The Malay printed word in Penang had its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, peaking just before the Second World War.
In a dusty shop on the second floor of Chowrasta Market, yellowing cardboard-bound books lie tied up with cord. Many of these are printed in Tamil and Jawi, and some in romanised Malay. These are the remains of Penang’s early Malay publishing industry which once dominated northern Malaya. These are books written, printed, bound and sold in Penang – a self-sustaining trade that extended to journals and newspapers, once almost comparable to the products of London’s Paternoster Row.
Printing in Penang began in 1806, when the London Missionary Press established a Mission that employed wooden blocks of typeset Jawi held in place by a wine screw press. This was the first press to be established in the peninsula.
Since the press was operated by the Mission, the ethos of Malay publishing could perhaps not be said to have begun. However, it was the beginning for the printed Malay word in Penang. Reverend Thomas Beighton was the most prolific printer of the period. In 1832 he printed his first work in Malay, a grammar book titled Ibarat Perkataan. This was the first Malay book printed in Penang, albeit by an Englishman1. With Beighton’s death in 1844, the presses fell silent and very little work was produced on the island until the advent of the lithographic press in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
The Lithographic Era
The Malay word for printing is cap, which literally means to print a die over a surface such as batik textile. This lithography was the preferred method of printing among the Muslims for over 50 years. In the Malay Peninsula, lithography started in Singapore with Munshi Abdullah Kadir. Having learnt the techniques of lithography from Reverend Benjamin Keasberry, Munshi Abdullah used it to print many books including his autobiography, Hikayat Abdullah. Many early lithographed Malay books throughout the Nusantara credited him as the “teacher” of printing in the colophon2. But what of Penang?
