The Book Worlds of East Asia and Europe, 1450-18 - Connections and Comparisons 9789888208081, 988820808X

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Plates
1. Introduction
2. Bibliography, Population, and Statistics: A View from the West
3. “Noncommercial” Private Publishing in Late Imperial China
4. Distribution: The Transmission of Books in Europe and Its Colonies: Contours, Cautions, and Global Comparisons
5. Empire of Texts: Book Production, Book Distribution, and Book Culture in Late Imperial China
6. The Proliferation of Reference Books, 1450–1850
7. Books for Women and Women Readers
8. Epilogue
East Asian and European Book History: A Short Bibliographical Essay
Index

Citation preview

The Book Worlds of East Asia and Europe, 1450–1850 Connections and Comparisons

Edited by

Joseph P. McDermott and Peter Burke

The Book Worlds of East Asia and Europe, 1450–1850

The Book Worlds of East Asia and Europe, 1450–1850

Connections and Comparisons

Edited by Joseph P. McDermott and Peter Burke

Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong www.hkupress.org © 2015 Hong Kong University Press ISBN 978-988-8208-08-1 (Hardback) All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by Paramount Printing Co., Ltd. in Hong Kong, China

To Jack Goody friend, scholar, and inspiration

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

List of Illustrations

xi

List of Contributors

xv

1.

Introduction Joseph McDermott and Peter Burke

2.

Bibliography, Population, and Statistics: A View from the West David McKitterick

3.

“Noncommercial” Private Publishing in Late Imperial China Joseph McDermott

4.

Distribution: The Transmission of Books in Europe and Its Colonies: Contours, Cautions, and Global Comparisons James Raven

147

Empire of Texts: Book Production, Book Distribution, and Book Culture in Late Imperial China Cynthia Brokaw

181

5.

1 65 105

6.

The Proliferation of Reference Books, 1450–1850 Peter Burke, with Joseph McDermott

237

7.

Books for Women and Women Readers Peter Kornicki

283

8.

Epilogue Joseph McDermott and Peter Burke

321

East Asian and European Book History: A Short Bibliographical Essay

327

Index

335

Acknowledgments

This book is the outcome of a one-day workshop held at St John’s College, Cambridge, on June 23, 2009. Undertaken as part of a developing series of “Conversations at St John’s,” this workshop brought together a group of experts in the history of the book who happened to be in Cambridge at that time. Some of us specialize in the books of Europe and others in the books of East Asia. But we all have at times indulged in generalizations about the similarities and differences in the history of the book of these two broad regions. The time had come, we all felt, to test those understandings. Not knowing precisely what would come out of a conversation, we spent a delightful day learning how fruitful such a dialogue can be. Questions previously neglected or downplayed came to the fore, set conclusions fell under closer scrutiny, and a wealth of striking similarities and differences extended our perspectives beyond the parameters that enclose our usual meetings with fellow scholars in our particular fields of research. The intensity of that day’s discussions as well as its pleasures live on, we hope, in the papers collected here. Each of us left that workshop aware of the broader significance of our own study as well as our fellow authors’, and on return to our original drafts we sought to rework our initial ideas into a paper that reflected the generous and learned comments of those present that day. We wish to express our thanks to the Master and Fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and the College Librarian Dr. Mark Nicholls for their help in making this workshop possible. To the librarians at the institutions that have allowed us to reproduce images of their holdings we are thankful, as we are to the external referees for their astute suggestions and to our fine editors at Hong Kong University Press for their help and patience in helping us prepare this manuscript for publication. A study of two parts of the world whose book worlds seldom interacted in premodern times, this collection of essays stands as testimony to the growth in mutual interaction and understanding that now marks scholarship on the book in East Asia and Europe. We hope more such studies follow.

Illustrations

Charts Chart 3.1 Annual number of Ming imprint titles produced by decade and by type of publisher. Chart 3.2 Decadal shifts in the production share of Ming imprint titles by type of publisher.

120 120

Figures Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 1.5 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Woodblock-printing tools. A Chinese moveable-type room, Jin Jian, Qinding Wuying dian Juzhen ban chengshi. A Chinese oil squeeze, ca. 1610, in Wang Qi, Sancai tuhui (Ming edition). Franco-Chinese male fashion in late seventeenth-century China, in Hu Yinling, Guanyin dashi xiansheng linying ji, print 51. News in the Capital Gazette ( Jingbao). Book production donors list, in Zhang Shiwei, Zhang Yidu xiansheng Ziguang zhai ji (1638 pref.) First page in a copy of a banned title, Li Zhi, Lishi Fenshu (Mr. Li’s book for burning) (Wanli era, 1573–1620, edition). An objectionable idea in print, in Li Zhi, Lishi Fenshu (Mr. Li’s book for burning) (Wanli era, 1573–1620, edition). The idyllic book-printing site, Wang Xian, “The Jigu Pavilion of Mr. Mao of Yushan” (1642, detail). “Der Buchhändler” by Jan Luyken in Johann Christoph Weigel the Elder (1654–1725), Abildung der gemein-nützlichen Hauptstände, Regensburg, 1698. Catalogus universalis pro nundinis Francofurtensibus, 1622.

11 15 25 38 57 110 139 140 144

155 157

xii

Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4

Fig. 4.5

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4

Fig. 5.5

Fig. 5.6

Fig. 5.7

Illustrations

Accessions register and invoices book, Chetham’s Library, Manchester, England, 1655–1700. A blind colporteur illustrated in Los Españoles pintados por si mismos (The Spaniards painted by themselves) (Madrid, Gaspar y Roig, 1851). Postal routes from Augsburg, Strassburg, etc., from Johann Christoph Weigel the Elder (1654–1725), Nuremburg, early eighteenth century. A page from an edition of a popular almanac and fortune-telling guide, Yuxia ji (Record of the jade casket), published in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century by the Rongsen tang, Yuechi. Cover page of a collectanea of Daoist inner alchemy, Jiyizi zhengdao mishu shiqizhong (Seventeen secret works of the corrected way [collected by] Master Jiyi), compiled by Fu Jinquan (act. 1800–1842) and published by the Shancheng tang. A page from an edition of the Four Books, the Wenhai lou jiaozheng jianyun fengzhang fenjie Sishu zhengwen (The Wenhai lou’s orthodox text of the Four Books, standardized, with correct pronunciations, and divided into chapters and sections), published in the late nineteenth century by the Wenhai lou, Sibao. A page from a Sibao collection of primers for elementary education, Zhushi San Bai Qian Zengguang heke (Annotated combined edition of the Three Character Classic, Myriad Family Names, Thousand Character Essay, and Expanded Words of the Sages), published in the late nineteenth century by the Wenhai lou, Sibao. Cover page of an edition of a popular primer, Baijia xing kaolüe (Capsule investigations of the Myriad Family Names), compiled by Wang Jinsheng, corrected by Xu Shiye, and published by the Dawen tang, Xuwan, during the Daoguang era (1821–50). A page from a ritual-cum-etiquette manual, Huizuan jiali tieshi jiyao (Collected essential models for family rituals), compiled by Jiang Jianzi in the early nineteenth century and published by the Wanjuan lou, Sibao. A page from a materia medica (Tuzhu) Bencao yuanshi (Sources of materia medica, illustrated and annotated), compiled by the Ming physician Li Zhongli and published by the Shancheng tang during the Guangxu era (1875–1908).

160

166

169

208

217

220

221

222

224

225

Illustrations

Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4

Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5

A page from the narrative-song romance Jinshang hua (Flowers on brocade), published by the Shancheng tang. A page from Zhuanghui tang ji (Collection from the Zhuanghui Hall), a collection of essays by Hou Fangyu (1618–54) and published by the Jiuxue shanfang, Xuwan, in 1878. A ship of war, in Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia (1728), vol. 2. Chinese fighting ships, ca. 1609, in Wang Qi, Sancai tuhui (Ming edition). Title page, in Hieronymus Brunschwig, Liber De arte distillandi (1512 edition). Table, “Exports and Imports to and from Denmark and Norway,” in William Playfair, Commercial and Political Atlas (London, 1786 edition). A Chinese water wheel, ca. 1610, in Wang Qi, Sancai tuhui (Ming edition). A martial arts move, “Two Women Vying for One Man.” Surveying, in Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia, vol. 2 (1738, second edition). Image of charity (Carità), in Cesare Ripa, Iconologia. Opening page of Admonitions for Women, in a Korean edition (Nyŏgye, 1736). Section of the Japanese booksellers’ catalog of 1670 (Zōho shojaku mokuroku). Opening page of Admonitions for Women, in the Japanese edition of 1652. Frontispiece from Onna teikin gosho bunko (The Palace Library of Home Education for Women, 1790). Opening page of the 1878 Vietnamese edition of Chen Hongmou, Jiaonü yigui (Rules bequeathed for the instruction of women, 1742; Viet. Giáo nữ di qui).

xiii

226

227 243 244 249

255 270 271 274 276 290 292 293 296

297

Maps Map 1.1 Map 1.2 Map 1.3 Map 1.4

Preliminary map of major sites of commercial publishing, Song-Jin-Yuan dynasties. Preliminary map of major and minor Ming commercial publishing sites (late sixteenth century). Preliminary map of major and minor Qing commercial publishing sites (nineteenth century). Map of fifteenth-century printing towns of Incunabula.

6 7 8 27

xiv

Illustrations

Plates (After page xvi) Plate 1.1 Plate 1.2 Plate 4.1 Plate 4.2

Woodblock book-production process, Tōri Sanjin and Katsukawa Shunsen, Takarabune kōgane no hobahira (1818). A sixteenth-century European printshop. Anonymous mid-seventeenth-century painting (École française). Colored engraving of clerks at work at the post office in London ca. 1808.

Tables Table 1.1 Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 2.3 Table 2.4 Table 2.5

European book titles on China, by century and site of publication. Publications in Italy, 1500–1600. British book production, 1651–1700, by decade. British book production, 1701–1750, by decade. London printing houses and presses, 1668–1723. Varieties of total non-imprint and imprint titles presently found in 781 Chinese libraries. Table 6.1 List of reference works printed between 1452 and 1502.

48 82 95 95 96 103 248

Contributors

Cynthia Brokaw is Professor of History at Brown University, the author of Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods (2007), and the coeditor of Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (2005) and The History of the Book in East Asia (2013). Peter Burke is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History, University of Cambridge, Fellow of Emmanuel College, and Fellow of the British Academy. With Professor Asa Briggs he is the author of A Social History of the Media (third edition, 2010). Peter Kornicki is Deputy Warden of Robinson College, Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2014 he retired as Professor of Japanese and Head of the Department of East Asian Studies at Cambridge. He is the author of The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginning to the Nineteenth Century (1998) and coeditor of The Female as Subject, Women and the Book in Japan (2010) and The History of the Book in East Asia (2013). Joseph McDermott is Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Emeritus Reader in Chinese History at the University of Cambridge. He has written widely on Song through Ming social and economic history, and his books include A Social History of the Chinese Book and The Making of a New Rural Order in South China (2 volumes). He has also edited State and Court Ritual in China and Art and Power in East Asia. David McKitterick is Librarian and Vice-Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. His most recent book is Old Book, New Technologies: The Representation, Conservation and Transformation of Books since 1700 (2013). James Raven is Professor of Modern History, University of Essex, and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Director of the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust and of the Centre for Bibliographical History, University of Essex, he is the author of numerous books and articles on the history of publishing and reading, most recently including The Business of Books (2007), Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 (2014) and Publishing Business and EighteenthCentury England (2014). He is also editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book.

Plate 1.1 The power of capital in woodblock book production, Edo Japan, 1818. A full-sheet depiction of the woodblock publishing process as an interlinked line of specialists (clockwise from upper right): a pug-nosed author, a copyist, a printer, a bespectacled block carver, an artist, and a publisher, whose face of gold ingot indicates the driving force of capital in a highly commercialized process of book production. In Tōri Sanjin (text) and Katsukawa Shunsen (illustration), Takarabune kōgane no hashira (1818), a multivolume manga book (courtesy of the Tōyō Bunko).

Plate 1.2 A sixteenth-century European printshop, from Stradanus (1523–1605), Nova Reperta (Antwerp, ca.  1600), in Bibliographica, vol.  1 (London, 1908): 223, Plate  12 (courtesy of Cambridge University Library). This printshop required close coordination among all its workers, all of them male.

Plate 4.1 Anonymous mid-seventeenth-century painting (École française) (reproduced by kind permission of the Musée des arts et traditions populaires, Paris).

Plate 4.2 Colored engraving of clerks at work at the post office in London ca. 1808 (author’s collection).

1 Introduction Joseph McDermott and Peter Burke

Of all the world’s greatest inventions, that of printing is the most cosmopolitan and international. China invented paper and first experimented with block printing and movable type. Japan produced the earliest block prints that are now extant. Korea first printed with type of metal, cast from a mould. India furnished the languages and the religion of the earliest block prints. People of Turkish race were among the most important agents in carrying block printing across Asia, and the earliest extant type are in a Turkish tongue. Persia and Egypt are the two lands of the Near East where block printing is known to have been done before it began in Europe. The Arabs were the agents who prepared the way by carrying the making of paper from China to Europe. Paper making actually entered Europe through Spain, though imported paper had already come in through the Greek Empire at Constantinople. France and Italy were the first countries in Christendom to manufacture paper. As for block printing and its advent into Europe, Russia’s claim to have been the channel rests on the oldest authority, though Italy’s claim is equally strong. Germany, Italy and the Netherlands were the earliest centers of the block printing art. Holland and France, as well as Germany, claim first to have experimented with typography. Germany perfected the invention, and from Germany it spread to all the world. Thomas J. Carter, The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward

In addressing many of the topics mentioned here by Thomas Carter, this volume stands at the crossroads of a number of recent trends in historical thought and writing. Its purpose is to make a substantive—and, we hope, a substantial—contribution not only to the history of the book but also to comparative history, the history of knowledge, and the history of the media. It is with these wider contexts that our introduction is concerned.

The Rise of Book History The past few decades have seen increasing worldwide interest in the history of the book. Publishers have rapidly expanded their lists of books on the topic, and journals—such as the Revue française d’histoire du livre, Gutenberg Jahrbuch, Wenxian (Documents), and, most recently, East Asian Publishing and Society—have published

2

Joseph McDermott and Peter Burke

a constant stream of articles on what appears to be an ever-growing field of research. Academic societies such as SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing) have grown up around book history, and annual series of talks like the Panizzi Lectures at the British Library regularly develop and disseminate the latest findings and approaches. These activities have attracted not just literary scholars and bibliographers but also historians, ranging from historians of printing technology to economic historians concerned with the fortunes of the book trade as well as to cultural historians interested in changing styles of reading.1 Some studies are microscopic, focused on a single book or printer, while others investigate large problems, among them what a well-known contribution has described as “the printing press as an agent of change.” In the West, the printing press has been seen to have contributed to major intellectual movements such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. In East Asia, print technology is seen to have profoundly shaped the region’s premodern and modern culture. Woodblock printings disseminated Confucian texts for the examination system in China and Korea as well as popular fiction and images for urban consumers in Suzhou and Osaka,2 and since the mid-nineteenth century, lithographic and moveable-type machinery has enabled newspapers and journals throughout East Asia to spread nationalist appeals for the formation of more inclusive modern print cultures.3 So far, the best-known contributions to book history, in its present progress toward becoming an autonomous discipline, have been made by Anglophone and Francophone scholars, among them Don McKenzie and Roger Chartier.4 Appropriately enough for the compatriots of Johan Gutenberg, important contributions have also come from Germany.5 Most of these studies have been concerned with the book in the West, especially the printed book, often within the frontiers of particular nation-states. Indeed, national rivalry surely underlies some major

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Robert Darnton, “First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” reprinted in his The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990): 154–87; and Frédéric Barbier, L’Europe de Gutenberg: le livre et l’invention de la modernité occidentale (Paris: Belin, 2006). John Chaffee, The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985): 14, 74; John Lust, Chinese Popular Prints (Leiden: Brill, 1996); and Roger Keyes, E-hon (New York: New York Public Library, 2004). Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004); and Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China: Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s News Media, 1872–1912 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004). Don McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Museum, 1986); and Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). Michael Giesecke, Der Buchdruck in der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991; rev. ed., 1998).

Introduction

3

collective projects such as the histories of the book in France, Britain, Canada, and elsewhere.6 However, interest in the history of the book outside the West has also been growing. Johannes Pedersen’s groundbreaking 1946 study, Arabiske bog (The Arabic Book), undoubtedly because it was published in the author’s native Danish, took time to have the impact it merited. But, with its 1984 translation into English it started to find a much wider readership and lay the seeds for important recent findings about the very complex history of book production and text transmission in the Middle East, that Geoffrey Roper and Nelly Hanna, among others, have begun to disclose in fascinating detail.7 In East Asia, the rise of book history as a separate historical concern has been favored by the region’s rich tradition of publishing and bibliographical studies. Over a decade ago, many important Japanese findings on Japanese books were expertly presented in English in an authoritative account of Japanese book history by one of the authors in this volume.8 Even before this contribution, a younger generation of Japanese scholars had begun to pose new questions about this rich lode of traditional book knowledge. They undertook important research on communication networks, media formation, and information channels in premodern Japan. The walls that had once stoutly defended bibliography from encroachment by Japanese humanistic and literary research have largely fallen, to the benefit of all these disciplines.9 Yet, it is in Chinese studies that the history of the book as a distinct discipline seems in the past decade or so to have had the widest appeal and greatest impact outside of European studies. A virtual explosion of Chinese and non-Chinese research on the Chinese book has taken place, concerned principally with imprints at various times between the Tang (618–906) and the Qing dynasties (1644–1911). In addition to adroitly tapping traditional Chinese strengths in bibliography, this research has explored new questions about the production (woodblock as well as moveable type), distribution (buying, giving, lending, and even stealing), and consumption of books (reading practices, private and public libraries, and collectors). The findings have 6.

7.

8. 9.

Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier, eds., Histoire de l’édition française, 4 vols. (Paris: Promodis, 1983–86); and Richard Gameson et al., eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2011). Johannes Pedersen, The Arabic Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); translated by Geoffrey French and edited with introduction by Robert Hillenbrand; Eva Hanebutt-Benz, Dagmar Glass, and Geoffrey Roper, eds., Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution: A Cross-Cultural Encounter (Westhofen: WVA-Verlag Skulima, 2002); and Nelly Hanna, In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo’s Middle Class, Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003). Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1998). For example, Nagatomo Chiyoji, Edo jidai no tosho ryūtsu (Kyoto: Bukkyō Daigaku Tsūshin kyōikubu, 2002); and Suzuki Toshiyuki, Edo no dokusho netsu (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2007).

4

Joseph McDermott and Peter Burke

helped to make book history and such core issues as canon formation, manuscript culture, text transmission methods, cultural integration, and access to knowledge become central to the study of China’s cultural history.10 In sum, a new discipline, the history of books, has over the past two decades attracted ever-widening interest in scholarly circles in various regions of Eurasia. The way their separate histories and historiographies dovetail and interlink—or not—promises to be a key concern of international scholarship in the coming decades.

