$43.2 million for US Constitution first printing

 

 

Sotheby's auctioned a copy of the US Constitution printed in Philadelphia on Sept. 17, 1787, the last day of the Constitutional Convention. Out of 500 printed, only 13 remain extant. (The manuscript copy signed by the Founders and displayed in the Rotunda of the US National Archives in Washington was penned months later.) The auction price, $43.2 million, was three times higher than Sotheby's estimate. This copy last sold for ... The identity of the winning bidder has not been announced, but the losing bidder was a crowd-funded effort by more than 17,000 people, "many of whom professed their affection for cryptocurrency and the cinematic works of Nicolas Cage, star of National Treasure," according to NPR.

To explain this remarkably high price, commentators refer to the Constitution's iconic status. The Guardian quoted David Brigham, the chief executive of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, saying "this auction and the interest in it reflects something much deeper – the intrinsic value of the US constitution and the fact that it remains the force that binds this nation together. ...  even in a digitised world, being able to see and hold a real document from the time of the Constitutional Convention is a powerful thing.”

Heirloom edition of graphic-novel style Divine Comedy

 

Here's another example of creating new iconic books. George Cochrane and his team are producing an heirloom edition of Dante's Divine Comedy in graphic-novel style.

Note the various editions in different price ranges, up to hand-coloring pages of the buyer's choice in the $10,000 edition.

 

 

Great Bible of 1539 on Twitter

The Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge) is providing frequent Twitter updates on its scientific analysis (including X-Ray Fluorescence, microscopy, and spectroscopy) of a presentation copy of the Great Bible (1539) thought to have belonged to either Henry VIII or Thomas Cromwell. See https://twitter.com/1539Bible.

 

They invite "your thoughts, comments and suggestions as the research unfolds."

Qur'anic Matters by Natalia Suit

New book by Natalia Suit, Qur'anic Matters: Material Mediations and Religious Practice in Egypt (Bloomsbury, 2020).

The publisher's description: In Qur'anic Matters, Natalia Suit explores the materiality of books, focusing on the mushaf. With its paper, binding, ink, and script, the mushaf is not simply a carrier of the Qur'anic text but, by the virtue of its material body, it also has the ability to engender reformulations of religious knowledge and practice. Reading the Qur'an on a screen of a phone, for example, does not require the same forms of ritual ablutions as reading a printed text. The rules of purity limiting the access to the Qur'anic text for menstruating woman change when the Qur'anic text is mediated by digital bytes instead of paper.

Qur'anic Matters spans the time between two important technological shifts-the introduction of printed Qur'anic books in Egypt in the early nineteenth century and the digitization of the Qur'an almost two centuries later. Throughout, Natalia Suit weaves together the theological, legal, economic, and social “presences” of the Qur'anic books into a single account. She argues that the message and the materiality of the object are not separate from each other, nor are they separate from the human bodies with which they come in contact.

Contents:
Preface
Introduction
Part I: The Makers
1. The Beginning(s)
2. Pens, Letters, and the Politics of Correctness
3. Qur'anic Icons
Part II: The Custodians
4. Debating Defects
5. The (Ortho)Graphic Blueprint
6. What the Eyes Can't See but the Hands Can Touch: Mushaf in Braille
Part III: The Users
7. How Printing Created Manuscripts
8. Uses and Abuses
9. Enacting the Electronic Qur'an
Conclusion

How and Why Books Matter

 

What I have learned from 18 years of the Iconic Books Project—now collected together in one place:

How and Why Books Matter: Essays on the Social Functionof Iconic Books, from Equinox, 2019. 

Religious and secular communities ritualize some books in one, two, or three dimensions. They ritualize the dimension of semantic interpretation through teaching, preaching, and scholarly commentary. This dimension receives almost all the attention of academic scholars. Communities also ritualize a text’s expressive dimension through public reading, recitation, and song, and also by reproducing its contents in art, theatre and film. This dimension is receiving increasing scholarly attention, especially in religious studies and anthropology. A third textual dimension, the iconic dimension, gets ritualized by manipulating the physical text, decorating it, and displaying it. This dimension has received almost no academic attention, yet features prominently in the most common news stories about books, whether about e-books, academic libraries, rare manuscript discoveries, or scripture desecrations. By calling attention to the iconic dimension of books, James Watts argues that we can better understand how physical books mediate social value and power within and between religious communities, nations, academic disciplines, and societies both ancient and modern.

