2025 - Architecture of Bibliophilia: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Libraries, by Yavuz Sezer

The long-awaited monograph Architecture of Bibliophilia: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Libraries is scheduled to be published in 2026 by Edinburgh University Press, one of the leading publishers of cutting-edge research on Ottoman history. The book is based on the PhD dissertation of the late Yavuz Sezer, a bright historian of architecture who lost his life to the COVID pandemic in 2021. Completed at MIT, Sezer’s dissertation earned great acclaim in Ottoman cultural and architectural history when it was completed in 2016. Since then, it has become a classic in its field and received numerous citations.

Architecture of Bibliophilia is the first book-length study of the Ottoman library movement in Istanbul during the eighteenth century, a period when the Ottoman ruling elite commissioned more than twenty grand public libraries in the capital. These dwarfed, in both scale and architectural ambition, not just the libraries of the preceding centuries but also those built years thereafter. Sezer’s book provides an in-depth account of these libraries, detailing their plans and architectural characteristics, the motivations and intellectual aspirations of their patrons, and the perception of libraries by the scholars, bureaucrats, and poets of the Ottoman capital. Through a solid grounding in and an exceptional emphasis on bridging each of these disparate areas of inquiry, Sezer’s study offers a multi-layered perspective that at once illuminates the architecture, patronage, and readership of the libraries and sheds light on the intellectual tendencies represented by the book collections they were built to house.

The book is a posthumous publication of the work of Dr. Yavuz Sezer, whose untimely passing-away in 2021 echoed far and wide in the scholarly community. The grant covers colour imaging, indexing, and editing costs.

Banner photo credit: Köprülü Mehmed Pasha Library on Divanyolu street, Istanbul. R Prazeres.