To Know Wisdom and Instruction

In 1512, Hakob Meghapart (Jacob the Sinner) created an Armenian press in Venice, Italy, and published the first printed Armenian book, the Urbatagirk‘ (the Book of Fridays). The era of Armenian printing had begun.

In 2012, the Library of Congress marked the quincentenary of this milestone with an exhibition titled  “To Know Wisdom and Instruction: The Armenian Literary Tradition at the Library of Congress,” which opened  on April 18, 2015, off the Great hall of the Library’s historic Thomas Jefferson Building.  During its 5-month run, almost a quarter of a million people passed through the gallery.  The companion volume to the exhibition, written by the Library’s Armenian Area Specialist, Levon Avdoyan, is now available in an interactive ebook format. It celebrates the growing role of the Library of Congress as a major research center for Armenian and non-Armenian scholars whose studies delve into the past and present of the Armenian people and their neighbors.

Drawing from the Armenian collections of the Library of Congress, this ebook contains 75 color images highlighting the varieties of the Armenian literary tradition from the era of manuscripts through the early periods of print and on to contemporary publishing. This ebook is an electronic and interactive reformatting of the original catalog that contains the full text together with original photographs of the collections starting with a 1321 Gospel Book copied in Jerusalem and ending with a 2010 Yerevan imprint on the works of the Armenian painter Ayvazovski.