How and Why Books Matter will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in books, reading, literacy, scriptures, e-books, publishing, and the future of the book. It also addresses scholarship in religion, cultural studies, literacy studies, biblical studies, book history, anthropology, literary studies, and intellectual history.

Series: Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts

Table of Contents: 

Introduction: The Iconic Books Project  1-5

Chapter 1 How Books Matter: The Three Dimensions of Scriptures  7-29

Chapter 2 Iconic Books and Texts  31-54

Chapter 3 Relic Texts  55-69

Chapter 4 Iconic Digital Texts: How Rituals Materialize Virtual Texts  71-81

Chapter 5 Desecrated Scriptures and the News Media  83-98

Chapter 6 Ancient Iconic Texts  99-115

Chapter 7 Rival Iconic Texts: Ten Commandments Monuments and the U.S. Constitution  117-134

Chapter 8 Book Aniconism: The Codex, Translation and Beliefs about Immaterial Texts  135-159

Chapter 9 Mass Literacy and Scholarly Expertise  161-166

Chapter 10 Why Books Matter: Preservation and Disposal  167-188

500 years of beautiful print

Arkyves, a collection of sources for the study of the History of Culture, showcases the beauty of print fonts with a zoomable collage of printed pages produced between 1469 to 1935.

(click to view)

Print and Personal Religious Identity

It is exciting to see the many new studies of the impact of book technologies on histories of religions. In some cases, history is recast in new ways and what we thought happened ends up looking a little different in retrospect. In other cases, attention to the materiality of books bolsters already argued histories, but shows the origins of an event to be not so much intellectual as physical: ideas are constrained and disseminated in printed and bound forms, just as the ideas would have been impossible without the resources of writing and print.

Kathleen Lynch has recently published an essay at the Martin Marty Center's Religion & Culture Web Forum with the provocative title, "How does the fixity of print become a problem for religious identity?" Lynch is Executive Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library and knows a few things about the power of books. Her 2012 book, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World, (Oxford UP) argues that the genre of Protestant autobiography was bound up with print, and with the trans-Atlantic book trade.

Lynch's recent essay on the fixity of print supplements Protestant Autobiography, and focuses on Sarah Wight's 1647 publishing "sensation," The Exceeding Riches of Grace. Because of its existence as a bound book, the conversion story becomes fixed, in spite of any future doubts and questions Wight might have had. Even with new editions published over the following two decades, addenda were relegated outside the narrative proper, leading Lynch to suggest: "Despite the multiple opportunities and anecdotal prompts, the continuation of the story is resisted, with the material constraints of the number of sheets at least bolstering, if not precisely establishing, a conceptual boundary."

Print itself makes it seem that religious identity is secure, "the physical properties of the book helped shape the model of godly selfhood that was being advanced in this narrative." Stories of conversion are fixed in print, while the personal early-American gospel of an interior-focused religiosity is spread through thoroughly external, material means.

Georgia on My Mind: The Invisible Power of Typeface

(cross-posted with the Material Scripture blog)

My thanks to my colleagues who made sure I saw the article in The Week from a few days ago, "How Typeface Influences the Way We Read and Think."

The insight here is a helpful one for those interested in materialist questions in the study of Scriptures: namely, that the visual presentation of the words themselves create a psychological effect in the reader, leading to increased credulity (in the case, say, of Georgia) or outright derision (as in the case of Comic Sans).

The only book on the subject of which I am aware is Graphic Design and Bible Reading: Exploratory Studies in the Typographical Representation of the Text of Scripture in Translation, by E. R. Wendland and J. P. Louw. Sadly, it looks like it has gone out of print, though I do have a copy if anyone would like to do some more exploration.

Besides that one text, I have not done much formal study of typefaces in Scripture; but I am pretty sure S. Brent Rodriguez Plate has, and I would love to hear his response to this (and other responses, as well).

Greater Truthiness with Baskerville

Errol Morris wrote a two-part essay in the New York Times about the effects of type-fonts. He used an online quiz to test whether six different fonts affected people's answers. He found that more people believed a statement printed in Baskerville than in Georgia, Helvetica and three others. Along the way, he has much to say about the tendency inherited from reading hand-writing to evaluate letter-forms for the credibility of what is written--the legitimacy earned from iconic fonts. He also summarizes John Baskerville's turbulant life.