The Comparative Approach The resulting multiplication of histories of the book in parts of the world as diverse as Britain and Japan or Cairo and Hangzhou enables scholars of book history to contemplate for the first time how they might undertake sophisticated comparative analyses. Historians of the Western book have been invited more than once to conferences on the Chinese book for this purpose.11 To repeat and return the compliment, this particular book seeks to have experts on East Asian and European book history explore issues of mutual interest, to the benefit we believe of our main concerns and other issues of book history at the opposite ends of Eurasia.12 This effort is neither as new nor as novel as might be thought. Past scholars of Chinese book history such as Paul Pelliot, Thomas Carter, and Zhang Xiumin have drawn implicitly and explicitly on research done on European printing, just as Lucien  Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin turned to the history of the Chinese book to refine their views on the history of the European book.13 Also, in the past halfcentury, leading historical journals like Comparative Studies in Society and History and Past and Present have occasionally published comparative studies of reading and even book history.14

10. See the titles by Brokaw, Chia, Chow, and McDermott mentioned in this volume, “East Asian and European Book History: A Short Bibliographical Essay.” 11. Ann Blair, “Afterword: Rethinking Western Printing with Chinese Comparisons”: 349–60, in Lucille Chia and Hilde De Weerdt, eds., Knowledge and Text Production in an Age of Print, 900–1400 (Leiden: Brill, 2011); and Roger Chartier, “Gutenberg Revisited from the East,” Late Imperial China 17.1 (1996): 1–9. 12. See Han Qi and Mi Gala (also known as Michela Bussotti), eds., Zhongguo he Ouzhou (Beijing: Shangwu, 2008), for the results of a recent French-inspired effort in China to introduce French scholars of mainly the French book to Chinese scholars of the Chinese book. 13. Thomas J. Carter, The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925); Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 (London: Verso, 1981); Paul Pelliot, Les débuts de l’imprimerie en Chine (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1953); and Zhang Xiumin, Zhongguo yinshua shi (Shanghai: Renmin, 1989). 14. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5.3 (April 1963): 304–45; and Robert Darnton, “The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France,” Past and Present 51 (May 1971): 81–115.

Introduction

5

These books and articles show, among other things, our need to clarify loose categories like East and West, since scholars in different national communities have tended consciously or otherwise to favor different regional units for comparison. Here we will concentrate on the book cultures of the two regions of Eurasia, East Asia and Western Europe, which in premodern times made the most of publishing books.15 Just as the most influential Western scholars of the European book have relished researching how the book has shaped the history of European countries other than just their own, so do we now wish to analyze the development of book production, distribution, and consumption of these regions from a consciously comparative perspective. Our hope is that our chapters will cast new light on the history of books and book culture within each of these regions. The stretch of time treated here, 1450–1850, includes the first four centuries of the period that Europeans have traditionally entitled “The Age of European Expansion” and four centuries of considerable expansion of printing in East Asia, after the spread of printing in China during the Song period (960–1279) (see Map 1.1, Map 1.2, and Map 1.3). As the greater interaction of European and East Asian cultures involved everything from religion and silver to armies and commodities, it is only to be expected that their book worlds also had some contacts, perhaps meaningful ones. This introduction explores how much of this Eurasian imprint and printing relationship can be revealed through what recent French studies have called histoire croisée, “entangled” or “connected” history.16 This increasingly popular kind of history writing focuses on the parallel, at times unconsciously shared, history that wide-ranging research discovers for different cultures and societies. It is seen as a basic feature of global history, itself stimulated by the accelerating globalization of our time. How might such histoire croisée enrich the history of the book? We suggest that it can do so through the study of technology transfer, knowledge transfer, and the history of “news.” These three subjects, commonly taken up in studies of historical connectivity, will form a set of interlinked reflections on the matters described by Thomas Carter at the head of this introduction. Much of the general story related by Carter a century ago still holds true: printing began in East Asia, and European printers did make use of some Asian innovations, like paper, to print books. Yet, many of the details in Carter’s account need reexamination and revision. More importantly, 15. For example, the Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest writing at the close of the seventeenth century: “One must notice that in the entire world there is not one nation, even not in Europe [speaking of this ‘nation’ in its entirety, in general terms], where the use of writing and books is more familiar and even more necessary than in the Chinese nation,” as in Noël Golvers, Libraries of Western Learning for China: Circulation of Western Books between Europe and China in the Jesuit Mission (ca. 1650– ca. 1750), vol. 1, Logistics of Book Acquisition and Circulation (Leuven: Ferdinand Verbiest Institute, 2012): 16n6. 16. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, eds., De la comparaison à l’histoire croisée (Paris: Seuil, 2004).

PINGYANG

KAIFENG

CHENGDU

HANGZHOU

JIANYANG

Map 1.1 Preliminary map of major sites of commercial publishing, Song-Jin-Yuan dynasties Notes: 1. Map 1.1 conservatively lists only major sites for commercial publishing in the Song, Jin, and Yuan dynasties. For a comprehensive map of all kinds of publishing, including literati or elite-family publishing, see Su Bai, Tang Song shiqi de diaoban yinshua (Beijing: Wenwu, 1999): facing 84. 2. The major commercial publishing sites are identified here by the use of capital letters for their entire name.

Beijing Taiyuan Ji’nan

Xian

Kaifeng

Yangzhou Chengdu Chongqing

NANJING Hankou Wuchang

Huzhou HUIZHOU

CHANGSHU SUZHOU HANGZHOU

Nanchang

JIANYANG

Guangzhou

Map 1.2 Preliminary map of major and minor Ming commercial publishing sites (late sixteenth century) Notes: 1. Map 1.2 tentatively lists major and minor sites for commercial publishing and the major book markets as identified by Hu Yinglin (1551–1602), Jingjihuitong, 4, Shaoxing shanfang (Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1958), v. 1: 65ff. Provincial capitals were usually sites of official publishing, while throughout the empire and especially the lower Yangzi delta many prefectural and county seats, market towns, and even rural districts were active in literati or elite-family printing. 2. The major commercial publishing sites are distinguished from the minor by the use of capital letters for their entire name.

Shengjing (now Shenyang) Liaoyang BEIJING Botouzhen (now in Hebei) Lanzhou

Ji’nan Dongchang

Zhangde Zhengzhou Ankang

Kaifeng

Zhoujiakou

YUECHI CHENGDU

Guang’an CHONGQING

NANJING Anqing Wuhu Huzhou Wuchang HANGZHOU Jiujiang Huizhou

Shashi Hankou

Changde Changsha Guiyang Kunming

Baoqing (now Shaoyang)

Nanchang XUWAN SIBAO BASIN

Anshun

Fuzhou

Quanzhou Xiamen

Bose Nanning

YANGZHOU Zhenjiang Changzhou CHANGSHU SUZHOU Shanghai Jiaxing Cixi Ningbo Yuyao Shaoxing

GUANGZHOU Magang FOSHAN

Map 1.3 Preliminary map of major and minor Qing commercial publishing sites (nineteenth century) Notes: 1. Map 1.3 tentatively lists major and minor sites for commercial publishing in the nineteenth century primarily on the basis of Zhang Xiumin, Zhongguo yinshua shi (Shanghai: Renmin, 1989): 547–59. As in the Ming dynasty, Qing provincial capitals were often sites of official publishing, while throughout the empire and especially the lower Yangzi delta many prefectural and county seats, market towns, and even rural districts were active in literati or elite-family printing. 2. The major commercial publishing sites are distinguished from the minor by the use of capital letters for their entire name.

Introduction

9

where Carter and his successors, like the historian of science Joseph Needham, saw an easy passage of this printing technology, book knowledge, and information across Eurasia, we have repeatedly found obstacles to this mutual sharing and communication between 1450 and 1850. The sharing of technical knowledge related by Carter and the establishment of a common Eurasian system of scientific knowledge that Needham imagined simply did not take place in this period, and for sure not in the often disembodied manner these scholars described. In this introduction we reexamine this transmission of book technology and knowledge and consider the reasons for the difficulties it often encountered. We hope thereby to clear the ground for the discussion of a comparative and, in places, global book history in this volume’s other chapters on the East Asian and European book worlds of East Asia and Europe. “Book world” is a concept adopted here to indicate explicitly the network or system of people and institutions in an East Asian or a European country that supported and sometimes restricted the production, diffusion, and consumption of books: scriptoria, printer’s workshops, book peddlers, bookshops, libraries public or private, large or small, etc.17 This introduction begins our consideration of these book worlds by analyzing the transfer of their printing technology, arguably the simplest and most basic of bookrelated transfers. First, we review the likelihood of the transmission of woodblock or moveable-type printing technology from East Asia westward and then survey the subsequent passage of Western printing-press technology eastward as far as Japan. Having found that before the mid-nineteenth century these particular technology transfers had limited success in either direction, we next study these regions’ “book connectivity,” as seen in their transfer of scientific and religious learning through printed books initially in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Admittedly, these early exchanges bore only temporary and partial fruit and led to minimal institutionalization of the exchange of knowledge between these two distant parts of Eurasia (as in the regular sharing of scientific learning). But, this scientific knowledge and religious thought from the West did help, we suggest, to introduce new ideas to East Asia that arguably helped to prompt Chinese scholars to pay greater attention to textual scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Meanwhile, some eighteenth-century French ministers and thinkers, anxious to learn from China, sought a secular type of “book connectivity” that aimed at more than the mere transfer of knowledge. These members of the French political and cultural elite called instead for the regular exchange of scientific and practical information that would involve long-term collaborative Sino-French research on both contemporary 17. This understanding of “book world” is shaped by the term “art world” as coined by the philosopher Arthur Danto and defined by the sociologist Howard Becker as “the network of people whose cooperative activity organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things produces the kinds of art works that the art world is noted for” (Howard S. Becker, Artworlds [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982]).

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and historical matters.18 Such Enlightenment ideals may have soon become mired in the mud of domestic disputes and power politics in China and Europe, winning little support from Chinese within China and never being matched by onsite Chinese collaborative surveys about the West. But they lived on to inspire later generations of Western investigators to undertake research surveys in China and to involve Chinese deeply in such work, even at the risk of harsh criticism. In fact, if we are looking for early steps to institutionalize the transfer of knowledge between East Asia and Western Europe, it would be wise to look beyond scientific expeditions, royal patronage, missionary publications, and imported books. The French court’s failure to set up a regular exchange of scientific and economic knowledge between Paris and Beijing took place after another type of knowledge exchange had for a century and a half been attracting the attention of practical men: the regular gathering, channeling, and delivery of “news,” that is, discrete pieces of often ephemeral information about current political and commercial conditions around the world. The annual provision of such information to the ruling elite of Tokugawa period (1600–1868) Japan was a duty that from 1641 the Dutch merchants assumed in return for their trading privileges in Japan. This growth of “news” transmission from Europe to Japan would seem to have had a parallel in formal and informal processes of relaying information among officials and degree holders within the Chinese empire. But the Tokugawa government’s practice was different. Not only did it rely on foreigners for this information, but also it collected foreign books on science and events in the distant West. As a result, the political elite of this island kingdom, otherwise sealed off from the European world and hitherto accustomed to an East Asian political order whose members largely kept their neighbors at bay and remained ignorant of their real plans and problems, was for two centuries able to keep abreast of major world and European developments. Somewhat surprisingly, it was better informed than the courts of Qing China and Korea about international events (other than about Central Asia) and thus in the mid-nineteenth century better prepared than these governments to use this international (or European) order of information for a relatively smooth reentry into the global political and economic system. Also, through their study of Dutch books, eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Japanese would gradually learn of Western advances in medicine and the natural sciences and thus begin to introduce some of the modern learning that few contemporary Chinese officials had shown little active interest in acquiring and using. Only after 1850 did Chinese in increasing numbers recognize how crucial the transfer of once-distant European technology, knowledge, and news had become to their civilization’s survival.

18. This subject is presently being researched by McDermott for a book entitled On the Eve.

Introduction

11

Technology Transfer Between 1450 and 1850, the principal ways of printing books in East Asia and Europe were, respectively, woodblock printing and moveable-type printing. These printing technologies differed radically, as did their organization, labor conditions, most of their required skills, and their costs.19 Consider first the East Asian production process of woodblock printing, in particular the simplicity of its tools and flexibility of each of its six stages.

Fig. 1.1 Woodblock-printing tools (twentieth-century tools, photographed in Japan). East Asian publishers and authors traditionally showed minimal interest in providing images of production tools and accounts of the woodblock printing process.

19. For this information on printing technology, see Michael Twyman, The British Library Guide to Printing: History and Techniques (London: British Library, 1998); Blaise Agüera y Arcas, “Temporary Matrices and Elemental Punches in Gutenberg’s DK Type,” in Kristian Jensen, ed., Incunabula and Their Readers: Printing, Selling and Using Books in the Fifteenth Century (London: British Library, 2003): 1–12; Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); and Joseph P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006): 16–19. Agüera y Arcas has made the provocative claim that Gutenberg’s punches were not for whole letters but for the different parts of a letter’s shape, and thus these punches were made from a relatively easily carved material such as wood.

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First, thin slabs of wood were planed down and prepared for the cutting-in of a text (see Plate 1.1). Second, this text was transcribed with ink onto sheets of paper, each of which was placed onto the face of a separate woodblock to be rubbed so as to leave an inverted version of its text’s characters. Third, these characters were then cut in relief into the woodblocks. Three further stages, all aimed at multiplying copies of the text, ensued: the laying of ink onto the cut face of these blocks; the placement, rubbing, and removal of paper sheets onto and from the blocks; and then the folding of each of these printed sheets and their sequential stitching with thin string to form separate bound volumes. Although one party could do all of these jobs, from no later than the Song period the labor was often divided and assigned to four kinds of specialists: the scribe who wrote the text, the block-cutter who handled the woodblocks and did the cutting, the printer who handled the ink and the sheets, and the binder who finished the job by stringing the printed sheets together.20 By contrast, moveable-type printing was a mechanical operation, involving initially at least two distinct stages: text preparation (the making of moveable type) and text multiplication (the use of this type to print) (see Plate 1.2). Type preparation, the stage most commonly identified as Gutenberg’s innovation,21 required the carving of a master letterform (also known as punch) for each letter or character in the text awaiting reproduction. The punch was pressed into a matrix (usually made of a softer metal like copper), which then was reused to produce a large supply of reusable type from an adjustable mold, “a device that accommodated one matrix at a time and allowed molten metal, consisting primarily of lead, to be poured into a rectangular cavity.” The resulting piece of type was a shaft of lead, graced at one end with a letterform that replicated the punch stand in relief. In the second stage of moveable-type printing—and eventually the only work done regularly in European moveable-type printing shops and houses—separate pieces of this type were arranged by compositors to spell rows of words, which were locked into a metal frame to be inked and then pressed by pressmen with a flat sheet of paper for each printing of the frame’s text (also known as forme). This final pressing work in the second stage involved three distinct steps: a frisket and tympan were folded over the locked frame, the first to keep margins clean and the second to hold the paper in place. The bed of the press was rolled under the platen, which then was pulled onto the press to print the sheet for a final reading by proofreaders. And to complete the book production process, 20. In Song times, the binder often pasted margins of printed sheets together to form accordion-like volumes; but over the course of the dynasty this practice gave way to the relatively convenient and durable bound volume. 21. This manufacture work, metal or otherwise, soon developed into a specialty that most printing shops and houses purchased or borrowed rather than made for themselves. In other words, the work actually done in most cases was just that of the second stage and as such was done by compositors, pressmen, and proofreaders.

Introduction

13

the printed sheets were folded and arranged to await binding, which was usually done after purchase to suit the customer’s taste and pocketbook. These technical differences had extensive consequences for the working conditions, management methods, and capital invested in each of their production methods. Work for the East Asian variety of woodblock printing depended primarily on the manual skills of the block-cutters, printers and binders, while European moveable-type printing relied more on metal machinery, the workers’ skill at manipulating it, and the managers’ ability to coordinate all the workers’ labor. The long training period required of each worker in moveable-type printing (apprenticeships could last up to seven years) strengthened the corporate and yet hierarchical nature of the labor force, as did the use of a fixed press site for at least the multiplication stage of the production process. In fact, the need to readjust much of the same type for each of the separate type formes encouraged close coordination among the different types of worker in a press room. Woodblock printing, by contrast, allowed each worker and type of worker to do his or her job independently and not necessarily in proximity or sequence. Admittedly, when in later centuries a woodblock cutter was at times assigned to cut only a particular kind of brushstroke in the characters of a woodblock text (or to carve all examples of one kind of stroke before proceeding to do the same with other kinds of stroke), these carvers would have had to synchronize their work schedules. But such coordination was not required of them with the other kinds of woodblock workers or of these other kinds of woodblock workers among themselves. The scribe had no need (and probably no wish) to work at a production site, and the printers of a copy sheet might do their job decades after the blocks had been cut, perhaps for another publishing house at another site. When a font of type had to be purchased or rented, moveable-type printing would have overall become more expensive than woodblock printing. Working with figures across countries, centuries, and currencies is a highly risky exercise that historians often dabble in to their embarrassment. But the cheapness of late sixteenth-century printing—“the exceedingly large numbers of [printed] books in circulation here and the ridiculously low prices at which they are sold”—was noted by the pioneering Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci,22 and the relatively low cost of woodblock printing in Qing-dynasty China was, at least for nonelite books, confirmed by later European missionaries in the nineteenth century. Paper cost less in China (where woodblock printing allowed for the use of far thinner sheets), and low labor costs there were often further reduced by the adoption of a simpler method of block-cutting and the resort to family labor.23 Production sites in China, often located at the back of residences or 22. Matteo Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci, 1583–1610, translated by Louis J. Gallagher, SJ (New York: Random House, 1953): 21. 23. McDermott, Social History: 40–41; Cynthia Brokaw, “Empire of Texts: Book Production, Book Distribution, and Book Culture in Late Imperial China,” in this volume; and Chow Kai-wing, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004): 28–29.

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in temple grounds, would often have been cheaper to rent or purchase than printshops with all their machinery in European cities; from no later than the eleventh century24 and increasingly from the seventeenth century,25 some important publishing sites were located in small commercial towns and even rural settlements rather than in large cities. Thanks to its cheapness and simplicity, woodblock printing in China also benefited from flexible financing by companies, commercial partnerships, and numerous private individuals—as in Europe—and from direct publication—far more than in Europe—by private individuals, families, religious institutions, and government institutions. Indeed, long after the state and private noncommercial parties in China ceded claim to dominating the quantity of imprint production, they continued as publishers to set standards of quality in paper, calligraphy, and editing, which commercial publishers—unlike in Europe—seldom matched. Also, the social background of those involved in the financing and marketing of books in China was highly varied. Despite some modern generalizations to the contrary, some Chinese full-time commercial publishers and many part-time private publishers won social respect, because they printed fine editions of books that scholars needed or desired, or they distributed free copies of rare and famous titles in their own collections.26 Whereas in the mid-eleventh century all of China’s book merchants were said with some exaggeration to have been scholars (shi), later on in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, local school teachers and degree-holding scholars even worked as commercial publishers in some smaller provincial towns.27 In short, not only was printing by woodblock often cheaper than by moveable type, but also these two kinds of printing used two different sets of technology, formed two different modes of production, and helped to shape two different book worlds. Is it odd, then, that some scholars have sought to identify links of technological transfer across medieval Eurasia? No, if only because each of these book worlds for some time practiced both woodblock and moveable-type book printing before going their largely separate ways. That is, the Chinese were successfully using woodblock printing by ca. 700 and moveable-type printing with ceramic type by the 1040s, with wooden type by 1298, and with bronze type by no later than ca. 1490;28 yet, at no time 24. Lucille Chia, Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fukien (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003): 18–23. 25. Cynthia Brokaw, Commerce and Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007). 26. McDermott, Social History: 108; and Joseph P. McDermott, “Rare Book Collections in Qing Dynasty Suzhou: Owners, Dealers, and Uses”: 199–249, in Lu Miaw-fen, ed., Learning and Culture in Late Imperial China (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 2013). 27. As discussed by Brokaw in her chapter in this volume. 28. Tsien Tsuen-hsuin, Paper and Printing, in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume  5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985): 201–20. Note, however, that earlier efforts (dating from ca. 1300) to use tin type failed due to poor control of the ink (ibid.: 217).

