Style combination · Contrasts

Bulaq Naskh Book Printing × Urdu Katib Lithography

Urdu kept the calligrapher's hand by lithographing it while Bulaq set Naskh in movable type; choose deliberately between a written page and a set one, or run set Naskh body text under a hand-written headline.

From the research on Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh Book Printing

Mix them and make something Bulaq Naskh Book Printing Urdu Katib Lithography

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Bulaq Naskh Book Printing, their arrangement from Bulaq Naskh Book Printing, the finish from Bulaq Naskh Book Printing. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh Book Printing Urdu Katib Lithography

Type from Urdu Katib Lithography: Brush & pen calligraphy
Hand-lettering
Colour from Urdu Katib Lithography: Monochrome
Light ground
Form from Bulaq Naskh Book Printing: Rectilinear
Borders & frames
Composition from Bulaq Naskh Book Printing: Classical text block
Central symmetry
Surface from Bulaq Naskh Book Printing: Paper & letterpress bite
Flat

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Urdu Katib Lithography

Civic

Rakkas, standing in for Lahori Nastaʿlīq (katib hand)

Text · Bulaq Naskh Book Printing

The page of the Arabic printed book as Egypt's state press at Bulaq shaped it from 1822: justified blocks of black Naskh type on pale paper, often boxed in a ruled frame, with an ornamental headpiece on the opening page, headings set larger or in a second script such as Nastaʿlīq, and almost no pictures. It printed army manuals, laws, textbooks, translated science, the Arabic classics and the official gazette. Calligraphers drew its later types, Mirza Sanglakh and then Muhammad Jaʿfar, whose 1905–06 body type was the basis of the 1924 Qur'an and lives on as Khaled Hosny's Amiri.

Libre Caslon Text; Bulaq Naskh Book Printing used Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh body type, 1905–06, drawn by the calligrapher Muhammad Jaʿfar Bey and Bulaq Naskh and Nastaʿlīq types by the Persian calligrapher Mirza Sanglakh, made for Muhammad Ali's press

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Urdu Katib Lithography, with a counter-accent from Bulaq Naskh Book Printing. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh Book Printing Urdu Katib Lithography

#eee6d2 ground · 39%
#141312 ink · 15%
#a32a2a accent · 20%
#7a5236 accent · 15%
#c9bfa6 accent · 11%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #eee6d2;
  --ink: #141312;
  --accent-1: #a32a2a;
  --accent-2: #7a5236;
  --accent-3: #c9bfa6;
  --font-display: "Rakkas", cursive;
  --font-text: "Libre Caslon Text", serif;
}

Use it with care

Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh Book Printing: The press also set the Qur'an (the 1924 Cairo edition) and hadith collections such as the Sultaniyya Sahih al-Bukhari, and Bulaq-style Naskh and Amiri are still used for Qur'anic and religious text, so never crop, mirror or distort Qur'anic verses or the names of God and the Prophet, use them as texture, or put them on floors, footwear or throwaway packaging. Set Arabic right to left with correct contextual shaping, have every word read by a fluent reader, never fill a layout with pseudo-Arabic, and never present a generated page as a historical Bulaq imprint.

Urdu Katib Lithography: Urdu pages often carry Qur'anic phrases, the names of God and the Prophet and religious verse; never use Nastaʿlīq as meaningless texture or set invented text that imitates it, and have every word read by a fluent Urdu reader. Katibs were rarely credited; name the calligrapher where known, and commission a working khushnawees rather than tracing archival pages.

The two styles

Large black Arabic calligraphy reading “طلب العلم” is centered on a textured cream background. A black-and-muted-gold rectangular border, small corner flowers, and symmetrical floral flourishes above and below frame the lettering.

1822–1956 · Middle East & North Africa Bulaq (Amiriyya) Naskh Book Printing The page of the Arabic printed book as Egypt's state press at Bulaq shaped it from 1822: justified blocks of black Naskh type on pale paper, often boxed in a ruled frame, with an ornamental headpiece on the opening page, headings set larger or in a second script such as Nastaʿlīq, and almost no pictures. It printed army manuals, laws, textbooks, translated science, the Arabic classics and the official gazette. Calligraphers drew its later types, Mirza Sanglakh and then Muhammad Jaʿfar, whose 1905–06 body type was the basis of the 1924 Qur'an and lives on as Khaled Hosny's Amiri. 1837–present · South Asia Urdu Katib Lithography For about a century and a half Urdu chose lithography over movable type, because metal type could not reproduce the sloping, stacked ligatures of Nastaʿlīq. Teams of katibs wrote whole newspapers, books and advertisements by hand on transfer paper, nesting each cascading word into dense, hand-ruled columns under enlarged calligraphic headlines. Noori Nastaliq (1981), digitised from Ahmed Mirza Jamil's hand, carried the katib's letterforms into computer composition.