Taking its cue from al-Mutanabbī’s celebrated verse, this seminar examines how Arabic literature imagines, narrates, describes, and aesthetically enacts relationships with books. Moving beyond books’ epistemic function, it attends to their material presence, the intimate bonds they foster, their social worlds, and the aesthetic wonder they generate in literary writing. Across Arabic literary genres, books appear as companions, cherished possessions, gifts, inheritances, and objects of desire, loss, grief, and wonder.

Centering Arabic literary traditions, the seminar invites comparison with Persian and Turkish literary cultures, tracing the circulation of books, manuscripts, and reading practices across these interconnected worlds. In doing so, the seminar reconsiders the Republic of Letters not merely as a network of authors and ideas, but as a material and affective community of books, readers, scribes, collectors, and libraries. Al-Jāḥiẓ’s evocation of the book as companion and source of cultivated pleasure, and Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī’s more ambivalent relation to books and writing, offer important points of departure. Walter Benjamin’s reflections on collecting and the intimate histories of owned books, Roger Chartier’s work on textual forms and reading practices, and Leah Price’s attention to the social uses of books offer productive modern interlocutors.

Possible topics include literary representations of intimate bonds with books—bonds of companionship, care, loyalty, desire, loss, and mourning—and of the practices, objects, and communities through which such bonds are expressed: collecting, gifting, lending, inheritance, preservation, and destruction; figures of readers, copyists, scribes, booksellers, and libraries; and the sensory and visual life of books—paper, ink, binding, calligraphy, ornament, color, margins, page design, and visual or spatial poetics, including shaped or tree poems whose arrangement on the page is integral to meaning. Together, these scenes and forms reveal how texts figure books as intimate companions and participants in human social worlds—objects of care, loyalty, ritual, loss, and mourning, as well as signs of ethical conduct, taste, prestige, and cultural belonging.

The seminar also welcomes work on libraries as literary, aesthetic, and social spaces—from Abbasid Baghdad to Persianate and Ottoman collections, and from manuscript culture to print and digital archives—as well as on contemporary nostalgia for paper, handwriting, and the singular copy. It also invites studies of cinematic and audiovisual representations of books, libraries, manuscripts, and reading, including films that translate book love from page to screen or figure books as companions, archives, fetishes, or endangered objects. Comparative, transhistorical, and interdisciplinary approaches across literature, film, and visual media are welcome, with literature at the center.