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did moveable-type printing of any sort predominate there but in a few book genres in a few places (e.g., genealogies in the southern Anhui prefecture of Huizhou or in a late eighteenth-century imperial printing project; see Fig. 1.2).29 Printing methods of various kinds also appeared in the West, but all began centuries later than in East Asia: the first woodblock printing of sheets (of only images) has been tentatively dated to no earlier than the second half of the fourteenth century for Italy and to the very end of that century for Germany. Woodblock printing of texts with images

Fig. 1.2 A Chinese moveabletype room, in Jin Jian, Qinding Wuying dian Juzhen ban chengshi (Siku quanshu zhenben ed.), 16a (courtesy of Cambridge University Library). The absence of machinery in Chinese moveabletype book production becomes obvious once this image is placed alongside Plate 1.2.

29. Michela Bussotti, Gravures de Hui (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2001): 283; and Xu  Xiaoman, “‘Preserving the Bonds of Kin,’ Genealogy Masters and Genealogy Production in the Jiangsu Zhejiang Area in the Qing and Republican Periods”: 337–39, in Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005).

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appeared in Germany in the early fifteenth century but of books (that is, like those in China) only from ca. 1440, the very time that we know Gutenberg was making his breakthrough with metal moveable type and a printing press.30 Thus, before European publishers and craftsmen in the next half century went their separate way in establishing a distinct technology set, it is just conceivable that the process and practice of woodblock printing of books had somehow been introduced from East Asia and briefly adopted in Europe. If the technology for making paper, silk, and many other objects had already made the long passage from China to Europe (as would firearms and glass lenses later on in the opposite direction),31 why can we not expect the same for printing practices, woodblock or moveable-type? Might information about either of these East Asian printing methods have reached Europe and eventually helped to trigger or instruct what has been called, rightly or wrongly, “Gutenberg’s invention”? For many generations, Western scholars speculated along such lines; but only in 1925 with the publication of Carter’s landmark study, The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward did they have strong empirical support for this argument. Making use of extensive Chinese, Central Asian, Middle Eastern, and European records, Carter pressed the view that “The influence of Chinese [wood]block printing on European printing rests on such strong circumstantial evidence as to be accepted with a reasonable degree of certainty.”32 Quickly translated into Chinese, his book inspired readers in China (and later Korea) to take his views as rock-solid facts and, in accord with some of Carter’s European predecessors, to extend his claims of transEurasian Chinese and Korean influence on woodblock printing to the moveable-type printing of Gutenberg as well.33 These modern East Asian writers have seemed to think, If Westerners were as smart as we think they are or half as smart as they think they are,34 their medieval visitors to East Asia would surely have learned about these 30. Richard S. Field, “Early Woodblocks: The Known and the Unknown”: 19–36, in Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch, eds., Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 31. Jonathan M. Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Dieter Kuhn, Textile Technology: Spinning and Reeling, in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 418–21; and Nicola Di Cosmo, “Did Guns Matter? Firearms and the Qing Formation,” in Lynn A. Struve, ed., The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004): 122–66. 32. Carter, Invention of Printing: 184. 33. Tsien, Paper and Printing: 313–19. 34. In medieval times, Chinese reportedly had an adage acknowledging the intelligence of “people in the far west—Europe, perhaps including the Byzantine area: they were thought to have one eye, as opposed to the two-eyed Chinese and the totally blind others who tried to trade with China” (Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410 [Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005]: 294). This trope, which may have originated as Arabic self-denigration, was used by late sixteenth century Chinese to refer to all non-Chinese, according to the Italian merchant Francesco Carletti in his My Voyage Around the World [(London: Methuen, 1965): 152]. But the original form, with the Europeans honored as oneeyed due to their contact with Chinese civilization, survives in reports by João de Barros in 1563 and

Introduction

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East Asian printing inventions and have made the most of them on their return home.35 Either way, these two East Asian countries and their cultures had for sure participated in the invention of book printing and thus in the making of the modern world on their own soil. Over the past century, newly discovered information has helped to turn these scholars’ beliefs into common Chinese and Korean convictions. Some scholars have dated a Buddhist sutra imprint in the Tangut language, unearthed in northwest China in 1987, to the mid-twelfth century and thus accorded it the honor of being the oldest extant example of moveable-type printing in the world (a telltale mark of such printing is the presence in a text of at least one upside-down character). Other specialists, however, prefer this distinction to fall on an earlier Tangut translation of a Tibetan tantric text printed in Tangut with wooden type and dating from the early twelfth century.36 Either way, the earliest extant book printed with moveable type appears to be a Tangut imprint published with Chinese technology in the Tangut language. Moreover, the moveable type used to print these Tangut books was undoubtedly used to print other Tangut texts as well (about 12 Tangut titles printed in moveable type survive, largely thanks to excavations in the Chinese provinces of Gansu, Ningxia, and Inner Mongolia), and travelers heading toward Europe along the Silk Road would surely, it is argued, have encountered these or similar examples of moveable-type printing, if not in the Tangut, then in the Uighur or Chinese script.37 Such encounters “with printed books, woodblocks, or metal types,” according to Tsien Tsuen-hsuin in his authoritative volume in the Needham series on Chinese science and technology, argue for “the presence of a Chinese connection in the origins of European printing” and, he implies, typography as well as xylography.38 In recent years, Timothy H. Barrett has made important contributions to this line of thinking about a Eurasian transfer of printing technology. In weaving various threads of evidence into a rich historical tapestry, his book The Woman Who Discovered Printing describes how East Asian and Central Asian printing practices, woodblock as well as moveable type, might have reached Europe and eventually attracted the attention of Gutenberg. For instance, during the fourteenth century many slaves came to the cultural heart of Europe from as far away as China and present-day Mongolia (they even appear in Renaissance paintings), and he speculates that they might have

35.

36.

37. 38.

Andre Pereira, SJ, in Beijing in 1737 (C. R. Boxer, João de Barros, Portuguese Humanist and Historian of Asia [New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1981]: 107, 126n24). Thomas T. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 178–79; Jackson: 301, dates the peak of European merchant visits to Mongol China to just ca. 1320–ca. 1345. Zhang Xiumin, The History of Chinese Printing, revised by Han Qi (Paramus, NJ: Homa and Sekey Books, 2009): 311–15; Imre Galambos, Chinese Texts in Tangut Manuscripts and Printed Books from Khara-khoto (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015): 104. We wish to thank Dr. Galambos for this information. Tsien, Paper and Printing: 304. Ibid.: 317–19.

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passed on their knowledge of printing and printing practices to Europeans.39 Yet, as in the work of Carter, clear textual, material, or visual proof of the transfer of this technical information to anywhere in Europe is never provided, and we the readers are left with a large body of fascinating “circumstantial evidence” and intriguing conclusions. The scholarship dazzles, even if in the end it fails to convince. Nonetheless, Barrett’s conclusions are supported by similar claims by eminent Chinese scholars like Zhang Xiumin and by the findings of Thomas Allsen on the great variety of the occupations of those Chinese who served or traveled westward into Islamic and Christian lands during the Yuan dynasty.40 As such, they call for reconsideration of possible indications of East Asian influence on European and especially Gutenberg’s printing methods. For this study, our original question—Did East Asian printing methods reach Europe and eventually help to trigger or inform Europe’s “printing revolution”?—can profitably be refined into three interlinked questions: When did Europeans first learn of any kind of East Asian printing and of printed books? When did they first learn of the priority of East Asian book printing? And, when did they first learn how to print sheets or books, or even textiles? The last two of these questions, when asked of either woodblock or moveable-type printing, will provide answers that generally indicate the independent origin and development of East Asian and European book-printing technologies. The answer to the first of our questions is straightforward, if not entirely satisfactory: the earliest Western reports of any type of printing in China are found in the travel records of eight European travelers, including Marco Polo, who visited China between 1254 and 1344. These men all mention the Chinese and Mongol practice of printing paper money.41 Unfortunately, since these Europeans were interested primarily in how such a unique form of currency retained its value and profits, the closest they get to describing the production process is a brief passage in the earliest of their reports, that of William of Rubruck: “The everyday currency of Cataua [i.e., Cathay or north China] is of paper, the breadth and length of a palm, on which lines are stamped as on [Khan] Mangu’s [i.e., Möngke’s] seal.”42 As a result, when modern historians have sought to determine early knowledge of either the Chinese practice of printing in general or the printing of paper money in the Chinese manner, they have had to rely on medieval Persian sources. Those Persian sources about the Mongol

39. Timothy H. Barrett, The Woman Who Discovered Printing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008): 20, 140; Joseph Needham, Clerks and Craftsmen in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970): 61, 201; and Iris Origo, “The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Speculum XXX (1955): 321–66. 40. Allsen, Culture and Conquest: 6–7. 41. Carter, Invention of Printing: 121–22. 42. The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253– 1255, translated by Peter Jackson (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990): 203.

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introduction of paper money, however, uniformly warn the reader of the folly of any such printing. In 1294, we read, the recent Mongol subjugator of Persia imposed a contemporary “Chinese/Mongol” solution to the Persian problem of a coin shortage: he printed paper money,43 most likely off a wooden or metal block. To this khan’s consternation his currency innovation flopped. The merchants in Tabriz rejected his printed money so resolutely that they forced the markets to close and the ruler to withdraw his paper currency from the market. Their understandable preference for metal thereby not only led to a seven-century reversion to metal currency but, more germanely, boded ill for the potential transfer to Persia of any East Asian printing technology. No books were printed in Persia by woodblock or moveable type—that is, there was no publishing industry—until the early nineteenth century. If the Genoese and Venetian merchants trading in late thirteenth-century Tabriz returned to Italy with tales of printed paper money, as speculated by Carter,44 then surely they would not have shared our modern assumption that the benefits of printing are self-evident. They would have reported home its infliction of market chaos and collapse rather than its expansion of trade and profits. Not for the last time in the global history of printing did the introduction of its technology, even in the simple form attempted here, lead to havoc and arouse stubborn opposition to any promise of its economic or social benefits. For Western knowledge of the printing of books (as opposed to money) in Asia, Thomas T. Allsen would have us turn to another passage in Marco Polo’s account of his travels in Mongol China: “And so, they will make ( facient) many little pamphlets (quatrini) in which they write everything (scribent omnium) which shall happen in each month that year, which pamphlets are called tacuini. And they sell one of these pamphlets for one groat to any who wishes to buy that he may know what may happen that year.”45 Allsen takes these pamphlets to refer to printed almanacs, a view that he backs with Chinese textual evidence of a Yuan-dynasty government Office for Calendar Printing as well as with a unique surviving example of a Mongolian calendar dated 1324 and printed in the Uighur script, which was discovered a century

43. Karl Jahn, “Paper Currency in Iran: A Contribution to the Cultural and Economic History of Iran in the Mongol Period,” Journal of Asian History 4 (1970): 101–35, esp. 131–32. 44. As mentioned in Carter, Invention of Printing: 128–29. 45. Allsen, Culture and Conquest: 183, as in Marco Polo, The Description of the World, translated and annotated by A. C. Moule and Paul Pelliot (London: Routledge, 1938), v.1: 252. The surviving manuscript versions of Marco Polo are translations of translations of, possibly, translations. Our use of the Moule and Pelliot edition of the Toledo copy (a Latin manuscript that is often taken to be the most reliable and comprehensive extant version of the text) assumes the word choice of this Latin manuscript closely follows that of whatever earlier version was dictated in Franco-Italian by Marco Polo to his scribe. Note that other consulted texts (e.g., the Yule-Cordier edition) also have this meaning of “write.”

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ago by German scholar-adventurers in Turfan in Central Asia.46 Yet, strictly speaking, the passage in Marco Polo’s account—which of course would have been the only one of these three sources known to premodern Europeans—speaks simply of pamphlets in which men “write.” No fifteenth-century or later European reading or hearing of this passage would have had reason to think here of printing by either woodblock or moveable type. Thus, even though Europeans may have orally learned of the practice of printing from travelers to and from Central Asia and China, the earliest textual evidence of European knowledge of the Chinese practice of book printing appears to date from the start of the sixteenth century. Portuguese navigators had arrived home from their forays in East Asian waters, and although they sought to monopolize their information on China and the Eastern trade routes, the Portuguese king could not in 1514 refrain from sharing with an astonished pope one of their most remarkable souvenirs from Chinese ports, a printed book from China. Knowledge of this first-dated European mention of an East Asian printed book soon spread in Europe, and the volume itself won entrance to the Vatican Library.47 In other words, from the very late thirteenth century some literate Europeans for sure knew of Chinese printing of paper money, but European knowledge of Chinese book printing began much later. It seems to postdate by roughly three-quarters of a century the start of European woodblock printing of books as well as Gutenberg’s technical breakthrough in Mainz. To answer the second and third of our questions about European knowledge of the priority of East Asian printing and its production methods, we have to look separately at the European evidence for the arrival of knowledge about woodblock and moveable-type printing. Whereas the earliest extant description in any language of how Chinese printed books from woodblocks was written by a late thirteenth-century Persian (whose account was first translated into Western languages centuries later),48 it is only with the French Jesuit Du Halde’s 1735 book on China that an account of the Chinese method of woodblock printing appears in any detail in a European publication.49 Yet, two centuries earlier, in 1546, in an influential book by Paolo Giovio 46. In other parts of Eurasia, such as Turfan, early woodblock prints were made in Chinese, Uighur, Sanskrit, Tangut, Tibetan, and Mongolian. 47. Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968), II, book 1: 41. 48. Tsien, Paper and Printing: 194–95. 49. J. B. Du Halde, Description Géographique, Historique, Chronologique, Politique et Physique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie Chinois (Paris: Chez P. G. Le Mercier, 1735), v. 2: 249–51; and Theodore J. De Vinne, The Invention of Printing (London: Trübner, 2nd edition,1878): 109–10. De Vinne’s account of Chinese printing still merits reading by students of East Asian printing. It draws on nineteenthcentury missionary reports, most likely including the first account in a Western language that is detailed enough to allow a Westerner to print books by practicing the entire Chinese process of woodblock carving and printing: William Milne, A Retrospect of the First Ten Years of the Protestant Mission to China.

Introduction

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we find the first Western textual acknowledgement of possible Chinese priority in the printing of books.50 Even if the textual evidence would seem then to argue against any transfer of East Asian woodblock printing technology westward to pre-Gutenberg Europe, some surviving material evidence has been interpreted by scholars, including Giovio, to argue just the opposite. The European use of woodblock printing for objects other than books, as we have already seen, predates Gutenberg’s invention by about a century.51 By the mid-fourteenth century, some European textiles were being printed with woodblock designs, and by the same century’s end so were images on paper sheets (which, from the 1440s, were produced in increasing numbers, often for inclusion in moveable-type imprints).52 While some Chinese like Tsien Tsuen-hsuin have traced the appearance of these European printed materials to the prior introduction of “Eastern” woodblock-printing materials and practices, we remain to be persuaded. In our belief, none of the surviving material evidence, when carefully examined in light of present scholarship, confirms claims of a transfer of these woodblock-printing practices or materials either directly from East Asia or indirectly through Central Asia and the Middle East. Consider first the seventy-seven or so Arabic printed amulets traceable to Islamic Egypt, the only extant examples of Arabic paper printing from the medieval Middle East.53 Their calligraphic style, archeological context, and a few possible textual references have persuaded some scholars to date their production to the period between 900 and 1400.54 Rough confirmation of these dates has come from the archeological context of two unearthed amulets (their excavation site at Fustāt near Cairo has been dated to the century between 950 and 1050) and from scientific analysis of two other amulets (the production of their paper has been dated 50. Tsien, Paper and Printing: 314. The oldest European document with Chinese characters that was printed in Europe dates from the second half of the seventeenth century (Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism [Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010]: 17). 51. Tsien, Paper and Printing: 131–32, 309–10; Carter, Invention of Printing: 139–44; Richard S. Field, “Early Woodblocks: The Known and the Unknown”: 19–36, in Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch, eds., Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); David McKitterick, “The Beginning of Printing,” in Christopher Allmand, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 287–98; and De Vinne, The Invention of Printing: 251. 52. Field, “Early Woodblocks”: 20, 30; and, Peter Schmidt, “The Multiple Image: The Beginnings of Printmaking, between Old Theories and New Approaches” in Parshall and Schoch, eds., Origins of European Printmaking: 40. 53. The only other printed sheet from the medieval Middle East appears to be a crude Hebrew print now in the Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Library and dated to ca. 1400 by nowhere less than Scotland Yard. The precise implications of this date for a single printed sheet await further study, but the print’s quality shows little sign of direct influence from Chinese or Central Asian carving. 54. D. S. Richards, “The Block-Printed Fragments,” in Wladyslaw Kubiat and George T. Scanlon, Fustāt Expedition Final Report, Vol. 2, Fustāt-C (Winona Lake: American Research Center in Egypt/ Eisenbrauns, 1989): 69–70, 76–78, 80.

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to the thirteenth century and the early fifteenth century).55 Furthermore, educated Persians in the fourteenth century certainly knew of Chinese printed books,56 and their rulers received Chinese books, almost certainly imprints, from the Yuan court.57 Yet, as Allsen astutely observes, only one Persian writer, the extraordinary Rashīd al-Dīn, rightly appreciated the Chinese practice of printing as “one of the wonders of the age.”58 Hence, claims of a direct Chinese influence on the printing of these Arabic amulets have been few. Even fewer have been assertions by Islamic specialists of these printed amulets’ influence on European woodblock-printing practices and prints.59 Another means of possible Chinese or Middle Eastern influence, printed playing cards, seems to offer a more credible explanation, if only because playing cards were woodblock-printed by no later than the ninth century in China and by the fourteenth century in Europe (where they now are the most common kind of woodblockprinted paper item that survives from the fifteenth century). Yet, any posited passage of Chinese printed playing cards or of their production method across Eurasia to Europe is very hard to trace, since no material evidence of printed playing cards survives from the medieval Middle East. Instead, all extant playing cards from the medieval Middle East are painted (an indication of how limited was the use of printing there during the centuries when Arabic amulets are said to have been printed). Furthermore, even if we forget the inconvenience of this missing Middle Eastern link for printed playing cards, not one of the surviving pre-1450 printed European cards (numbering about 70) contains a text. Thus, even though the practice of playing cards may have been transmitted orally from one gambling trader to another over very long distances, claims of the direct or indirect passage of Chinese or Middle Eastern printed playing cards to medieval Europe are at best speculative and would for sure concern the reproduction only of single images and not of texts and by extension books.60 One might argue around this conclusion by positing that some Chinese or Central Asian printed cards may have entered Eastern Europe directly with invading

55. Karl R. Schaefer, Enigmatic Charms: Medieval Arabic Printed Amulets in American and European Libraries and Museums (Leiden: Brill, 2006): 41–45; and, Richard W. Bulliet, “Medieval Arabic Tarsh: a Forgotten Chapter in the History of Arabic Printing,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 107 (1987): 427–38. 56. Allsen, Culture and Conquest: 117–22 for agricultural manuals, 144–46 for medical translations. 57. E.g., the album page, “The sages of China bringing books of history to Uljaitu,” from a Majma ‘alTavarikh (ca. 1425–30) of Hafiz-I Abru, Timurid, Herat, depicting Li Dazhi and Maksun presenting books a century earlier to Uljiatu, the Mongol ruler of Persia from 1304 to 1316 (British Museum, OA 1966.10–10.013). 58. Allsen, Culture and Conquest: 184. 59. We wish to express our thanks to Stefan Reif, Geoffrey Roper, Ben Outhwaite, Ulrich Marzolph, and Gabriele Ferrario for sharing their expertise with us on these and other matters. 60. Field, “Early Woodblocks”: 21, 22–23: Allsen, Culture and Conquest: 180–81; Tsien, Paper and Printing: 131–32, 309–10; Carter, Invention of Printing: 139–44.