E-Books and Print-On-Demand in the News

A busy spring and summer made me neglect this blog. It's time to dig into the accumulated pile of news of (iconic) books in the news. Doing so immediately reveals one advantage of procrastination: I can now pull together a series of items of about the rise of e-publishing.

In April, the American Association of Publishers revealed that the number of e-books sold in February surpassed the number of hardback and softback sales together. Digging further into statistics showed, however, that e-books grossed the published $90 million, print books still grossed $215 million. By September, the Association was reporting that e-book sales were taking market away from mass-market paperbacks in particular. And Michael Lieberman on Book Patrol pointed out the trend that the headlines missed:

While much of the focus has centered on the meteoric rise of e-books and their effect on the publishing industry it is the print-on-demand segment that has really taken off. In 2010 there were almost 8 times the number of print-on-demand titles then traditional titles!

APHA Conference Early Bird deadline approaching

For folks who might be interested in attending the 2011 American Printing History Association conference in San Diego this fall, the deadline for Early Bird registration is this Thursday, September 15th.

The theme this year is "Printing from the Edge":

What have been the transformative moments in printing history that have changed the direction of printing, typography, papermaking, bookbinding, or book design, and moved us to a new edge? What are today’s frontiers? Where is tomorrow’s edge?

The conference takes place October 14-15 at UC San Diego. More information can be found here at the APHA website.

Tripitaka Koreana (3)

I have twice already blogged about the Tripitaka Koreana (here and here), the 13th-century collection of 88,000 wooden printing blocks of Buddhist sutras stored and displayed in the Haeinsa monestary in Korea. On Sunday, I was lucky to see a procession in Seoul that began the cellebrations of the millenial anniversary of the carving of the original set of printing blocks. Participants carried reproductions of the print blocks on their heads or backs through the streets of the city, preceded by palanquins containing more blocks and followed by dancers and soldiers in period costumes. It was a vivid example of how ritualizing the iconic dimension of texts allows broad participation by lay people who are unlikely to have the linguistic skills necessary to read and interpret these Chinese texts.

Stolow on Artscroll

Jeremy Stolow has written a fascinating analysis of the Orthodox Jewish publishing phenomenon, ArtScroll. In Orthodox by Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the Artscroll Revolution (University of California Press, 2010), he documents the history of ArtScroll, its products, and their appeal to buyers. He then applies the analytical models of the field of book history to show how this publisher's attention to the material look and feel of its books has powered its sales.

... through their material properties ArtScroll books can be seen to possess forces that strcuture and constrain the ways they are stored, read, displayed, or otherwise used in their designated social settings. This agency, embedded in thematerial design of the books themselves, is hardly incidental to the centrality ArtScroll texts are said to enjoy, whether in everyday life situations or in the ways ArtScroll is publicly imagined, discussed, embraced, or even rejected. (146)

This leads Stolow to draw some conclusions about religious books in today's rapidly changing book marketplace:

... books can be said to possess a material agency whereby, for example, a leather covering has the power to convey an affective charge through its signifiers of dignity, solemnity, and artisanal authenticity. Form this perspective, it would appear that the continued (and indeed growing) vitality of the market for printed books rests on a deeper set of cultural assumptions about what kinds of technologies and institutional frameworks are best suited to generate "authentic" religiosu experiences and to sustain the bonds of religious community. ... Far from being rendered obsolete as "old" media, today's printed books have been reinvented as viable means of exercising authority and securing legitimacy through the particular disciplines and habits and the connective tissues that constitute
text-centered religious community." (178)

It's a great read!

Origins of Book Veneration in Mahayana Buddhism

A new article explains the origins of book veneration in Mahayana Buddhism. Will Tuladhar-Douglas points out that early Buddhism featured two institutions to preserve the Buddha’s oral teachings on the one hand and to preserve and venerate his relics on the other. The invention of written sutras produced an artifact that functioned as both teaching and relic simultaneously. Therefore reading aloud and written reproduction of the sutras was valued just for the sake reproducing it, as in oral transmission, while the sutra itself was venerated as an important relic. An early (2nd-4th centuries C.E.) text in the Prajnaparamita tradition depicts a sutra on a throne on a glorious stupa being venerated by the gods themselves:

