Summary

The author of the preface, a Turkish intellectual named Faruk Darvinoğlu, presents the reader with a book he describes as a seventeenth-century manuscript which he discovered in 1982 while rummaging in his governor's so-called archive. He found it, he says, at the bottom of a chest overflowing with government documents and read the manuscript with such great pleasure that, unobserved by the archive's custodian, he slipped it into his own briefcase so that he could read it over and over again. One intriguing feature that increased his interest in the book was the observation that someone other than the manuscript's scribe had penned a title on the otherwise blank first page: "'The Quilter's Stepson'" (9).

He explains that he searched Istanbul's public and private libraries for clues about the manuscript's author, but couldn't even find the books or treatises mentioned in the manuscript. The only...