India Office Library), supplemented by the Library’s acquisition archives and the Straits Settlements Government Gazette registration records.
  • Historiographically, the article serves as a curatorial introduction that synthesises existing bibliographic scholarship (van der Chijs, Ockeloen, Darlow and Moule, Teeuw) with close physical examination of the books themselves, filling a gap between reference catalogues and narrative history of Malay printing.

References