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Mongol forces in the early fourteenth century. But bereft of textual and material evidence, that claim also remains only speculation. Other scholars interested in showing a Eurasian transfer of printing technology have sensibly chosen to compare the European and East Asian woodblock prints and their methods of production. In finding similarities in the spatial arrangement of text and image on Chinese and European early woodblock sheets, some have rushed to conclusions of “influence” that handily forget that medieval Chinese and Europeans each had several ways to arrange text and image on woodblock sheets and manuscripts and that European woodblock solutions to this problem resemble and arguably derive from their own earlier practices for manuscripts and textile pieces.61 A second line of argument based on surviving Chinese and European woodblock prints is more direct, in that it focuses on similarities in Chinese and European techniques for woodblock print and book production. If we forget for the moment that all such modern comparisons of techniques are ahistorical in that they project recent survey findings onto otherwise unknown techniques of the distant past, certain woodblock production practices in the view of the celebrated nineteenth-century printer and bibliophile Theodore De Vinne were common to China and European craftsmen: the preliminary drawing of lines and images onto paper, the transfer of lines from the paper onto wood, the cutting away of the field, the use of a fluid writing ink, and the use of only one side of a paper sheet for printing.62 Note, however, what is missing from this list: not just key differences in production that De Vinne mentioned63 but also the essential knowledge of how to prepare a woodblock, how to cut it, how to print sheets from it, and how to bind those sheets. When faced, then, with sample printed sheets of each woodblock tradition, one is hard put to avoid concluding that the “primitive beauty”—or, more accurately, technical crudity—that some have found in the surviving European woodblock prints of the fifteenth century indicates that no skilled East Asian carver transmitted his trade to a European carver then. Moreover, the few specific similarities found for their making of woodblock prints could just as well have come from the far from rare circumstance of craftsmen in these two parts of Eurasia independently reaching common solutions to common problems. The awkward images on the European woodblock prints, then, are testimony not just to

61. Jean-Pierre Drège, “Du texte à l’image: les manuscrits illustrés”: 105–68, in Jean-Pierre Drège et al., eds., Images de Dunhuang, Dessins et peintures sur papier des fonds Pelliot et Stein (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1999). 62. De Vinne, The Invention of Printing: 131. 63. For example, the common European use then of brown rather than black ink and the practice of cutting with rather than against the grain of the wooden plank (ibid.: 114, 253). Contrary to the impression given by Tsien, Paper and Printing: 313, De Vinne is far more tentative in his conclusion: “They have been regarded as sufficient warrant for the hypothesis that our knowledge of engraving on wood must have been taken from China . . . The mechanics of Europe had little to learn of the theory, and but little of the practice of xylography.”

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the brevity of Europe’s woodblock tradition and the decisive shift in late fifteenth-century Europe away from woodblocks, that is, to moveable-type printing for texts and eventually copper etching for images. The awkwardness also manifests the absence of an encounter between European craftsmen and their skilled counterparts—or at least skilled teachers—from Asia. If the transfer argument based on the westward movement of printed cards is at best inconclusive, that based here on the similarity of some production practices in East Asian and European woodblock printing runs aground on the slimness of the evidence. It is also strongest when we assume the mediation of an unskilled transmitter of a sophisticated East and Central Asian tradition of woodblock carving. But, to sum up, the posited presence of an intermediary is yet one more assumption set up to support a nebulous argument of technological transfer that is backed by little if any convincing evidence, textual or material. For the westward transfer of East Asian moveable-type printing technology to Europe, the evidence is even less supportive. Gutenberg’s production process, as described above, depended on many mechanical parts, such as type molds, orderly metal-type frames, a press to print legible paper sheets with a new kind of ink, and a font of metal type. As Barrett acknowledges,64 any claims of East Asian influence on Gutenberg’s invention can relate to only the last of these parts. The printing press itself was partly based on old Mediterranean oil or wine presses, which made use of helical gears to squeeze grapes for wine or olives for oil, and which had no counterpart in traditional East Asian technology (compare the press mechanisms in Plate 1.2 and Fig. 1.3 for sixteenth-century European and Chinese presses).65 No type molds are described in any pre-Gutenberg Chinese accounts of making moveable type; in fact, not until the late fifteenth century did Chinese solve problems of ink control and type arrangement in the use of metal type.66 Furthermore, according to Beth McKillop, metal-type frames, at least in Korea (where metal-type printing was achieved more than a century before Gutenberg) had little to teach Gutenberg: Contemporary [fourteenth and fifteenth century] Korean accounts of the process of printing process read to us today (and, I dare say, Gutenberg’s contemporaries in Mainz) like a DIY operation: the use of copper plates instead of a frame for the arrangement of type, the consequent need for first beeswax and then bamboo to fill empty space between type, and the production expanding from ‘only a few 64. Barrett, The Woman: 16. 65. Christian Daniels, Agro-Industries: Sugarcane Technology: 330, in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 6: Part III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Rudolf P. Hommel, China at Work (New York: John Day, 1937; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971 reprint): 87–91, 112–14. Helical gearing on screws is first recorded in East Asia only in the midseventeenth century, with the use of the Archimedean screw to pump water out of silver mines in Sado, Japan. The use of this kind of gearing in China came later, as late as the nineteenth century. Our thanks to Christian Daniels for guidance on this matter. 66. Zhang Xiumin, The History of Chinese Printing, revised by Han Qi (Paramus, NJ: Homa and Sekey Books, 2009): 327.

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Fig. 1.3 A Chinese oil squeeze, ca. 1609 (Wang Qi, Sancai tuhui, Ming edition) (courtesy of the Naikaku Bunko Library). This wedge press extracts oil by hammering seeds with wooden wedges. Chinese artisans traditionally showed little interest in screws of any sort. sheets a day to several sheets in a day.’ The amateurish nature of the operation is underlined by the use of civil service examination graduates, rather than artisans, to supervise the entire process.67

And when we examine the evidence about the only metal part of Gutenberg’s machine that in Barrett’s view can have possibly benefitted from East Asian influence—the metal moveable type—the evidence is nonexistent. No text indicates the presence or knowledge of any kind of Asian moveable type or moveable-type imprint in Europe before 1450. The material evidence is even more conclusive. While 67. Beth McKillop, “The History of the Book in Korea,” in Michael F. Suarez, SJ, and H. R. Woodhyusen, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 370.

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pre-1450 printed texts have been found in seventeen different languages in Turfan alone,68 no non-European printed book or sheet, either woodblock or moveable type, is attested to have reached Europe before the early sixteenth century. Furthermore, no pre-1450 Chinese or other Asian moveable type for any script has ever been discovered west of Dunhuang and Turfan in Central Asia (Paul Pelliot dated the Uighur type he found there to ca. 1300).69 The German scholar Anne-Marie v. Gabain has claimed that a mural scene from a Turfan cave of two men hammering away at an anvil depicts the Chinese inventor of moveable type, Bi Sheng, making his font and thus shows Central Asian appreciation of the transfer westward of his invention; this piece of pure speculation (Bi Sheng made ceramic rather than metal type) has won the scholarly silence it richly merits. 70 In sum, however tantalizing all these leads are about a possible transmission of East Asian woodblock or moveable-type printing practices to Europe, they do not add up to a convincing case that any European based his or her printing “invention,” woodblock or moveable type, on previous Chinese or Korean innovations. His or her “invention” certainly followed theirs, but evidence of it being derivative is highly conjectural, even for woodblock printing. Of course, a Middle Eastern cave or archaeological site may someday emit a printed playing card, the metal type of a Chinese character, or even a Chinese printed book. But in the meantime, can we not sensibly conclude that Gutenberg and his fellow printers in fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Europe were as ignorant of crucial events that had taken place in their craft centuries earlier and 8,000 miles way, as are most Europeans today of Chinese rockets into space? About the spread of Gutenberg’s printing press across the breadth of Eurasia we fortunately have far more information, much of it underlining the difficulty of transferring one region’s printing technology elsewhere. Within Europe and eventually some of its colonies outside of Europe the transmission of the printing press was rapid and smooth. A copy of Gutenberg’s new machine reached Bamberg and Strasbourg in the 1450s and Cologne in 1464. Outside of Germany similar machines were set up in Italy (Rome in 1465 and Venice in 1469), France (Paris in 1470, Lyon in 1473), Britain (London in 1475–76), Sweden (Stockholm in 1483), Greece (Salonika in 1515), and Russia (Moscow in 1553).71 From just 14 in 1470, all in Germany and Italy, the number of European printing offices grew eightfold over the course of the next decade to 110, now including Spain, France, Poland, and England. By ca. 1500 a printing press had operated in as many as 240 to 270 European cities, and together 68. Allsen, Culture and Conquest: 177. 69. Tsien, Paper and Printing: 304, n. d. 70. Annemarie v. Gabain, Die Drucke der Turfan-Sammlung (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1957): 15–16, and illustration 7. 71. Stephan Füssel, Gutenberg and the Impact of Printing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003): 59–70.

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these presses had published an estimated 30,000 titles in 9 million volumes.72 Its spread westward to European colonies in the New World occurred largely during its second century: it was first operated in Mexico in 1539, in Peru in 1584, in New England in 1638, and finally in Brazil in 1808.

Map 1.4 Map of fifteenth-century printing towns of Incunabula (Creative Commons)

72. Jean-Francois Gilmont, “Printing at the Dawn of the Sixteenth Century,” in Jean-Francois Gilmont, ed., The Reformation and the Book, translated by Karin Maag (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998): 133; and Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

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Yet, in the long-settled and relatively literate cultures of Eurasia to the east of Europe, the printing press enjoyed far less success. It met stubborn resistance in the Islamic Middle East, heavy state and church domination in Russia, apparent indifference in South Asia, and knowing rejection in China and eventually in Japan. The first non-Europeans introduced to the invention were groups in the Islamic Middle East, who put up the staunchest opposition, notably with the sultan’s 1485 ban on Islamic printing (as the ban did not apply to Arab Christians, Jews, Armenians, and other non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, these non-Islamic groups showed some interest in printing books, but their printing activities were very restrained). Only in the 1720s did Muslims begin, very tentatively, to produce Arabic-language imprints in the Islamic world, that is, centuries after books were printed in Arabic by nonMuslims first outside the Islamic world and then within it; even so, this experiment was rapidly terminated.73 Hence, Venice, not Istanbul, was the location of the first printing of a book in Arabic, in 1514, and of the Qu’ran itself in 1537–38 (virtually all of this edition was shipped to Istanbul, apparently to be sold but actually destined for a bonfire due, it appears, to its egregious textual errors).74 Northward, in the kingdom of Muscovy the first printing press arrived in the late 1550s, only to fall so rapidly and completely under the control of the state-supported Russian Orthodox Church, that by the end of the eighteenth century only one major publishing house had been set up in Moscow. Other presses were imported by modernizing Russian rulers, but their activity was frustrated by limited demand in a country with stubbornly low levels of literacy.75 Meanwhile, in South Asia the printing press, introduced in 1556 by Jesuits to Goa, remained essentially the tool of Christian missionaries for the next two centuries. Its 73. Geoffrey Roper, “The History of the Book in the Muslim World,” in Suarez and Woodhyusen, eds., Oxford Companion to the Book: 321–39, 332. Hebrew typographic printing began in the Ottoman Empire in 1493 and in Morocco in 1515. Armenian type was used from 1567 in Turkey (i.e., Constantinople) and then from 1638 in Iran. Syriac type was used for Syriac and Arabic in Lebanon in 1610 (it was the first Arabic book printed in the Middle East), and Greek books were printed in Istanbul in 1627. This Muslim tardiness has been attributed to religious or social conservatism, deep attachment to manuscripts and scribal culture, sultans’ bans on printing, and scribal fear of unemployment (Allsen, Culture and Conquest: 184–85, discusses the problem of printing in premodern Islamic culture). Although the matter is not yet conclusively understood, one cannot fail to note the importance of non-Muslims (i.e., Jews and Christians) in Middle Eastern printing before 1819–20, the founding date of the first Muslim printing press in the Arab world at the state-run Būlāq Press near Cairo. Commercial presses appeared later on in the nineteenth century, but only under strict supervision by the state. 74. Geoffrey Roper, “Early Arabic Printing in Europe,” in Eva Hanebutt-Benz, Dagmar Glass, and Geoffrey Roper, eds., Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution: 131; and Hartmut Bobzin, “From Venice to Cairo: On the History of Arabic Editions of the Koran (16th–early 20th century),” in ibid.: 153–54. 75. Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985): 19. Over the entire seventeenth century, Russian imprint production amounted to fewer than 500 titles, usually issued in runs of between 1,200 and 2,400 copies.

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use was also restricted geographically, to mainly a few locations along the western and then eastern coasts: to Tranquebar by German/Danish Protestants, to Colombo by the Dutch Reformed Church, to Pondicherry by French Jesuits, and to Vepery by the British Protestants’ Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.76 Virtually no native Indian use of a printing press with native script fonts is recorded before the late eighteenth century.77 In fact, commercial publishing of any sort in India started only in 1777 in Calcutta, when a bankrupt English businessman there turned to his former London trade of printing books to pay off some of his creditors and so gain release from debtors’ prison.78 Whatever the reason for the tardiness of the Indian response to Gutenberg’s machine—its foreign or Christian origin, India’s low rate of literacy and lack of demand, the relative expense of imprints, the power of scribe castes, respect for the tradition of transmitting texts privately from teacher to disciple, or simple satisfaction with the practice of transcribing texts onto banana leaves— moveable-type printing took root in India eventually but only very slowly: more than two centuries after it had been introduced, three centuries after its “invention” by Gutenberg in Germany, and more than seven centuries after its first “invention” in China.79 In East Asia the printing press also had a limited impact, but for very different reasons. Initially, in fact, it won a respectful following in Japan. Into a book culture then dominated by manuscript reproduction for secular writings and woodblock editions for Buddhist texts, the Jesuits in 1590 imported a printing press from Goa to publish mainly Christian texts in the Japanese language but in a non-Japanese (that is, romanized) script. Then, in 1593, a rival font of moveable type for Chinese characters, seized in Korea by invading Japanese soldiers, was brought back to Japan, where the 76. Graham Shaw, Printing in Calcutta to 1800 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1981): x and 52; Dennis E. Rhodes, The Spread of Printing: Eastern Hemisphere, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma, and Thailand (Amsterdam: van Gendt, 1969): 11–19 and Illustration 1. Note that the earlier presses published only intermittently. 77. J. Mangamma, Book Printing in India, with Special Reference to the Contribution of European Scholars to Telugu (1746–1857) (Nellore, India: Bangorey Books, 1975). Though printing was overwhelmingly practiced by Christian missionaries, five books in Tamil script were printed by the Portuguese Jew Henrique Henriques from 1577. 78. Shaw: x and 52; Mangamma, Book Printing. Between 1780 and 1790, seventeen weekly and six monthly periodicals started in Calcutta (Abhijit Gupta, “The History of the Book in the Indian Subcontinent,” in Suarez and Woodhyusen, Oxford Companion to the Book: 343–44). Even so, virtually all materials and equipment had to be imported from Europe. 79. India (or rather certain people in India) has the distinction of having been indifferent to both moveable type and woodblock printing. The latter form of printing, known to some Tibetans in the ninth century and practiced in Tibet since at least the early fifteenth century, was introduced to some Indians as early as the ninth century and by no later than the fifteenth century; but it never proved popular (Kurtis R. Schaeffer, The Culture of the Book in Tibet [New York: Columbia University Press, 2009]: 9; and Sheldon Pollock, “Literary Culture and Manuscript Culture in Precolonial India”: 86–87, in Simon Eliot, Andrew Nash, and Ian Willison, eds., History of the Book and Literary Cultures [London: British Library, 2006]).

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nascent Tokugawa government used it for secular imprints. As the Jesuits took their printing presses with them to Macao on their expulsion from Japan two decades later in 1613, moveable-type printing in Japan was thereafter carried out overwhelmingly by the Tokugawa government without recourse to a Gutenberg-like press. From the second quarter of the seventeenth century, however, “as publishing became increasingly a commercial enterprise, the more economic method of printing from woodblocks . . . soon replaced moveable type.”80 In the mid-nineteenth century Western printing technology—by then improved over Gutenberg’s printing press—would return, to replace woodblocks in the 1880s. Elsewhere in pre-1850 East Asia, outside of the Spanish colony of the Philippines,81 Gutenberg’s invention won even fewer converts. In the late sixteenth century, the Chinese printing world, based overwhelmingly on woodblock production, was thriving as never before.82 To the European eye, as seen in Beth McKillop’s account above, the Korean—and by extension Chinese—use of moveable type appears clumsy and inefficient. But to East Asians, Gutenberg’s printing press would have had more serious drawbacks. We refer not to the potential technical challenge that the press’s lumbering hardware might have posed to East Asian craftsmen. Chinese and Japanese proved themselves more than equal to the task: at least one of the Japanese boys sent to Europe on the Date Mission learned how to print books from a printing press, and in 1604 a Chinese migrant to the Philippines (known in Spanish records as Juan de Vera) published the earliest surviving moveable-type imprint of the Philippines, the types, punches, and matrices made there and not imported.83 Rather, the problems that restricted the acceptance of Gutenberg’s machine in East Asia were more basic: it required huge capital outlays and overhead costs, its type fonts were for just 26 alphabetic letters and thus useless for a written language with well over 50,000 Chinese characters and no letters, and its ink and paper were not usable for anything resembling a Chinese or Japanese book. Moreover, its operation and its regular imprints tended to be more expensive, its maximum print runs for an edition of a popular title (and thus moneymakers) often smaller, its exposure to state censors and tax collectors more vulnerable, and the shape of its Westernerpunched characters unattractive to readers accustomed to the proper shape of characters written with calligraphic strokes. In pre-1850 China and Japan, Gutenberg’s press, then, had met its match not from fearful clerics, autocratic rulers, or a thriving 80. Donald S. Shively, “Popular Culture,” in John W. Hall and James McLain, eds., Cambridge History of Japan Volume 4: Early Modern Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): 726. 81. Piet van der Loon, “The Manila Incunabula and Early Hokkien Studies,” Asia Major 12 (1966): 1–43 and 13 (1967): 95–186. 82. McDermott, Social History: 99–103. 83. Van der Loon, “Manila Incunabula,” 12: 1, 25–27; and C. Salmon, “L’édition chinoise dans le monde insulindien (fin du XIXe s.-debut du XXe s.),” Revue Française d’Histoire du Livre 42 (1984): 111–34, esp. 112.