Moreover, at that time the great Bodhisattva Dharmodgata caused a peaked shrine to be built from seven (kinds of) jewels, decorated with copper and sandalwood, draped with strings of pearls. At each of its four corners he had lamps fashioned from single rubies set. On each of the four sides were silver censers facing each of the four directions, in which pure krsnaguru (Vepris bilocularis) incense was burnt to worship the Prajnaparamita. In the middle of this shrine was set a seat (parmika) made from seven jewels; and on the seat was a casket (peca) made from four jewels. The Prajnaparamita, written on leaves of gold coated with lapis lazuli, had been placed inside this. The peaked shrine was decorated with hanging banners and garlands of many colours. (V 249-50.4) Now Sadliprarudita, the merchant's daughter and her five hundred attendants saw the peaked shrine laden with countless arrays of offerings. They saw hundreds of godlings, with Indra chief of the gods, scattering and showering and festooning the peaked shrine with sacred mandarava flowers, sandalwood, gold dust and silver dust. They heard divine hymns. (V 250.5-9)

See Will Tuladhar-Douglas, “Writing and the Rise of Mahayana Buddhism,” in Die Textualisierung der Religion (ed. Joachim Schaper; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 250-72.

Books as Furniture

SHARP’s annual journal arrived in the mail recently. It includes an article that should be of great interest to follower’s of this blog: Jeffrey Todd Knight’s “‘Furnished’ for Action: Renaissance Books as Furniture,” Book History 12 (2009), 37-73. He discusses

a set of practices, still operative but generally devalued in modern textual culture, that involve making books useful as material objects or artifacts, not just for reading or owning for their ideational content alone. The “use” of books in the era of early print has recently become a topic of substantial interest of both historians of reading and scholars interested in the materiality of literary works; but conceptions of utility, I would like to suggest, remain largely bound to modern categories, making room enough for texts but little for textual objects [38].

In the Renaissance, these practices included using books as filing cabinets in which to store or write legal documents, recipes, and the like; making desks and beds out of stacks of books; and conversely regarding furniture and walls as inscribable objects. The Renaissance book

was an object with multiple functions, none of which was fully determined by its text. It was a container, a writing tablet or notepad, and a veritable bookshelf all at once. The surviving evidence of reading habits and uses such as these puts pressure on the prevailing categories of book history and related literary-critical approaches that have perhaps been overly rigid in separating out utility and instrumentality from aesthetics and affectivity, and that have furthermore parsed intellectual from material utility—books as information, in other words, from books as objects or things [40].

Knight goes on to demonstrate that the words “furniture” and “furnishing” had broader applications then, applying to both material and intellectual objects in such a way as to cast in question our distinctions between them. He notes that this usage also reflected the physical place of books in the home. The tended to be scattered almost anywhere and everywhere. They had not yet assumed a conventional place, such as on the bookshelves that became common later.

Knight’s article raises all sorts of interesting questions about the relationship between the material book and its textual contents which makes it of interest here. But his discussion does not blend obviously with our category of “iconic” books. That is, we usually assume that books have become less iconic and more utilitarian over time as modern publishing has made them more ubiquitous and more disposable. Yet Knight’s description of book use in the Renaissance home suggests a less iconic view of books, one in which their “proper” place and use had not yet become so culturally defined.

Iconicity from a Book History perspective

(Deirdre Stam participated in the Saturday sessions of last month's Iconic Books Symposium. She later wrote me some reflections on the event which I think are worth sharing with a wider audience. I'm reproducing them here with her permission.)

When putting myself in the shoes of a person in the field of religion, I could understand your statements about scholarship in that and other humanities areas ignoring the "iconic" element of texts and of their physical manifestations. Working in another area, though, as I have for many years, I've become aware of an enormous body of inquiry in "book history" about the physical history and properties of texts and the more recent expansion of concerns relating to the "book." Particularly since Donald McKenzie's work in the 80's, drawing significantly from the French theorists of the previous decades, the field has looked at both the physical book (its printing, manufacture, etc.) and, more recently, its uses and significance in its culture. Robert Darnton would be a principle proponent as would Anthony Grafton, both eloquent spokesmen for this approach. Many of the texts they have addressed have been iconic, and in some cases the editions are iconic. Sometimes even the copies they have examined have had iconic properties sometimes for reasons relating to the text, but sometimes for different reasons having little to do with the textual and/or intellectual content.

