Abstract/Summary

An author’s role in the material production of text is generally not a subject that has received much attention but there is particularly little research about authors’ involvement and methods of working with texts comprising ‘foreign’ or unfamiliar scripts. In Britain, the period from late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, being a time not only of progressive interest in the languages and literature of India but also of explorations and innovations in the printing of various scripts of the region, provided many such occasions where the authors – often pioneering scholars in their fields – had to contend with a new, or subsequently acquired script. This essay focuses on the Devanagari script and one such author/scholar of Sanskrit, Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), and in charting his engagement with the material fabrication of his texts it aims to throw new light on the process of dealing with a script from handwritten copy to the printed page.