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manuscript culture, but from an alternative kind of technology which its users found more useful, affordable, attractive, and profitable than any moveable-type option invented by their compatriots or a European. Did sensible Chinese, Japanese, and by extension Koreans need any further reason to let the Jesuit printing presses languish in the Portuguese colony of Macao? Europe and East Asia, then, had evolved two different primary kinds of book publishing technology, each functioning in parallel to suit what became its own linguistic, cultural, and economic practices. Technological connectivity between these two kinds of printing was severely constrained, as their technology sets—ink, paper, woodblock, or metal type font—and their required skills—block-cutting styles or press control—were not mutually exchangeable. Hindsight encourages us to speculate that the more mechanical nature of publishing with the printing press offered more long-term opportunities for basic improvements in production and efficiency than did woodblock with its heavy reliance on manual skills. But that European advantage lay in the future, long after this machine had been introduced to East Asia and found wanting. Unwittingly, the printing museums in Mainz and Beijing today reflect these cultural and technical differences. In Mainz one finds an impressive array of metal machinery, that is, the printshop of the German artisan and its mechanical means for printing an untold number of identical copies of a single text. In Beijing, by contrast, the focus is not on machines but on humans. An imposing statue of Bi Sheng is given pride of place, and a few modern pieces of ceramic type show why he rather than Gutenberg deserves to be known as “the inventor of moveable type.” But elsewhere in the building woodblock printing reigns, the Chinese scholar presiding as its driving spiritual force, at times its publisher, and always its consumer. The world of manual work, of block-cutting and printing, is a world away. However much the scholar enjoyed his brushes and ink, he would not have dirtied his hands with the cutter’s tools and the printer’s ink. Even less can one imagine him, inside or outside of this museum, wrestling with a mass of clanging ironware, hard wood, and ink, as did Gutenberg and his successors in German printshops.84 These fundamental differences in printing technology, practice, and values would end, not with the first legal introduction of the printing press to China by Protestant missionaries in 1844–45, but with Chinese publishers’ ready adoption of another German technological innovation, that of lithography. Invented in 1796, this method of printing spread rapidly through post-Napoleonic Europe and eventually reached Shanghai in 1866. Dependent on chemicals to fix texts and images onto flat stone surfaces before they were carved,85 it was more suited to the traditional 84. For further discussion of woodblock printing practices and advantages, see the instructive comments by Cynthia Brokaw in her chapter in this volume. 85. Reed, Gutenberg in China.

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needs and carving practices of the Chinese script, stone carver, reader, and market than was moveable type. As it also had many of the advantages of the printing press and few of its clear disadvantages, it was quickly taken up by enterprising Chinese firms in Shanghai. Soon, their lithographic imprints were outselling not just rival Chinese publishers’ woodblock versions of the same titles but also the same titles from Christian missionaries’ letter presses. From the 1880s, the high quality, large runs, low prices, and high profits of Chinese lithographic imprints dominated book publishing in Shanghai and much of the rest of China, until an improved version of letter-press machinery—far cheaper and more productive than the Protestant missionaries’ Gutenberg-style printing presses a century earlier—eventually replaced lithography in the 1910s for the mass production of many kinds of printed materials. Meanwhile, new vernacular language publishing for newspapers and journals had expanded the Chinese demand for printed materials and made the adoption of this latest Western printing machinery commercially viable. In short, European printing technology had to become more suited to the Chinese and Japanese markets’ special (and arguably more sophisticated) needs and wishes, and the demand for printed matter in some Chinese cities had to expand before the two largest book worlds in Eurasia had strong commercial grounds to use similar print technology and printing practices.86

Knowledge Transfer and Exchange This absence of a “technological connectivity” for Gutenberg’s printing press, however, did not prevent the books of these two pre-1850 book worlds from enjoying some “intellectual connectivity.” This three-century dialogue between Europeans and Chinese has long attracted attention from scholars like Joseph Needham and Donald Lach, not least because they regarded it as the first concentrated effort by some members of these book worlds to link their cultures’ central intellectual and moral concerns. This bridge building through imprints, however, did not win universal acclaim, as its bold goal of establishing a Eurasian conversation with common conceptual vocabulary aroused in some Chinese and European quarters a distrust and opposition as fierce as did the printing press in the Middle East and South Asia. The books and ideas that the Jesuits introduced to both China and Europe were destined to cause as much dissent as consent, just as the universalizing presumptions of European discourses’ clash with the Chinese court’s and elite’s insistence on autonomy

86. The quicker Japanese adoption of Western printing presses in the mid-nineteenth century is partly explained by a high level of demand, enabled by an exceptionally high level of literacy in a pre-industrial society (see Ronald Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1965]).

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impeded close cultural ties between Chinese and Europeans right up to the twentieth century. Overall, this book connectivity was less than many scholars have assumed. With the 1549 arrival of Francis Xavier, SJ, on an outlying island of Japan and the 1583 admission of two other Jesuits into China, we can with hindsight see how an East-West dialogue over cultural and technical knowhow began to take root in East Asia. Although the Jesuit mission lasted for less than a century in Japan, it survived the rough and tumble of Chinese politics for two centuries and eventually gained entry—illicitly—into Korea and Vietnam as well. During their travels in Eurasia, the Jesuits came to the view that the peoples of East Asia (and some peoples in India) were civilized and rational, and thus inferior to Europeans principally because of their ignorance of Christianity. Convinced that these East Asians were amenable to the Christian message through persuasion rather than force, they set about evangelizing by writing, translating, and printing books.87 In Japan they published “as many as 100 titles,”88 until the Tokugawa government ordered their expulsion. Whereas the Jesuit publishing accomplishment in Japan has been appreciated for its fonts and other technical breakthroughs (e.g., the use of romanized script for the Japanese language), in China it was the contents of their books that underlined the intellectual character of the cultural exchange and that subsequently won them both accolades and brickbats. It is the history of these books, those they introduced, translated, wrote, and published in China and Europe, that will be the prime concern of this section’s discussion of knowledge transfer. We will begin by assessing the limited extent of the Jesuit transfer of Western learning, by examining the obstacles to its spread in China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by considering its shaping of some trends in early and mid-Qing thought, and by discovering initial steps in the mid-eighteenth century to the involvement of both Chinese and Europeans in their regular exchange of information about their social and economic conditions. We will next briefly discuss the return-flow of this Eurasian exchange, whereby Jesuit missionaries’ writings on China influenced European and other countries’ views of China, even in the Middle East. This wider perspective will encourage us to explore dimensions of connectivity not simply in the circulation of these books but also in the way their information and questions prompted certain responses and were shaped by a culture’s overall framework for handling new ideas and values. In other words, we will

87. See the astute discussions of this point in Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms, From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013): 79, 81, 157; and Mary Laven, Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the East (London: Faber, 2011): 148. 88. Kornicki, Book in Japan: 125–27; and William J. Farge, SJ, “Translating Religious Experience Across Cultures: Early Attempts to Construct a Body of Japanese Christian Literature”: 83–105, in M. Antoni J. Üçerler, SJ, ed., Christianity and Cultures: Japan and China in Comparison, 1543–1644 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2009).

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find it necessary to discuss religion as well as science in any meaningful account of how these kinds of early modern European knowledge entered the book world of East Asia. Let us first consider the role of European imprints themselves in this transmission. In the view of Henri Bernard, SJ, a lifelong historian of early modern ChineseEuropean relations, “the ‘commerce des lumières’ between the two civilizations [of China and Europe] was begun by the exchange of printed books and by the formation of durable libraries.”89 This assessment, on first reading, seems grossly overstated. In the early seventeenth century, major European libraries, such as the Bibliothèque de Roi in Paris, the Königliche Bibliothek zu Berlin, and the Collegio Romano, held just “hundreds of volumes” apiece.90 By 1791, the first of these Chinese-language collections had grown from no volume in 1667 to 4,000 volumes (ce) to become “by far the largest [collection] in Europe.” Yet, not only were many of its volumes actually translations of Jesuit writings on Christianity and Confucian canonical texts, but also its size would have had it rank as small and minor among provincial Chinese private book collections at the time.91 Educated Parisians may no longer have regarded Chinese books simply as curios, to be presented to European rulers for inclusion in their cabinets of curiosities (the Portuguese king’s gift of a Chinese book to the pope in 1514 was accompanied by an elephant).92 But, with mere handfuls of Europeans able to read Chinese, these Chinese-language books could not, on their own, have sparked great European interest in China. Back in China, the largest collections of Western books were found in Jesuit libraries in Beijing and Macao. The college library in Macao had by 1746 grown to about 4,200 books (livros) (or volumes?). Judged “disappointingly low” by Noël Golvers in 89. As expressed in 1969 in his welcome for Hubert G. Verhaeren, comp., Catalogue de la Bibliothèque du Pé-t’ang, Mission catholique des lazaristes à Pékin (Beijing: Impr. des Lazaristes, 1949; reprint Paris: Belles Lettres, 1969): xxxiii. Golvers, Libraries, v. 1: 15, continues this trope, by designating the seventeenth Jesuit mission to China “a true Mission of the book.” 90. Marcia Reed and Paola Demattè, eds., China on Paper: European and Chinese Works from the Late Sixteenth to Early Nineteenth Century (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2011): 4. 91. Nathalie Monnet, “De Mazarin à Bertin, l’essor de la collection chinoise à la Bibliothèque royale entre 1668 et 1793”: 140–45, in Marie-Laure de Rochebrune, comp., La Chinese à Versailles, Art et Diplomatie au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: Somogy, 2014). By 1739, this collection’s catalog contained just 403 entries, or titles (far more in volumes). Further acquisitions from the missionary Joseph-Marie Amiot, SJ, and the minister Henri-Leonard Bertin added to the collection, as did some purchases by the French kings. Nathalie Monnet, “Les livres chinois de Louis XIV”: 213, in Kangxi, l’Empereur de Chine, 1662–1722, La Cité Interdite à Versailles (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 2004); and Nicolas Standaert, Ad Dudink, and Nathalie Monnet, eds., Textes Chrétiens Chinois de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Taipei: Taipei Ricci Institute, 2009), preface: i–xiv. The collection had a preponderance of illustrated volumes, an indication of how Europeans understandably appreciated Chinese pictures more than they did the Chinese text. 92. Carter, Invention of Printing: 125, 134n9; and Lach, Asia, II: 1: 41; Monnet, “Les livres chinois”: 213. A rhinoceros was also anticipated but died on the way to his delivery and audience.

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comparison with contemporary Jesuit college collections in Europe, it was seized and sold off in 1762.93 Eventually, larger and longer lasting were the Western libraries set up in Beijing, three of them Jesuit-run. The Xitang Library, said by some to have begun with books left by Matteo Ricci, had by the mid-seventeenth century over 3,000 volumes. By the century’s end it had grown to be “moderately large” like many Jesuit colleges in Europe. But Golvers downplays its size, putting it at no more than 6,000 volumes.94 The size of another Jesuit collection in Beijing, the Nantang (later called the Beitang), is recorded only in its 1949 catalog, so long after its original holdings had been either lost or intermixed with other collections that its pre-1850 size is beyond our knowledge today.95 Although this Nantang collection then included an up-to-date set of European writings on mathematics, astronomy, and medicine (as well as issues of some European periodicals that were several years old), its catalog consists largely of theological, philosophical, and religious texts. Unlikely, then, to arouse widespread interest even among educated Chinese, this collection—what Golvers rightly calls a Renaissance library—would have posed an awesome obstacle to Chinese readers interested in learning about the West. Its books were all written in European languages, principally Latin, French, and Italian,96 and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as in all previous centuries, even fewer Chinese read Latin or any other European language than Europeans read Chinese. Although some of these European imprints escaped into Chinese hands and Chinese bibliophiles admired their binding and print quality,97 virtually no European imprint is listed, to the best of my knowledge, in the surviving printed catalog of any significant private Chinese collection of books before the twentieth century.98 While Golvers has richly described the operation of at least seven European networks for collecting and sending books 93. Golvers, Libraries, vol. 2, Formation of Jesuit Libraries (Leuven: Ferdinand Verbiest Institute, 2013): 87. The buyers, alas, are not identified. 94. Ibid., v. 2: 97–103, 115–16. 95. Golvers, Libraries, v. 1: 9. Late Ming Chinese wrote of its 7,000 “pieces” (bu). Verhaeren: xi–xii, sensibly argues that their estimates refer to another unit of calculation. But, even if these estimates need to be replaced by recent recalibration of this figure to 4,100 titles (or about 5,200 volumes), this new estimate remains almost twice the number of Chinese titles then in the Bibliothèque de Roi. 96. Golvers, Libraries, v. 1: 21n16. 97. Cheng Huanwen, Wan Qing tushuguan xueshu sixiang shi (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan, 2004): 62–63. 98. The principal exception is the hereditary family collection of Xu Guangqi, the famous Catholic convert, in the Xujiahui (also known as Zikaiwei) area of present Shanghai; this library presently holds about 1,830 pre-1800 Western titles, most of them collected for this library in the mid-nineteenth century (Golvers, Libraries, v. 1: 21n15). Just as the Western books sent to the Kangxi emperor’s private collection were considered Western exotica (Joachim Bouvet, SJ, Journal des Voyages, Claudia von Collani, ed. [Taipei: Taipei Ricci Institute, 2005]: 53), so were Chinese books widely treated as curiosities by their early modern European collectors (e.g., Oxbridge college libraries have cataloged their few East Asian titles only in the past half-century). Both cultures had trouble accurately transcribing the titles of the other’s books in any script.

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to the Jesuit mission in China,99 neither he nor anyone else has demonstrated the use of most of these Western volumes inside China, especially by Chinese. Indeed, Richard Rudolph has shown that on three occasions (1643, ca. 1650, and 1698–1703) Jesuits translated Western books on anatomy from the Nantang collection’s 271 titles concerned with medicine and natural history, and that none of these translations was ever published. The sole surviving copies of the first two efforts, all manuscripts, survive only in Europe, and although the Kangxi emperor is said to have wished to print and distribute the third of these works throughout his empire, it survives only in manuscript. Western medical knowledge in fact had minimal impact on Qing medical knowledge and practice until the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Protestant medical missionaries saw to the printing of books with European anatomical and other knowledge, by then centuries old.100 While future research on this aspect of Chinese cultural history may contain surprises, so far the clearest evidence of the direct impact of these Jesuit-owned volumes on Chinese culture concerns the artistic response of some late Ming (1368–1644) and early Qing-dynasty painters to the engravings in these books. For Chinese intellectual life the influence of these volumes instead was indirect, thanks to the translation and publication of some of them into Chinese from 1584 onwards (the question of these scholars’, as opposed to painters’, direct access to the Jesuit libraries thus becomes a minor issue). Persisting at publishing far longer than any other Catholic missionary group active in East Asia, the Jesuits in China translated and published books long past the papal order for their dissolution in 1773 (by contrast, the Dominicans’ Chinese-language printing efforts in the Philippines lasted only from about 1593 to 1607).101 Between 1584 and 1636, no fewer than 107 Western titles (210 volumes) were translated by the Jesuits and/or their converts into Chinese (of these, 36 titles, or 121 volumes, remained unpublished as of 1636).102 By 1700, their published translations in China had risen to 590 titles.103 Published privately, like many Chinese scholars’ own writings, these imprints initially circulated mainly through gift, loan, and hand copy. Only eventually did some enter the market through private sale as used books. Yet, in the late Ming especially, the laxness of government censorship and lack of any author’s or publisher’s legal claim to copyright privileges allowed anyone to reprint and circulate these texts as he 99. Golvers, Libraries, v. 1: 386–91. 100. Richard C. Rudolph and Schuyler Van Rensselaer Cammann, China and the West: Commerce and Culture (Los Angeles, CA: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1977): 19–21. Rudolph’s fine study deserves to be better known. 101. Lucille Chia, “Chinese Books and Printing in the Early Spanish Philippines,” in Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang, eds., Chinese Circulations, Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011): 259–82. 102. Nicolas Standaert, ed., Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume One: 635–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2001): 600–601. 103. Ibid.: 600.

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or she wished.104 Thus, in sharp contrast to the absence of original Western imprints in private Chinese book collections, we see that 138 translated volumes of Western books are listed in the catalogs of thirteen major private book collections in the lower Yangzi delta dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (another survey focused on just mid- and late seventeenth-century collectors and found over 150 such titles, roughly two-thirds of them “scientific”).105 In other words, once translated, some of the Jesuits’ books secured a presence in major Chinese book collections, including the imperial Four Treasuries. That presence supports claims of their significance in Chinese and Western cultural interaction in the seventeenth century. Even so, the numbers are small and, judged alone, they can give only weak support to any claim of widespread influence, especially when they are compared to the figures we have for the number of printed books then being exchanged among the separate countries of Europe or East Asia (e.g., from China to Japan and Korea,106 or from Italy, Germany, the Low Countries, and France to London).107 What instead has led many modern Chinese and Western scholars to stress the historical significance of this late Ming introduction of European knowledge to East Asia is other evidence of the depth of Western learning’s impact on many aspects of late Ming and early Qing elite culture and society. In recent decades scholars have explored this influence in Chinese writings on “practical learning,” in Chinese prints and painting, however exotic, and even in some traditional storytelling. For early modern Japan the influence may have been both wider and deeper. Frédéric Girard has shown how the Jesuits introduced the Aristotelian notion of the soul to Japanese Christians through manuscript translation and formal teaching. He has also pointed to Buddhist monks’ use of concepts of freedom and other Western political concepts, if only to counter growing Jesuit intellectual influence within Buddhist circles. Another Japanologist has revealed the impact of Western music in sixteenth-century Japan.108 104. Cynthia Brokaw, “On the History of the Book in China,” in Cynthia Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005): 18–19; and Inoue Susumu, Min Shin gakujutsu hensen shi (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2011): 110–45. 105. Nicolas Standaert, “Note on the Spread of Jesuit Writings in Late Ming and Early Qing China,” China Missions Studies Bulletin 7 (1985): 22–32; and Xu Haisong, Qingchu shiren yu Xixue (Shanghai: Dongfang, 2000): 72–76. 106. Fan Jinmin, “Qingdai qianqi Jiangnan shuji de Riben xiaochang,” in Zhou Shengchun and He Zhaohui, eds., Yinshua yu shichang (Hangzhou: Zhejiang daxue, 2012): 291–314. 107. P. G. Hoftijzer and O. S. Lankhorst, “Continental Imports to Britain, 1695–1740,” in Michael F. Suarez, SJ, and Michael L. Turner, eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. 5: 1695–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 513–22. 108. For painting, see James Cahill, The Compelling Image (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) and Pictures for Use and Pleasure: Vernacular Painting in High Qing China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010): 67–98; for literature, Li Shexue, Zhongguo Wan Ming yu Ouzhou wenxue: Mingmo Yesuhui gudian zhengdao gushi kaoquan (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2005; rev. ed. 2010); for philosophy, Frédéric Girard, “Discours bouddhiques face au christianisme,” in Frédéric Girard, Annick Horiuchi, and Mieko Macé, eds., Repenser l’ordre, Repenser l’héritage, Paysage

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Fig. 1.4 Franco-Chinese male fashion in late seventeenth-century China. In a book of prints depicting the good works of the Buddhist deity Guanyin, the last sheet is devoted to an exotic image of Guanyin dressed à la mode occidentale within a bamboo frame (Hu Yinling, Guanyin dashi xiansheng linying ji, print 51) (courtesy of Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, Japan).

And, of course, some Chinese preserved a resilient faith in another type of learning introduced by the Jesuits, Roman Catholicism. In the face of hostile Qing edicts and campaigns, Chinese converts to Christianity at the end of the eighteenth century are estimated to have numbered over 200,000. While statistically insignificant in a population then of 400 million, their numbers had risen from the middle of the eighteenth Intellectuel du Japon (XVIIe–XIXe siècles) (Genève: Droz, 2002): 167–208; and for music, David Waterhouse, “The Earliest Japanese Contacts with Western Music,” Review of Culture 26 (1996): 36–47 and “Southern Barbarian Music in Japan,” in S. Castelo Branco, ed., Portugal and the World: The Encounter of Cultures in Music (Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote, 1997): 351–77.