For this topic of iconic "books" in religion, I think it would be helpful to break down that word "book" into "text," "manuscript" if appropriate, "edition" if appropriate as for printed works (and family of editions), and "copy" within an edition. A copy, for example, can be iconic because of its unique binding, or its variants, or its association (such as having been owned by Thos. Jefferson as was a Koran recently used to swear in a Detroit congressman). The intellectual content was really secondary in this example. The term "book" while a good catch-all for the many issues addressed in a meeting such as this, is too broad, I think, for clear communication. It seemed to me that some attendees assumed the codex form when they heard "book," or allowed codex and scroll, but drew the line at web page or oral recitation. Others had a broader range of possible physical forms in mind when they heard the term. The distinctions described above might have eliminated some confusion.

For a sense of present-day book history, I would strongly recommend looking at the offerings of the Rare Book School, located at the Univ. of Va. but somewhat independent of it. RBS is a non-degree, continuing education program of about 100 courses a year, with some given at the Morgan Library and Walters Art Gallery and elsewhere, which are attended by (grown up) curators, academics, collectors, and obsessives of various sorts, with a small sprinkling of graduate students. The emphasis is on the physical book. While book historians have become interested in run-of-the-mill publications in recent years, the bulk of time is still devoted to iconic texts and publications. The new director is the charismatic book historian Michael Suarez, SJ, who left a pair of tenured positions at Oxford and Fordham to give the school a new and probably more scholarly direction. (It was very curatorial before -- but great anyway.) You'd enjoy meeting Suarez and I suspect you'd enjoy a week-long course at Rare Book School. Total and exhausting immersion. The Univ. of Va. has a vast workshop creating digital versions of texts and related databases; that is in itself an eyeopener. (There are Rare Book Schools at Lyons and UCLA but these are newer, smaller, and only tangentially related to the "mothership" at UVa.)

A number of rare book libraries have scholarships for brief projects on the history of the book using their collections. (Fellows need to use the materials uniquely held in these institutions -- the emphasis is on the physical.) The attendees might like a list of these fellowships even after the fact of the "Icon" conference itself -- the libraries include AAS, Newberry, and a dozen or so others. Some of these libraries belong to the Independent Research Library Association (IRLA) and their fellowships would be accessible, directly or indirectly, through the web site of that organization. The SHARP newsletter lists a lot of these opportunities. While many fellows study iconic works in the collections of these libraries, I think that the emphasis on the "iconicism" itself, especially within religious materials, would be novel and welcome. AAS does a theme each year; I wonder if this theme might appeal to them for a future summer.

Map of the Land of Books

Strange Maps has reproduced a fanciful map of the "land of books" drawn by German illustrator Alphons Woelfle in 1938.

Comments to the post have helpfully provided English translations to the various labels. The Blog points out that:

Plotting out imagined places on a map as if they were “real” countries is a favourite trope in curious cartography. The artificial equation of place and meaning allows for double-entendres and other humorous leaps of the imagination on which this allegorical form of cartography thrives. As a sub-genre of cartography, it has been around since at least La carte de tendre, an 18th-century French map of love’s topography (discussed in entry #245 of this blog). Other examples previously discussed include a Map on Temperance (#258) or a German map of the Empire of Love (#59).

I notice that the map pays almost as much attention to the material production of books as to their literary genres. The river that flows through the land of book sellers as called the "paper stream" and has sources in the land of papermills and the lake of tints...

PhD program in "Texts, Contexts, Cultures"

Mark Bertrand, on Bible Design & Binding, points out a new set of PhD scholarships in Ireland:

"Dr Crawford Gribben, who is the Long Room Hub Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Print Culture at Trinity College in Dublin -- as well as a reader of this blog -- e-mailed me with some news that will be of interest to academics in the audience. He's directing a new PhD program at Trinity College and has twelve fully-funded scholarships to award. Here are the details:

12 fully-funded 4-year PhD scholarships are available for Arts and Humanities research in Trinity College Dublin

A new interdisciplinary and inter-institutional PhD pathway for research in Arts and Humanities has been launched by Trinity College Dublin in conjunction with NUI Galway and University College Cork. 12 four-year scholarships of fees plus €16,000 per annum are available for those who wish to pursue this pathway as students of Trinity College Dublin. Other scholarships are being offered by NUI Galway and University College Cork. The scholarship competition at Trinity College Dublin is open to both EU and non-EU applicants. The closing date for entry is 1 March 2008.

