Karin Scheper was trained as a book and paper conservator in Amsterdam, and she heads the Leiden University Library’s conservation studio. She completed her PhD in 2014 with a dissertation entitled “The Islamic Bookbinding Tradition: A Book Archaeological Study.” For her research into the development of Islamic book structures she received the schol- arly honor of the De la Court Prize awarded by the KNAW (the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) in 2017. She was a Bahari Fellow and studied the Persian collections at Oxford, and she teaches courses on the materiality of books and book history.
The most significant and by far largest collections of Zaydi manuscripts are housed by the many public and private libraries of Yemen, an endangered cultural heritage tradition, currently at risk due to the conflict and warfare in Yemen. The contributions brought together in this volume address a wide spectrum of aspects concerning Yemeni manuscript cultures, with some focusing on their history and present state within Yemen and others discussing the collections of manuscripts of Yemeni provenance in Europe and elsewhere.