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century, partly due to a new policy of ordaining Chinese as Jesuit priests.109 Some Chinese Jesuits active in the interior acquired training abroad, in a French Jesuit college in Siam (Thailand) and Paris or in an Italian seminary in Naples. One Siameducated Jesuit, born to a Catholic family in Shanxi province, even left a diary, whose seven hundred pages of Latin recounts almost two decades of clerical life in western China (it has never been translated into Chinese). And, progress, however slow, was made during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in that most challenging of book tasks, the translation of the Bible into Chinese. The oldest surviving pieces of evidence of this centuries-long struggle appear to be Chinese-language translations or accounts of parts of the New Testament, associated with the French Jesuit Jean Basset (1662–1707) and held respectively in the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome, the British Library, and the Cambridge University Library. The Cambridge manuscript embodies these religious strands of Eurasian cultural connectivity. Written in fine literary Chinese in standard Chinese script by an educated Chinese, this volume presently is bound in the Western manner, its cover is thoroughly Western, and its paper bears a Western watermark of ca. 1650–1700 vintage. It tells the story of the Four Gospels in the form of a “harmony,” an ancient genre of Christian writing that removes the inconsistencies of the Four Gospels’ lives of Christ to tell one clear and consistent tale of how Christ came to save the world, not just the West or China.110 Its direct impact, however, remained limited, since it was never printed. The major qualitative impact of these translations on East Asian culture was felt, it is widely believed, in certain fields of scientific and technical learning, such as mathematics, astronomy, clocks, cartography, and weaponry. For, even though the Jesuits as missionaries favored publishing Christian apologetica—four-fifths of the 590 works they published by 1700 treated religious and moral topics—they were aware that literate Chinese had different reading priorities. In Nicolas Standaert’s view, seventeenthcentury Chinese were more interested in science than was any other educated group of people outside of Europe (some even offered to pay to publish certain Western books on science). In response, more than in any of their other missions, the Jesuits in China made use of Western science to attract potential converts.111 And so, by 1700, they had published 120 titles on science and the West, mainly in Beijing but also in Fuzhou, Fujian province, and Hangzhou. Their influence, according to Xiong Yuezhi, was extensive, especially in fields of practical learning.112 109. Standaert, Handbook: 385–86. 110. Uchida Keiichi, “Morison ga moto ni shita Kanyaku Seisho atarashiku hatsugen sareta Jean Basset yaku: Xinyaku Seisho koho,” Ajia bunka koryū kenkyū 5 (2010): 191–98; Standaert, Handbook: 462–64; and Andre Ly, Journal d’Andre Ly, Prêtre Chinois, Missionaire et Notaire Apostolique, 1747–1763, ed. A. Launay (Paris: Alphonse Picard et Fils, 1906). 111. Standaert, Handbook: 600, 601, 689. 112. For evidence of influence on as many as 173 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chinese intellectuals, see Xiong Yuezhi, Xixue dongjian yu Wan Qing shehui (Shanghai: Renmin, 1994): 77–90.

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In succeeding centuries this celebrated transfer of scientific knowledge gave rise to two general approaches and interpretations, one scientific and the other historical. The first, focusing more on the knowledge transferred than on the process of transfer, is closely associated with the writings of Joseph Needham. This famous historian of Chinese science viewed the first century of Jesuit-Chinese exchange of learning as a pivotal event in the evolution of “oecumenical science.”113 Before the sixteenth century, East Asian and European worlds of learning confronted linguistic and cultural differences even greater than those that had separated the Arabic and European worlds of learning in medieval times. Virtually no one in Europe or China knew the other’s written or spoken languages (which are also linguistically unrelated). They also knew very little about one another’s history and religions; the teachings of Buddhism, for instance, were first described in reasonably accurate detail in a Western language only at the turn of the sixteenth century for Jesuits (and a century later for the educated reader); and, whereas Christianity was known of in mid-sixteenth-century China and Japan, it was associated with, respectively, Central Asian cults and Buddhism.114 By contrast, Arabic, as a Semitic language, was at this time taught at various European universities, and Islam was along with Judaism and Christianity considered an Abrahamic religion. All three religions had arisen in the same region of the world and shared the same understanding of a monotheistic godhead. Admittedly, some Jesuits strove to persuade both Chinese and Westerners that the ancient Chinese had believed in the same god as Christians still did (up to the nineteenth century many Westerners continued to think of the Chinese as an offshoot of ancient Egypt or even as the biblical “lost tribe of Israel”). But the vast majority of Chinese would have disagreed with this eccentric reading of their history. To them the only important religious or cultural import in their country’s long history had been Buddhism, and it was an influence that by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many of the educated had come to deplore. Despite these sharp differences, Needham argued that the Jesuit mission to China succeeded in playing an indispensable role in the initial stages of the formation of global science. By plotting “transcurrent points” and “fusion points” in the exchange of different strands of the traditions of East Asian and Western science, Needham charted a long-term trajectory for the merger of their different fields of scientific knowledge into one “universal science” that all educated people could henceforth hold as true. Mathematics, physics, and astronomy had essentially developed as distinct Chinese and Greek-Arabic science traditions, until in the late Ming the Jesuits’ dissemination of Greek/Renaissance science among the Chinese had created transcurrent and fusion points for these fields of knowledge: “By 1644, the end of the Ming dynasty, 113. Joseph Needham, “The Roles of Europe and China in the Evolution of Oecumenical Science,” in his Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970): 396–418. 114. App, The Birth of Orientalism: 16–19, 123–25.

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there was no longer any perceptible difference between the mathematics, astronomy, and physics of China and Europe; they had completely fused, they had coalesced.”115 In other fields of scientific knowledge, like botany and medicine, the actual fusion, he conceded, occurred no earlier than the late nineteenth century. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuits, for instance, informed the Chinese of many animals they had previously known little or nothing about, but Qing authors regularly continued to quote earlier Chinese accounts that failed to look widely beyond the books studied and thus to distinguish real from imagined features. “Generally, there is very little progress in recording new zoological details, and with a few exceptions only the most original writers are willing to break with literary traditions.”116 Nonetheless, overall, Needham’s “universal science” was first forged in the late Ming, in the early seventeenth century. Five decades on, Needham’s pioneering hypothesis about the fusion of Western and Chinese science still holds our attention, but due more to its imaginative leap than to its historical validity. Perhaps most crucially, the Western science transmitted by the Jesuits is now seen as a conservative, arguably out-of-date, version of the scientific learning then exciting some of the liveliest minds in Europe. As Jacques Gernet has observed of this conventional Jesuit science, “the teaching of the missionaries contained nothing of a kind to upset existing ideas. Nor did any of the Jesuits’ teaching to the Chinese bear the mark of modern science or indeed convey its spirit. Their teaching always remained in conformity with that purveyed in their colleges in Coimbra and Rome. Neither Copernicus nor Galileo were really legitimated in China. The Jesuits first taught the Chinese the astronomical theories which were current in Europe at the end of the sixteenth century, and once they had become installed in the astronomical service of the capital, they limited themselves to introducing into China such new knowledge as was useful to their own calculations, which was strictly of a practical and immediate nature.”117 Whatever the reason—the Chinese court’s limited interest in scientific topics other than astronomy, the strongly Aristotelian education these Jesuits had received in Europe, or their wish to avoid the spread of Western skepticism into the innocent minds of potential Chinese converts—the Jesuits did not inform their Chinese readers and listeners of contemporary European debates and advances in science. For instance, none of them taught Copernicus’ heliocentric understanding of the universe until the early eighteenth century.118 As a result, the 115. Needham, “Oecumenical Science”: 398, 404–15. 116. Roderich Ptak, “Intercultural Zoology: The Perception of Exotic Animals in Chinese Jesuit Works,” in his Birds and Beasts in Chinese Texts and Trade (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011): 107–28, esp. 109–10. 117. Jacques Gernet, Confucianism and Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 251–52n22. 118. Copernicus, as Nathan Sivin has reminded us in his Science in Ancient China: Researches and Reflections (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), had many non-Catholic critics in Europe as well. Yet, our

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Western contribution to this alleged fusion was a distinctly constrained transfer of information. The Chinese input was, if anything, less comprehensive and persuasive, if only because the disorganization of their reflections on nature made a genuine fusion very difficult. Ricci predictably attributed the problem to Chinese ignorance of Aristotelian learning. Whatever the reason, “the Chinese did not have a discipline, a system of knowledge, or even a coherent scholarly tradition equivalent to Western notions of ‘natural history,’ ‘botany,’ or ‘zoology.’”119 When Li Shizhen created a Chinese system of botanical classification in the late Ming, it was less a system than a description of what he had read about.120 Furthermore, it was introduced to the West only after Linnaeus’s new classification system had taken root and thus negated any need for Li’s “system” in the West.121 In the fields of astronomy and mathematics seventeenthcentury Chinese certainly did have something to learn from the West, but their ideas about physics (at least before Newton) just as certainly deserved more attention than they received from the Jesuits in their reports to Europe. Indeed, some late Ming Chinese ideas about the cosmos have struck recent Western scholars as more modern and accurate than the early modern Jesuits’ notion of God the Great Clockmaker: “The Chinese imagined the heavens as an infinite space in which heavenly bodies floated and in which, over extremely long periods of evolution, universes formed and disintegrated as a result of the condensation or dissipation of an omnipresent, universal energy.”122 In medicine as well, the Jesuits displayed little interest in the varieties of Chinese treatment and knowledge. Overall, then, Needham’s “oecumenical science” at its core was neither universal nor exploratory. Rather, as packaged by the Jesuits it was a narrow version of Western conventional wisdom on science, a version that in China and Europe was soon to become “backward” and “provincial.” Post-Ming Europeans might still adopt some Chinese technology (e.g., the iron mold board for ploughs).123 But even in technology they already felt that they had more to teach than learn from China, as some Chinese acknowledged in their

119. 120.

121. 122. 123.

point here is simply that as the seventeenth-century Jesuits were imparting neither the spirit nor the correct scientific knowledge of contemporary European science, they were in the process of undermining in the eyes of most educated Chinese the intellectual basis or justification for their presence at the court. Fan Fa-ti, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004): 104–5. Georges Métailié, “Concepts of Nature in Traditional Chinese Materia Medica and Botany (Sixteenth to Seventeenth Century)”: 345–67, in Hans Ulrich Vogel and Günter Dux, eds., Concepts of Nature: A Chinese-European Cross-Cultural Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2010). Fan Fa-ti, British Naturalists: 95, on Du Halde’s translation of parts of it in 1735. Gernet, Confucianism and Christianity: 60–61, 193–95. For example, Francesca Bray, Agriculture, in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 6: Biology and Biological Technology, Part II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985): 582.

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assessment of Western lenses, clocks, bells, nautical instruments, and especially military weapons (e.g., cannons).124 The main early modern European exponent of the use of Chinese scientific knowledge was Leibnitz (1646–1716). But his case only underlines the one-sided basis of the “fused science” that Needham hypothesized: the data from China that Leibnitz used in his writings were gathered and sent him by European Jesuits living there, not by Chinese or even the converted Chinese.125 The second approach to understanding this West-East transfer of scientific knowledge has stressed its broader historical, that is, political and cultural, context. Needham, despite his professed commitment to Marxism, presented a disembodied evolutionary view of this scientific or cultural encounter, which had more to do with books and ideas than with people and interests, more with Hegelian syntheses, or “fusions,” than with human beings and their conflicts.126 Other than by noticing how certain Chinese astronomers and Chinese (and Korean) cartographers made use of some Western learning, he did not clarify precisely what he meant by the “fusion” of these two civilizations’ scientific traditions. Nor, as Benjamin Elman has recently shown, did he look in detail into the fate of the science that emerged from this supposed “fusion.” If he had done so, he would have found a clash between these traditions, in which different groups of humans became so involved in the transmission of this knowledge, that in the end political interests mattered more than scientific learning per se. Conflicts between European Jesuits and Chinese officials, between the Kangxi emperor and officials’ factions (some of which had links to court Jesuits), and eventually between this emperor and the Vatican in the famous “Rites Controversy” of the early eighteenth century, all combined to derail any prospects for a fusion of East Asian and Western sciences. Instead, these tragic events, whereby the Vatican delegate challenged the Chinese emperor’s authority to tell his subjects how to worship their ancestors in his country, led the Kangxi emperor in 1706 to order that all China missionaries had to agree to follow “the rules of Matteo Ricci.”127 In this battle of the orthodoxies the Chinese emperor was ill disposed to see his subjects kowtow 124. Di Cosmo, “Did Guns Matter?”; Yin Xiaogong, 16–17 shiji xifang huoqi jishu xiang Zhongguo de zhuanyi (Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu, 2014): 66–69 for books on Western weaponry that were written or translated into Chinese by Jesuits; and McDermott, “Chinese Lenses”: 9–29. 125. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese, translated by Henry Rosemont, Jr. and Daniel J. Cook (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1977); and Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibnitz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 359–61. 126. Carlo Cipolla’s stress on the greater importance of people than books in the transfer of knowledge is persuasive: “Through the ages, the main channel for the diffusion of innovation has been the migration of people”; “The transfer of really valuable knowledge from country to country or from institution to institution cannot be easily achieved by the transport of letters, journals and books: it necessitates the physical movement of human beings” (Carlo Cipolla, “The Diffusion of Innovations in Early Modern Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 14 [1976]: 46–52). 127. Standaert, Handbook: 498.

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to foreigners’ orders within his realm, particularly when he considered these same foreigners ill-mannered and incompetent at Chinese.128 And so, the French Jesuits’ dream of establishing a scientific academy in Beijing that would exchange information regularly with its counterpart in Paris came to naught. The Jesuits remained at the Qing court, but never again did they reign as imperial favorites. This outcome gave rise in the modern West to two widely influential narratives. Christian commentators have held that this breakdown ruined their chances of converting China to Christianity,129 while other Westerners have judged it a fatal step toward the Qing dynasty’s eventual failure to modernize, or Westernize, peacefully.130 Recently, Elman and to some extent Catharine Jami have preferred to see these conflicts not in such essentialist terms but as part of the intellectual and political history of Qing China. They place it within a political and cultural context, one that saw a neo-Confucian orthodoxy and its official supporters gain hegemony at the court over the findings of Jesuit science and its far fewer supporters.131 In the eyes of many Chinese officials the Jesuits were interfering interlopers. Not only were they foreigners from countries the court neither knew nor trusted, but more importantly, they were seen as mere technicians and private employees of the emperor. Like other such specialists at the court (e.g., Moslem astronomers, Manchu shamans, and Chinese eunuchs) they held posts outside the official ranks and so had no legitimate claim to participate in matters of state. Rightly or wrongly, their learning was dismissed by neoConfucians as “absurd,” and their “methods” or “techniques” acceptable only when they operated within a dominant neo-Confucian framework of values and learning. And regarding these methods and techniques, here too some neo-Confucians issued damning, if self-interested, judgments. To their satisfaction they demonstrated that the Jesuits’ mathematics actually had added little to what could be found in the classical Confucian canon. Hence, it was not the contemporary Chinese who had to learn mathematics from the contemporary West; rather, it was the Westerners who had to acknowledge that their mathematics and astronomy actually derived from the Confucian classics. Even less did the Chinese need to read Ricci and other Jesuit fathers on the Chinese classics to learn of a God that their ancestors had supposedly once shared with the Christian West. 128. Jonathan D. Spence, “The K’ang-hsi Reign,” in Cambridge History of China, Volume 9, Part 1: The Ch’ing Empire to 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 120–82. Spence reports on the emperor’s low opinion of Jesuit sinology: “Even Father Bouvet’s work on the I-Ching [Yijing] which the Jesuits regarded as the pinnacle of his attainments was described by the emperor in his private comments as an incomprehensible jumble of misunderstood textual and historical references” (159). 129. Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1929): 152. 130. For example, Alain Peyrefitte, The Collision of Two Civilisations: The British Expedition to China in 1792–4 (London: Harvill, 1993): 144–45. 131. Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Catharine Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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With learning of all sorts turned into blunt weapons for bureaucratic infighting and academic grandstanding, the immediate and mid-term scientific impact of this court joust is hard to measure. But political currents favored neither the Jesuits nor the cause of “Western science” in China. The Jesuits were as vulnerable to Jansenist and Dominican calls for Counter-Reformation orthodoxy in Paris and Rome as they were to attacks from neo-Confucian fundamentalists in Beijing. Caught uncomfortably in this doctrinal wedge, they quickly fell under the heightened suspicion and skepticism of the aging Kangxi emperor and then faced outright hostility from his successor, the Yongzheng emperor (r. 1723–36). Despite some court interest in Jesuit-introduced skills like cartography the status of Western learning in educated Chinese circles fell precipitously over the course of the eighteenth century. In the 1770s, Confucian scholars and officials included seventeen Western titles in translation in the imperial book collection, but in its descriptive catalog they took care to declare their outright opposition to the broader claims of Western learning: “Our dynasty possesses deep insight in limiting its use [of the Westerners’ knowledge] to their skills, while banning the spread of their learning.”132 As Western scientific learning was reduced to technology and as no Chinese needed to look outside the country’s separate moral and intellectual tradition to understand the world and especially the Chinese world, the Jesuits and their books no longer persuaded Chinese that they shared the “same mind and same principles” with learned people in the distant West.133 Even in the late nineteenth century some distinguished Chinese scholars believed that science, including modern Western science, was what Westerners had stolen from China.134 But, of course, “Western knowledge” did not disappear. Miyazaki Ichisada, echoed by Benjamin Elman, has speculated that the late Ming Jesuit interest in the ancient meaning of certain key Chinese terms of ancient Chinese texts may have helped spark late Ming and early Qing scholars’ interest in textual studies.135 And, less speculatively, the strongly orthodox stances that the Vatican and the Qing court presented at their early eighteenth-century encounters and subsequently adopted toward one another had been shaped by even stronger orthodox intellectual pressures within each of their cultures, the strict Jansenist teachings of certain French Jesuits in Europe and the inward-turning and strict textual readings of the Confucian classics increasingly favored in Chinese intellectual circles from the late seventeenth century.136 132. Ibid.: 391. 133. Han Qi, “Astronomy, Chinese and Western: The Influence of Xu Guangqi’s Views in the Early and Mid-Qing,” in Catherine Jami, Peter Engelfreit, and Gregory Blue, eds., Statecraft and Intellectual Renewal in the Late Ming: The Cross-Cultural Synthesis of Xu Guangqi (1562–1633) (Leiden: Brill, 2001): 378–79. 134. Michael Lackner, “Ex Oriente Scientia? Reconsidering the Ideology of a Chinese Origin of Western Knowledge,” Asia Major, 3rd series, 21(1) (2008): 183–200. 135. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: 47–48. 136. For example, Kai-wing Chow, The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics, and Lineage Discourse (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).

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The context of the Qing court’s argument with the Vatican had been set not only in Beijing but also in Rome, thanks to the strong pressures for conformity in both of these centers with strong universalist claims for their cultural values. Ironically, what actually became global in eighteenth-century Beijing and Rome was less collaborative science than intolerant doctrinal orthodoxy. Leibnitz’s disciple Christian Wolf lost his chair at Halle University and was banished from Prussia due to his immersion in the study of Confucianism. The depressing nadir of this Western ignorance would be reached at the end of the nineteenth century, when a figure as distinguished as a professor of Chinese in Berlin University, Carl Arendt, would state, “I do not think that the history of China (with the exception of a few episodes) will ever be considered as forming an essential part of the general history of mankind.”137 A brief look at the different fate of Western science in Japan is instructive here, since the Tokugawa shogunate encouraged its admission only from 1720, that is, a  century after it had effectively banned Catholicism, evicted all Christian missionaries, outlawed trade with all Westerners but for the Protestant Dutch, and prohibited the entry of Western learning even on scientific matters. Eventually, this Japanese change of policy had them learn Western science from books rather than from people. Unlike the well-educated Jesuits, the Dutch and Chinese merchants who sold them these books had few cultural interests, and so Japanese could appreciate this learning’s utility apart from its religious implications and freed of whatever political and intellectual challenges it would have posed to government scholars and officials. Admittedly, this “Dutch Book Learning” had serious inadequacies. Having entered Japan in a random manner, it tended to consist of practical findings rather than basic theories. It assumed a permanent canon of Western science rather than ongoing “progressive improvements” arising out of public debate, and so it was frequently outdated. And, crucially, it stayed clear of the social, political, and religious implications of this thought that then was revolutionizing notions of nature and man back in Holland and the rest of Western Europe. Yet, it was arguably the very same tunnel vision of this Dutch learning that in contrast to the Jesuit learning in Qing China gradually won it and its Japanese advocates an institutionalized foothold in an otherwise hostile Tokugawa order.138 Thus, those scholars wishing to claim a strong interconnectivity of Chinese and European books and knowledge at any time between 1500 and 1850 may be able to point to the use of Chinese-language material in a variety of European publications 137. Rudolph: 9, 11. See similar sentiments about “the Sacred Books of the East”—“by the side of so much that is fresh, natural, simple, beautiful, and true, [they] contain so much that is not only unmeaning, artificial, and silly, but even hideous and repellent”—by Max Muller, The Sacred Books of the East (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), v. 1:xii. 138. These observations draw upon Grant K. Goodman, Japan: The Dutch Experience (London: Athlone Press, 1986): 222–35; and Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952): 5–38.

