The first conference of the TYPARABIC project team was hosted by the Library
of the Holy Synod in Bucharest on September 5 and 6, 2022. Over the two days,
ten core team members and six guests presented the papers published in this
volume, the second in the series Early Arabic Printing in the East (EAPE) dedicated
by De Gruyter to the TYPARABIC project developed in Bucharest, at the Institute
for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy, owing to the
Advanced Grant obtained in 2020 from the European Research Council (ERC) in
the frame of the Horizon 2020 Grants Program. The present volume is divided into three parts in accordance with the diverse
scientific interests of the TYPARABIC team members. In these opening pages, I intend to explain concisely why the society, culture
and prominent personalities living in 18th-century Istanbul, the Christians’ city
of Constantinople, are inseparable from any discussion of printing for the Arabic-
speaking Christians of the Levant; or, to put it differently, why, when studying
printing in the East, Istanbul is the focus of the researchers’ attention more than
any city inside the borders of the Ottoman Empire.