A few years ago, I translated Alexander Bevilacqua’s The Republic of Arabic Letters into Turkish — an award-winning 2018 study on the relationship between the Islamic world, Europe, and the history of print culture.
While working on that translation, I became fascinated by a strange historical reality:
For centuries, books were not simply carriers of information.
They were physical objects built slowly by human hands — through paper, metal type, ink, pressure, and labor.
That research eventually inspired me to write a screenplay titled The Face of the Other, centered around early Quran translations into Latin and the world of 17th-century printing
While working on the script, I started visiting printing museums and studying early presses more closely.
At one point, standing in front of a working Gutenberg-style press in California, I realized something:
I didn’t want this to remain only a story on a screen.
I wanted to physically rebuild part of that world.
So now I’m building a working Gutenberg-style press in Los Angeles — along with handmade cotton rag paper and small ceremonial print editions.
Not as a museum piece.
Not out of nostalgia.
But because I believe physical objects still carry a sense of permanence that we are rapidly losing in the digital age.