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(arguably, this type of scholarship in the West began with João de Barros’s use of Chinese books, translated by his bilingual “Chinese slave,” for Décadas da Ásia, his celebrated history of Portuguese nautical achievements in Asia).139 But despite peaks of interest in the seventeenth century the impact and input of these books worlds on one another was neither continuous nor substantial. Those arguing otherwise will need to find a great deal more evidence, perhaps in dusty books on, say, medicine, plants, and nautical cartography in old European libraries or in books translated from the intervening cultures of the Middle East and South Asia. But so far, not enough has been found to persuade us from being generally sympathetic to the conclusion reached by Francesca Bray on the shallowness of the cultural exchange between China and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: “despite the lively curiosity exhibited by a broad range of educated Europeans about China and the keen interest in Western learning shown by a smaller but decidedly influential group of Chinese intellectuals, the exchange of scientific and technical knowledge was remarkably limited. Information was available on both sides, but although in some cases new knowledge was explored, it was seldom adopted and even more seldom put to effective use. In certain important respects this was an era of noncommunication rather than communication between cultures, and the significance of such exchanges as did occur has frequently been overevaluated or misinterpreted in the light of hindsight.”140 This general assessment, it must be admitted, holds true more for Britain and northern Europe than for France. On the other side of the Channel, some members of the cultural and political elite took China more seriously. We refer not to French Jesuits’ willingness to admit Chinese into their order first as brothers and then as priests from the seventeenth century.141 Nor to some scholars’ belief that the inspiration for Diderot’s Encyclopédie project came in part from some of the Chinese books and manuscripts in the Bibliothèque de Roi, and certainly not to the French copperplate printing of sketches of imperial battle victories that had been drawn by, among others, the Jesuit painter Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766) and sent to France for etching and printing on orders of the Qianlong emperor.142 139. C. R. Boxer, João de Barros: Portuguese Humanist and Historian of Asia (New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1981): 106. Barros’s reliance on a “Chinese slave” as the translator of his Chinese books suggests an interesting if neglected link between the origins of European sinology and the Asian slave trade. Was this unnamed “Chinese slave” a “prime ancestor” of European Sinology? 140. Francesca Bray, “Some Problems Concerning the Transfer of Scientific and Technical Knowledge,” in Thomas H. C. Lee, ed., China and Europe: Images and Influences in Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1991): 205–19. 141. Standaert, Handbook: 301–8. 142. Madeleine Pinault Sørensen, “La fabrique de l’Encyclopédie”: 395, in Roland Schaer, ed., Tous les savoirs du monde: encyclopédies et bibliothèques, de Sumer aux XXIe siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Flammarion, 1996); Paul Pelliot, “Les conquêtes de l’Empereur de la Chine,” T’oung Pao 20 (1920): 183–275; and Matteo Ripa, Memoirs of Father Ripa: Thirteen Years’ Residence at the Court of Peking in the Service of the Emperor of China, translated by Fortunato Prandi (London:

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Table 1.1 European book titles on China, by century and site of publication Site Britain France Italy Spain Portugal Netherlands Germany Belgium Macao USA Sweden Russia Hong Kong Canton Malacca Shanghai Peking TOTAL

To 1599 11 43 64 14 16 10 31 7

1600–99 54 168 78 58 27 134 91 13 1 4

196

1700–99 105 263 128 16 18 76 160 37 2 1 21 30

2

1

630

1 (?) 859

1800–50 355 306 42 1 11 20 98 3 36 37 13 49 16 81 21 11 1100

Total 525 780 312 89 72 240 380 60 39 38 38 79 16 84 21 11 1 (?) 2785

Source: John Lust, Western Books on China Published up to 1850 (London: Bamboo, 1987): ix, itself based on the classic Henri Cordier, Bibliotheca Sinica, 4 vols. plus a one-volume supplement (Paris, 1922–24).

Rather, our concern is with two French schemes to institutionalize the exchange of scientific and technical information between Paris and Beijing. In 1685, a group of French Jesuits were sent to China as their “King’s mathematicians.” They were expected to report their latest research findings in Beijing to Louis XIV in Paris as well as to transmit French academicians’ latest discoveries in Paris to the Kangxi emperor in Beijing (the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg also received some of the French reports from China). This plan, alas, ran aground, reportedly due to the opposition of Portuguese Jesuits in Beijing.143 Nearly a century later, however, a far more ambitious French project for the exchange of scientific and technical information attained some success. Two highranking French officials, Henri-Léonard-Jean-Baptiste Bertin (1719–92) and A. R. J. Turgot (1727–81), arranged to have two Chinese, having studied in France to become Jesuit priests, communicate regularly with them on contemporary secular matters in China upon their planned return to Beijing. Anxious as much to learn as to teach, these two French ministers prepared their “deux Chinois” for this collaborative J. Murray, 1844): 82–84. Ripa introduced to the Qing court this technology as well as a printing press he cobbled together for this print job; his failure to work it properly won him dismissive abuse from court officials. 143. Standaert, Handbook: 228, 722, 892.

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work by providing financial and educational support for their nonreligious studies in France in 1764–66. Bertin had them travel around France to become familiar with its contemporary economic conditions and manufacturing practices. He had members of the Académie Royale des sciences instruct them in the physical and social sciences and natural philosophy (they also learned sculpture and oil painting). And, Turgot, a soon-to-be minister of finance, instructed them in the upcoming field of economics. Impressed by their quick minds, he personally presented them with a manuscript copy of his unpublished “Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Wealth” (“Réflections sur la formation et la distribution des richesses”). This economic treatise would subsequently bring him fame for its novel analysis of the economy as a self-equilibrium “machine,” that in its present phase required the involvement of capitalist entrepreneurs even in landownership and agriculture.144 In addition, Turgot drew up a list of fifty-two questions on China’s current political economy that he wanted his two Chinese students to answer from within China.145 Ranging from land and rice prices and types of labor (e.g., slaves and serfs) to the scale of China’s commercial wealth and interest rates, Turgot’s questions strikingly resemble those that historians of late imperial China have been arguing about for the past century. And to assure these Chinese students’ ongoing cooperation in this research, Bertin arranged for them an annual royal pension of 1,200 livres in China. Although one of these Chinese Jesuits died not long after his return to China, the other survived into the nineteenth century and was instrumental in seeing to the completion of the sixteen-volume set, Mémoires concernant l’histoire, les sciences, les arts, les moeurs, les usages, &c. des Chinois, published in Paris between 1786 and 1814. Precisely why this set of books contained far more on historical and cultural topics than on the technical and social science matters that so interested Bertin and Turgot is not clear. The Qing government, if it had ever learned of such collaborative research, would have undoubtedly condemned it as spying. Despite the Qianlong emperor’s construction of a European-type palace in Beijing, he and his government simply did not share the French Enlightenment’s keen interest in distant cultures at the opposite end of Eurasia.146 What, though, of the transmission of East Asian book knowledge westward to Europe? Nearly 2,800 titles directly about China were printed in Europe between

144. Ronald L. Meek, ed., trans., and introd., Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973): 14–27. The two Chinese in question were Pierre Louis Ko (Gao Leisi) and Etienne Yang (Yang Dewang). 145. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Oeuvres de Mr. Turgot, Ministre d’État (Paris: Belin, 1808), v. 5: 140–65, “Questions sur la Chine adressées à Mm. Ko et Yang.” 146. Marcia Reed, “A Perfume Is Best from Afar: Publishing China for Europe,” in Reed and Demattè: 20. Qing court interest in other cultures was reserved for Central and Northeast Asia, minorities within China, and some art work from Japan.

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1450 and 1850.147 Although their number and variety expanded greatly every century (Table 1.1) and the sites and countries with the greatest number of these publications shifted over time—from Venice and Italy before 1600 to Paris and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and increasingly to London and Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century—the image of China in the minds of educated Europeans by and large remained that imparted by the early Jesuit reports and writings: China was the “Celestial Kingdom,” a land of learning, philosophy, and technical ingenuity.148 Although this positive assessment like the eighteenth-century European interest in the Middle East and India freed the mind of some of Europe’s more adventuresome thinkers from the all-encompassing hold of classical Greek ideals and Roman models, it provided neither a full nor an accurate picture of China’s rich and varied culture. Part of the reason for this incompleteness was the overwhelming predominance of European authors in this list of Western publications on China, a point obvious to us today but unfortunately not to most of our predecessors.149 Over a hundred Chinese males are thought to have reached Europe between 1650 and 1850, usually for seminary study. But, virtually none of them left a detailed report on his experiences in Europe, as the Jesuits had so effectively done about China. Thus, no Chinese ever played the role of a spokesman to the West for his own country and its learning. Even when in the nineteenth century British books dealt with more mundane aspects of Chinese life like commerce, farming, family life, and popular religion, the spokesman in the West for China and the Chinese remained the Western missionary, now more likely Protestant than Catholic. To Western knowledge of earlier Chinese authors and their writings, the Catholic missionaries had made a slower and more erratic contribution than is usually recognized. Understandably, they considered their main tasks in China to be religious conversion and the pastoral care of their converts. Hence, for the first century and a half they translated far fewer Chinese books into a Western language for Western readers than they did Western (usually Latin) books for Chinese readers. Also, when in the eighteenth century they reversed this publication strategy, their selection of 147. A few titles written by Jesuits at least partly in Latin were printed from woodblocks and sent to Europe (e.g., Innocentia Victrix, printed in Guangzhou [Canton] in 1671, included the original Chineselanguage texts of the official government ruling that in 1661 declared Christianity innocent of recent charges against it, as well as a romanized transcription and translation into Latin of these documents). Publications in China of a book wholly or partly in a Western language, however, remained highly unusual throughout the centuries under consideration here. 148. An instructive discussion of this flow of influence in Britain is found in David Beevers, ed., Chinese Whispers: Chinoiserie in Britain 1650–1930 (Brighton: Royal Pavilion and Museums, 2008). 149. The principal exception to this generalization is the large number of testimonies that Chinese officials and scholars wrote at Jesuit request for the Vatican about their understanding of Confucian ancestral rites. Nicholas Standaert, Chinese Voices in the Rites Controversy (Rome: Institutum historicum Societatis Jesu, 2012).

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Chinese books for Western readers was sometimes eccentric and uninformed. For instance, the first European language (i.e., Latin) translation of a Chinese book (its title was transliterated as Beng Sim Po Cam) was accomplished in Manila in 1592 by a Dominican friar. This anthology may have usefully introduced certain Chinese philosophical concerns to Western preachers, but the overall banality of its truisms virtually assured this translation would remain unpublished and forgotten until the mid-twentieth century.150 The Jesuits tended to choose more wisely but saw their translations into print very slowly. In line with their general policy of accommodating Christianity with Confucian learning, they concentrated their translation efforts on the Confucian classics, that is, the Four Books and Five Classics. In fact, until their order was dissolved by the Vatican in 1773, the Jesuits were the only direct translators of these Confucian classics in the West.151 Yet, as the publication dates of their translations make clear,152 their efforts took an inordinate length of time. Ricci is thought by some to have translated the Four Books and Trigault the Five Classics, but their translations were never printed and appear not to have survived.153 The first publication of a full translation of just one of the Confucian classics appeared in print ten full decades after the first Jesuits had started studying Chinese in Macao and eight decades after two of them had won permission to enter China. Their translation of the Five Classics was first printed another seven decades later. In other words, a Western reader anxious to read all the Confucian classics that some of his Jesuit contemporaries were so enamored of would have had to wait a century and a half after the first Jesuit entry into China. It reminds one of the death that “the demands of scholarship” had until recently inflicted on the study of the Dead Sea scrolls. 150. Chia, Printing for Profit: 260–63. 151. Standaert, Handbook: 895; and David Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994): 247–99. 152. In 1593, Antonio Possevino quoted from a manuscript translation of the Four Books, possibly made by Ruggieri, when presenting his nearly complete translation of the opening section of the Great Learning (Knud Lundbaek, “The First Translation from a Chinese Classic in Europe,” China Mission Studies Bulletin 1 [1979]: 2–11). Ricci’s 1591–94 translation of the Four Books appears to have been a study manual transmitted within the Jesuit mission; it was never published and survives, it seems, only hidden within the unattributed text of subsequent published translations: the entire Great Learning and first quarter of the Analects by Confucius were published in translation in Sapiencia Sinica in 1662, the full Four Books in 1687, and the Five Classics in 1735, a century and a half and two centuries after the Jesuits had arrived in East Asia (Standaert, Handbook: 863, 895–96). Note also that a Cambridge graduate, John Vincent, translated a part of the Great Learning into English from the Latin translation in the Sapientia Sinica (1662, 1667). Inserted at the end of a book he had published in London in 1687, it is the first English-language translation of any part of a Chinese Confucian classic. 153. Louis Pfister, SJ, Notices biographies et bibliographiques sur les Jésuits de l’ancienne mission de Chine, 1552–1773 (Shanghai: Imprimerie de la Mission catholique, 1932–34), 1: 41, 119. One pities the poor Chinese Christians who had to wait more than three centuries to get a reasonably well translated Chinese version of the Bible, the Old Testament as well as the New Testament.

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As time passed, the Jesuits wrote little on Chinese science and even less on Chinese technology. Their first serious account of Chinese medicine was printed in Europe only in 1682 (pulse reading was the main feature of Chinese medicine that interested them and that they passed on to Europe in 1671).154 Chinese knowledge of botany and materia medica they learned of only in the eighteenth century.155 If, as Leonard Blussé argues, the heyday of Western interest in East Asia was the last third of the seventeenth century,156 then the eighteenth century saw less European reliance on Jesuit intermediary book reports and more on direct European observation of Chinese technology at work. The Dutch adopted the Chinese plough’s curved iron mold board for their own ploughs in Holland, it appears, not because they had read Jesuit books on agricultural technology but because some of them had noticed this plough’s high productivity in Asia.157 The Jesuit writings were similarly uninstructive about the detailed production practices and technology for the Chinese manufactures that won their admiration—porcelain, silk, and tea planting. The Europeans made either their own technological discoveries or their own observations,158 if necessary onsite in China. In the mid-nineteenth century two Western commercial agents, Isidore Hedde and Robert Fortune, disguised themselves as “Chinese,” slipped into China, and surreptitiously collected information, skills, and plants that ended up useful for, respectively, silk factories in Lyon and tea plantations in British India.159 Books had piqued their interest but did not divulge the technological and agronomic secrets these Europeans then had to hunt down inside China. Even then, the absence of Chinese experts to teach these skills significantly slowed the transfer of technology outside of China, especially in Europe. 154. That is, Andreas Cleyer’s Specimen medicinae sinicae; Standaert, Handbook: 795; Roberta Bivins, Acupuncture, Expertise and Cross-Cultural Medicine (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000); and “Imaging Acupuncture,” Asian Medicine 7 (2012): 298–318, referring to Willelm ten Rhijne, De acapunctuus (1683). Ricci is said to have noticed the superiority of this Chinese medical technique, even though it was reported to Europe only six decades after his death (Cheng Lun, Cunbu [Naikaku bunko copy], 2nd ce, anyi, 2a–b). 155. Michael Boym’s Flora Sinensis (1656 ed.) dealt with only twenty-one Chinese plants (Standaert, Handbook: 795, 805). Du Halde’s introduction of some of the findings of Li Shizhen, nonetheless, attracted some Western attention to Chinese plant studies. 156. Leonard Blussé, “Doctor at Sea: Chou Mei-yeh’s Voyage to the West”: 8, in Erika Poorter, ed., As the Twig Is Bent: Essays in Honour of Frits Vos (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1990). 157. Francesca Bray, Agriculture: 582. 158. Back in England, Josiah Wedgwood is said to have been aided in his ceramic research by Wang I Tong, one of the few Chinese visitors to Europe. Wang had been brought to England by John Bradby Blake, a naturalist, to help him with his research on medicine and food; he gave Josiah Wedgwood information on manufacturing Chinaware before becoming a page to the Dowager Duchess of Dorset at Knole, who had him educated at Sevenoaks School and then painted by Joshua Reynolds in a now well-known portrait (British Museum, Paintings and Drawings, 1967, 101, 4, b7 [or 67]). 159. That is, Isidore Hedde, Description méthodique des produits divers recueillis dans un voyage en Chine, 1843–1846 (Paris: Théolier ainé, 1848); and Robert Fortune, A Residence among the Chinese (London: J. Murray, 1857).

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The limited role of books in the Eurasian transfer, or theft, of technical knowledge is underlined by the European reception of a now celebrated compendium of mid-seventeenth-century Chinese technology, the Tiangong kaiwu. This 1637 publication arrived in the Bibliothèque de Roi after 1716.160 Covering a wide range of production practices and technology, it includes a surprisingly detailed account of porcelain manufacture (but oddly nothing on printing). Some have attributed to this book a hand in the European success in the production of porcelain. If so, it assuredly was a game hand, since, as Kimura Kōichi reported in 1954 on his use of it for trial production of porcelain in Kyoto, its technical information was not fit for purpose. Experienced potters in Kyoto who followed its instructions failed to make porcelain.161 At the opposite end of Eurasia, where none understood the process and techniques of porcelain production, its impact was mute. Thus, while Chinese books may have been sufficient for Tokugawa Japanese anxious to introduce better agricultural practices from China (e.g., sugar beet planting), they had nothing to do with the westward transmission of industrial secrets from China. The failure to transmit such skills out of China to Europe has far more to do with engrained Chinese practices of secrecy established principally against other Chinese, rather than with the nationalist or mercantilist agenda already evident in some contemporary European states’ shielding of their advanced technologies. With few writings on Chinese science or technology translated or introduced to Europe, Western books on China often either indulged in fantasizing a foreign utopia (that is, the chinoiserie of some plays, political writings, and garden manuals) or in reporting on maritime journeys to China. These travel books contained some information on actual conditions in China. But, as their authors were usually barred from traveling in the interior of the country, they and their readers seldom learned much about the country and its culture. A major exception to this general ignorance about Chinese life was a travel book of sorts written by Matteo Ricci. This Jesuit’s report on his thirty years as a missionary in China from 1583 to 1610, published most often under its Latin title De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas, won him instant fame in Europe as the European most knowledgeable of China. Written in Italian, Ricci’s manuscript had been taken back to Rome by the Flemish Jesuit Nicholas Trigault. During this return voyage Trigault translated it into Latin for a wide educated readership and upon arrival saw to his translation’s first publication in Augsburg, Germany, in 1615. European interest in Ricci’s account of a land, where “scholarship reached the heights of the most learned European nation,”162 proved so strong that over the following decade it was printed in its entirety in no fewer than 160. Monnet, “Les livres Chinois”: 215. 161. Yabuuchi Kiyoshi, Tenkō kaibutsu no kenkyū (Kyoto: Kōseisha kōseikaku, 1953): 123–36, esp. 132. 162. Liam Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1574–1724 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007): 243. The words are those of Juan Antonio de Arnedo in 1690.