Texts, Contexts, Cultures has been designed to prepare students for life in academia – and beyond. First-year students will develop their research through multi-institutional training elements in the pathway's core themes – History of the Book, Imaging Ireland and Renaissance intellectual history – much of which training will be delivered through audiovisual and online networks. Research will be supervised by multi-institutional scholarly panels. Students will also be provided with the opportunity for work placement in the knowledge economy sector.

Dr John Hegarty, Provost of Trinity College Dublin, commented that the Texts, Contexts, Cultures pathway "represents an exciting new beginning for higher education in Ireland and for higher education itself."

Full details can be found on www.textscontextscultures.ie . All enquiries should be directed to Dr Crawford Gribben, the Director of Texts, Contexts, Cultures at Trinity College Dublin (crawford.gribben@tcd.ie).

Dr. Gribben teaches a course focusing on Renaissance Bibles, including their design and binding! There's a PDF course description online that gives a flavor -- "Group exercises will include the preparation of an online annotated edition of part of an individual Biblical book, which edition will compare the forms and contents of
various early modern texts, translations and multimedia receptions"."

The Bible According To Henry VIII

Arthur Freeman, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, describes a rare portable-sized Vulgate Bible published in London in 1535. It contains selected portions of the Latin Old Testament along with the entire New Testament. But the preface, though unsigned, indicates that the editor was Henry VIII himself.

Freeman's speculations about what led Henry to sponsor the publication and then, in turn, abandon the project include interesting observations about the political pros-and-cons of Bible publishing in the 16th century.

Given whatever doctrinal or theological thrust such editorial choices suggest, can we adduce any special purposes in the publication of Henry’s bible, beyond those he states, of fulfilling an obligation to God and serving “the necessity of the people”? Was it really directed to a popular readership, or was it more in the nature of a ceremonial performance? Ordinary “people”, after all, could rarely manage Latin, and those who could, would probably have preferred – like Henry’s scrupulous reader – a complete bible, which, if they could afford Henry’s, they no doubt already possessed. Here a few bibliographical observations may be helpful.

The volume is, to begin with, conspicuously rare: it now survives in only four complete copies, and three slightly imperfect ones, none of which bears any sign of ceremonial presentation, that is, a lavish contemporary binding or sententious inscription. Apparently it was never reprinted, ...

... perhaps the forthcoming availability of the complete scriptures in reader-friendly vernacular English left Henry’s and Berthelet’s curious Vulgate – still the “first” bible printed in England, no mean distinction – something of an anachronism, or throwback, and accounts for its virtual demise both in practical use and in (modern) historical memory. Another possibility, also linked to its date of appearance, is more prosaic, but evocative: July 1535 was not exactly a serene month in the religio-political history of the English monarchy and Church. Bishop John Fisher had been beheaded at Tower Hill on June 22, to the indignation of nearly all Europe, a furore compounded by the perfunctory trial of Sir Thomas More, who followed Fisher to the block on July 6. Henry had escaped the latter occasion with a long summer progress through the West Country. But in the light of impending reaction from the rest of the Christian world, including papal excommunication itself in August, the appearance of a somewhat self-congratulatory “personal” canon of scriptural law, via an eccentric edition of the Vulgate, might have seemed grotesquely ill-timed.

(Thanks to PhiloBiblos for the tip.)

Trouble over publishing Guru Granth in Punjab

Unrest has broken out in Punjab prompted by a Sikh central committee's attempt (see previous post) to monopolize publication and distribution of the Guru Granth. The Tribune of Chandigarh (India) reports:

In a bizarre incident, agitated activists of the Guru Granth Sahib Satkar Committee picked up two brothers from the shop of famous publishers Jeewan Singh Chattar Singh and Sons, near Golden Temple, and blackened their faces in full public view.

The brothers are accused of selling 50 “birs” of Guru Granth Sahib to a Delhi-based Sikh couple. The activists of the committee followed the vehicle of the couple Surinder Singh and his wife up to Beas. They intercepted them and compelled them to return to Amritsar. The agitating Sikh activists alleged that the birs were stacked in the Delhi couple’s vehicle and they were wearing shoes. It is alleged that the couple wanted to sell the birs at a high price. It is alleged that both brothers were first beaten up in full public view and then in the room of Akal Takht. The heavy police force that reached the incident site could not intervene because of the surcharged religious sentiments.