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eleven other editions in five other European languages. In 1621 it was even published in the New World, in Lima, Peru (but not in North America until 1942).163 Away from Europe and the New World, this book—a European best seller written in China about China—had few readers for a very long time. In East Asia one would have thought its sympathetic assessment of Chinese culture would have assured it a warm welcome. Yet, from 1630 to 1720, the Tokugawa government was decidedly hostile. Having expelled the Jesuits and banned all Christian texts, it compiled a list of proscribed Jesuit writings and honored Ricci by including in it all his known Chinese writings. His Tianzhu shiyi (pub. 1603) had already entered Japan and been criticized as early as 1606 by none other than the strict neo-Confucian scholar Hayashi Razan. Banned as unorthodox, his works in Chinese continued to circulate in Japan covertly in manuscript and imprint, but their impact and readership were undeniably reduced even after the government ban was removed. Indeed, a Japanese translation of his De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas was first published in its entirety only in 1982.164 In Ming- and Qing-dynasty China the government did not ban Ricci’s writings; to the contrary, some of his texts in Chinese (mainly on Chinese religion, Western philosophy, and friendship) won warm applause from the cultural elite and thereafter were repeatedly reprinted. But the Chinese government and its officials and subjects seem not to have known of his De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas until the twentieth century. The Jesuits never introduced or translated it for a Ming or Qing readership even though two copies of it were in the 1949 catalog of the Nantang (later Beitang) Library in Beijing. Thus, although in a time of increasingly troubled relations between China and Europe Confucian scholars continued to shower praise on Ricci for his exemplary appreciation of their culture, no pre-twentieth-century Chinese ever remarked about, let alone saw to the Chinese translation of, arguably the most influential book ever written about their country by a foreigner. De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas had to wait three and a half centuries before receiving this honor; it was translated into Chinese from Gallagher’s English-language version, in parts in 1965 in Taipei and in its entirety in 1983 in Beijing (that is, two decades after the first virtually complete translation had appeared in English). At last in 1986, a full translation from the original Italian text was printed in Taipei.165 Consequently, only in the past generation has Ricci’s most important book acquired in China a reputation anywhere approximating its standing in the West and his own personal reputation in China. 163. Mungello, Curious Land: 46–48. Excerpts of Ricci’s work appeared in an English imprint in 1625, and the first full English-language translation was published in Milwaukee in 1942, as China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1583–1610, translated by Louis J. Gallagher, SJ. 164. Matteo Ricci, Chūgoku Kiristokyō fukukyō shi (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1982); and Hirakawa Sukehiro, Matteo Ricci den (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1997), v. 2: 190–92. 165. Wu and Ceng, Mingdai Ouzhou: 44–49, give a brief account of the prolonged and tortuous process of translating Ricci’s writings into Chinese.

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Ricci’s work, however, had another non-Western afterlife that has only recently come to light in the West and East Asia. In ca.  1650 a Persian painter named Mohammed Zaman had acquired a copy of Ricci’s book from Henry Busi (also known as Uwens), the Dutch Jesuit missionary who had converted him to Christianity. Intrigued by Ricci’s account of China, Zaman made a close translation into Persian— reportedly the first ever for a Latin book—of virtually all of the long first part of Ricci’s book, and by 1926 a slightly worm-eaten copy was stored in the Curzon Collection of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Fortunately, we know more about the life of its author than about this manuscript’s provenance.166 Zaman appears to have been sent to Rome by his shah to acquire skills at oil painting and debating, to rebut the Christian message. Apparently because his subsequent conversion to the side of the enemy would have made further residence in Islamic Persia somewhat problematic, he moved to Moghul India where he spent the rest of his life. He would gain considerable fame in his lifetime for his paintings, but his translation of Ricci’s text seems to have won him minimal attention in either Persia or India. That is, it led to the creation of few, if any, other copies (the Curzon copy is said to be unique), and no copies were printed, since the Persian shah’s ban on the import of the printing press remained in effect until 1784–85, and his additional ban on the use of the printing press to print books lasted until 1817.167 Locked into a manuscript culture, Zaman’s translation languished, its circulation restricted, and eventually its existence was preserved in just one Calcutta library. Only in Europe did Ricci’s book enjoy a wide readership and conditions favorable for opening the reader’s mind to the possibility of a successful social order based on a moral and political philosophy free of theological underpinnings. This Enlightenment message had to wait until 2008 for publication in Persian, when Zaman’s original version was updated and published in, of all places, Tehran. Presumably, the mullahs there no longer feel threatened by Jesuits, even those from Ming China.

Eurasian News Accounts like this of the reception of Ricci’s book in different parts of the world provide a rich description of how the book worlds of East Asia and Europe have only slowly come to share knowledge of one another’s books and history. The broader efforts to build up this shared body of knowledge will be strengthened by future 166. Matteo Ricci, Chīn’nāmah / ta’līf-i Mātiyū Rīcḥī, originally translated by Muḥammad Zamān from Latin and revised and edited by Muẓaffar Bakhtiyār and Lu Jin (Tehran: Mīrās̲ -i Maktūb, 2008), preface; Ivanow Wadimir, comp., Concise Descriptive Catalogue of the Persian MSS. in the Curzon Collection, the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1926), vol. 1: 124; and Mario Casari, “Italy XII Translations of Italian Works into Persian,” Encyclopaedia Iranica (online version): 1–2. 167. Roper et al., eds., Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution: 251.

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studies of the global history of information, of how people in particularly these two regions overcame enormous technical and political obstacles to share an increasingly common sense of the “news,” that is, current events. In nineteenth-century Western eyes, China was a land with either too much history or none of it. Yet, unknown to Europeans, its empire had had newspapers— and thus “news”—since arguably the Han dynasty or, more plausibly, the Song dynasty. Whereas Han-dynasty government offices distributed written information about official appointments, Song-dynasty government offices—and especially their employees acting privately—compiled news on court matters and then had it distributed through official channels. Upon receiving the page or two of these printed news reports, their counterparts in provincial, prefectural, and county offices then distributed the news regularly in simply printed sheets to local officials and others willing to pay local government employees a subscription charge in order to learn of the latest central government decisions and appointments. While none of these local efforts ever developed into a full-scale newspaper on even a seventeenth-century European model, they did serve to distribute court information to the outskirts of the empire in a way that seems archetypically Chinese: the private use of official institutions to spread centrally approved information (see Fig. 1.5). In addition, some government employees leaked information to private local sheets, despite harsh government bans and punishments.168 These local sheets seem never to have reported on local events, since “news” was what happened elsewhere in the empire, particularly at its center. In Europe from the sixteenth century onwards, information about current events circulated in the form of the manuscript newsletter, produced in scores of copies but adapted by the scribes to the needs of individual clients (these manuscripts often contained information that reigning regimes banned from print). The printed newspaper, in the sense of a sheet or sheets appearing at regular intervals—whether every week, every two or three days, or every day—dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century. These newssheets appeared from 1605 onwards in the Netherlands, Germany, and England. Each issue was dated and numbered so that readers would know if they had missed one.169 This invention came at the right time. It was almost unthinkable before the establishment of a postal system in sixteenth-century Central Europe allowed journals to reach their readers rapidly. When newspapers began to appear, they owed their rapid success in part to the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), a war that involved most 168. Sogabe Shizuo, Shina seiji shūzoku ronkō (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1943): 348–74; and Hilde de Weerdt, “‘Court Gazettes’ and ‘Short Reports’: Official Views and Unofficial Readings of Court News,” Hanxue yanjiu 27, 2 (June 2009): 167–200. 169. Folke Dahl, “Amsterdam—Earliest Newspaper Centre of Western Europe,” Het Boek 25 (1939); Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron, eds., The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2001); and Andrew Pettigree, The Invention of News (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).

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Fig. 1.5 News in the Capital Gazette ( Jingbao), issue dated 1874, ninth lunar month, and eighth day (editor’s personal collection).

European countries and gave news writers a regular supply of dramatic and tragic events. In similar fashion in Britain, the Civil War or Revolution of the 1640s encouraged a proliferation of rival newssheets with names such as Mercurius Aulicus (supporting the king), Mercurius Britannicus (supporting the parliament), and so on.170 International news was arranged by the name of the city from which the information originated, with Istanbul as the farthest point from which news regularly arrived. By the end of the seventeenth century, the periodical press was well established and specialized journals were emerging. Besides the newssheets, which concentrated on 170. Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–9 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).

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politics and war, we find journals such as the French Journal des Savants, founded in 1665 and published in Paris, offering book reviews, scholars’ obituaries, and other news about the European world of learning. The outbreak of the French Revolution encouraged more and more people to read the newspapers, both in France and outside it: 130 new political newspapers were founded in France in the year 1789 alone. Journalists played an important role in the events of the time. As in the case of England in the 1640s, the Revolution was good for the press. In its turn, the press was good for the Revolution. It has been suggested that the periodical press was “indispensable to give legitimacy to the new law-making of the Revolution by making that process public.”171 The Irish politician Edmund Burke saw the newspapers as a “Fourth Estate” of the realm like the clergy, the nobles, and the common people. While books on China in the first few centuries of European printing tended to impart a static view with a focus on general conditions, other sources imparting particular information, such as recent returnees’ travel accounts, merchant reports, and especially the great number of letters sent by the Jesuits to their priest houses back in Europe, played a more vital role in laying a framework for the more regular and systematic transmission of useful and profitable knowledge about this distant country.172 The growing incidence and interconnectedness of such information between East Asia and Europe led to an institutionalization of this knowledge sharing, whereby the transmission of information from China became far more regular and organized and its reception standardized even before the founding of daily newspapers. This sense of interconnectedness between East Asia and Europe, nonetheless, took a very long time to take shape. From the fourteenth century to the early nineteenth century, silver may have flowed continuously out of European countries and their colonies in the direction of China,173 but “news” followed the money very slowly.174 Western consciousness and recording of “news” coming from East Asia quite possibly began with the shocking reports of the 1587 Japanese proscription of Christianity as a “pernicious doctrine” and expulsion of missionaries and then the mass crucifixion of twenty-six Christians in Nagasaki a decade later. But, as European newspapers began only from 1605, the reporting of this tragedy through the printed press was probably impeded. 171. Jeremy Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789–1799 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990). 172. Noël Golvers, Building Humanistic Libraries in Late Imperial China (Rome: Nuova cultura, 2011): 96–130. 173. Peter Spufford, Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002): 344, 346, 348, 375, 410, on long-term trade imbalances leading to a regular flow of silver from Europe to Asia; and Richard von Glahn, Fountains of Fortune (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004): 112–257. 174. For example, Iwashita Tetsunori, Edo no Naporeon densetsu (Tokyo: Chūo kōron shinsha, 1999), tells of the growing reputation of Napoleon in Japan, two to three decades after his death.

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The first “event” reported from China to the West—which interestingly involved virtually no European—was the fall of the Ming dynasty and establishment of the Qing dynasty in 1644. The earliest talk of these two earth-shattering events in Beijing reached Nanjing in about ten days; more credible reports arrived ten or so days later.175 By contrast, this news took years to reach Europe by merchant boat, first becoming well known in detail in 1654 from Martino Martini’s eyewitness account in his Bellum Tartaricum. Published in seven Latin editions and in nine other languages, this book was avidly consumed by European readers startled by the fall of a country they had recently come to admire for its stately order. Martini’s account not only filled the columns of European papers as a “news event” but also soon fed the narratives of Dutch, German, Danish, and English novels and of Dutch and English plays, notably Joost van den Vondel’s Zungchin (1667). In the words of Donald Lach and Edwin Van Kley, “the reports of the Manchu Conquest seemed dramatically to move China into the European awareness, and for a time, informed Europeans seemed conscious of living in the same world with the Chinese.”176 Nearly a century later, as trade contacts grew, even French missionaries in China were reporting to the West a great variety of mundane information, ranging from the flood of a city in 1742 and the value of a Chinese tael of silver in French currency to the current rate of interest and the overall population of China.177 By contrast, the mid- and late eighteenth-century Qing court showed a degree of indifference to Western news that today can only startle a reader. During the last century of the Ming and for most of the Qing after 1684, the Chinese government had allowed its own people to engage in foreign trade and go overseas to Japan and Southeast Asia. It could have called on these overseas Chinese to report on foreign governments, just as some Chinese merchants and even a Chinese doctor in Kyushu had done on their own initiative to the Ming court during the Japanese invasions of Korea in the 1590s. It could even have maintained the practice of sending secret agents to Japan, as established in 1701, when the Kangxi emperor had a Manchu bannerman dress up as a Chinese merchant and go to Nagasaki to report to him directly on Japan’s recent ban on exporting copper to China.178 A very small number 175. Golvers, Building Humanistic Libraries: 107; and Kishimoto Mio, Min Shin koeki to Kōnan shakai (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1999): 145–57. 176. Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume 3: A Century of Advance, Book 4 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993): 1,663. 177. Standaert, Handbook: 722, 728–31, 892. 178. Matsuura Akira, “Mindai kaishō to Hideyoshi ‘Nyūkō Dai Min’ no jōhō”: 45–79, in his Kaigai jōhō kara miru Higashi Ajia: Tōsen fūsetsugaki no sekai (Osaka: Seibundō shuppan, 2009); and Angela Schottenheimer, “Japan the Tiny Dwarf? Sino-Japanese Relations from the Kangxi to the Early Qianlong Reigns”: 8–9, in Asian Research Institute, Working Paper No. 106 (2008), National University of Singapore. Court officials presumably opposed the establishment of rival channels of information for policy decisions. Meanwhile, the Tokugawa shogunate was kidnapping Chinese doctors to treat its rulers.

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of Chinese had even made their way to Europe, and although their published reports rarely went beyond broad generalizations on customs and products (in the manner of traditional gazetteers or descriptions of foreign countries),179 the Qing government could easily have prompted these travelers to impart more detailed impressions and information. For sure, overseas news entered southeast China through private channels; how otherwise explain the occasional presence of unconventional Western images in Chinese paintings and the early nineteenth-century Cantonese craze for foreign things that saw them publish prints of Western buildings and transform some Canton wine shops and even government offices into “barbarian-style” buildings?180 Furthermore, political and military developments in Central Asia remained of interest to the Manchu court. Nonetheless, after the death of the Kangxi emperor in 1722,181 the same government paid little attention to “news” and other information from and about faraway Europe (boxes of Gobelin tapestries sent by Louis XV to the Chinese court in 1767 remained unopened in the Forbidden City until 1914, nearly three years after the fall of the Qing dynasty).182 Even the European advance into South Asia attracted Qing attention very belatedly. When in 1793 a Qing border official passed on information about the British in India, he used a Tibetan word, P’i-leng, meaning “foreigner,” to refer to the British, as he and the court seem not to have known the more specific Chinese terms used for them in Canton, where they traded. Only in 1799 did the Qing court learn that three of its trading nations from Europe—England, France, and Spain—were at war with one another; an English boat captain had divulged the information to a Canton official, who dutifully passed it on to Beijing.183 Yet, no reasons for this continental conflict are mentioned, as news of the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte would be widely disseminated in China only half a century later.184 The Japanese response to news about the situation in Europe proved quite different. Despite the Tokugawa shogunate’s severe restrictions on Japanese contact with Europeans—it prohibited the propagation of Christianity in 1612, expelled 179. Xie Qinggao and Yang Bingnan, Hailu xiaoshi (Beijing: Shangwu, 2002). 180. Zhang Hongxing, comp., Masterpieces of Chinese Painting, 700–1900 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2013): 316–17; and Zhu An, Renwu fengsu zhidu congtan (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1989): 161. For even earlier Western-style buildings there and elsewhere in China, see Zhang Li and Liu Jiantang, Zhongguo jiaoan shi (Chengdu: Sichuan sheng shehui kexueyuan, 1987): 226. 181. Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), shows how the Kangxi emperor acquired a sophisticated knowledge of contemporary European politics. He appears not to have shared his interest and knowledge with his Chinese officials, who possibly regarded his interest as a threat to their privileged position as chief channel of information to him. 182. Daniele Varè, Laughing Diplomat (London: J. Murray, 1938): 111–12. 183. Fu Lo-shu, Documentary Chronicle of Sino-Western Relations, 1644–1820 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1969), v. 1: 324, 336, and v. 2: 580n463. 184. That is, with Wei Yuan’s Haiguo tuzhi (1844 ed.).

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Catholic missionaries and all Spaniards in 1616, outlawed all Japanese Christians in 1624, expelled all Portuguese and prevented all Japanese from going abroad in 1636, and from 1641 restricted all foreign trade to one port (Nagasaki) and banned all Western merchants except the Dutch from trading there—it obliged these same Dutch merchants to inform it regularly of world affairs (Chinese traders to Japan were questioned about East Asian matters). From 1641 to 1854, these annual Dutch reports were transmitted by a group of Nagasaki interpreters to Edo, where the shogunate’s leaders retained tight control over this valuable information. Leaks of course occurred, not least when the Dutch made visits to Edo and were widely questioned. But the handwritten translations of their handwritten reports would first be published only in 1976. For two centuries, then, the shogunate planned its policy toward the West with only limited need to be concerned about popular or even samurai reaction. The foreign news transmitted by the Dutch was more accurate than we might expect. Well aware that they were the shogunate’s sole channel for information from Europe, the Dutch withheld, added, distorted, and created some of this information to suit their purposes. The surviving reports in Dutch and Japanese read like newspaper headlines or thin précis. Nonetheless, Japanese historians today believe that overall the information they passed on to the Tokugawa government, when all realistic qualifications are considered, was accurate, especially on European matters (inaccuracies arose more often from Japanese mistranslations). Furthermore, reports of European news now reached Japan more regularly than ever before and more quickly than to anywhere else in East Asia but for the Dutch colony of Batavia. Usually no more than a year separated an event’s occurrence in Europe and the Dutch traders’ reporting on it to the shogunate. Thus, in 1649, they told it of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), in 1650 of the execution of King Charles I of England (1649), in 1691 of the flight of the Stuart King James II to France (1688), and in 1757 of the Dutch prediction of Halley’s Comet (1759). Interestingly, the only major European event the Dutch were lax about reporting to the Japanese was the French Revolution; finally, five years after its outbreak, Dutch representatives broke the news of the establishment of a revolutionary government in France and the execution of its king. Later, for the changes their own monarchy suffered from Napoleon’s occupation of the Netherlands, they hit upon an ingenious explanation that they rightly thought the Japanese would comprehend and accept: the king of the Netherlands, they reported, was Napoleon’s younger brother, adopted by marriage into the Dutch royal family to continue the Dutch royal family’s line. The Dutch may well have passed on more details in their private unrecorded meetings with the shogunate authorities. But the selection they annually presented of foreign current events was accurate enough to let the early nineteenth-century shogunate know that Asia and Europe were undergoing rapid political and military changes. The sudden arrival of Russian and British boats in Japanese waters as well as news of

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their expansion in Asia alarmed the shogunate, but it also introduced additional news sources that left it far better prepared than the Qing to handle the increasing number of gunboats approaching its shores.185 Its first newspaper would be set up in 1861 by a Briton in Nagasaki and then Yokohama, but only after Japanese had learned enough of European politics to create their own cult of admirers of the Great Napoleon.186 By  1868, this Yokohama paper had Japanese rivals in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Nagasaki, and from 1871, the Yokohama Mainichi Shimbun was up and running as the first Japanese daily. Within a few years telegraph and underwater communications cables were in place, making the traditional exclusionist policies of East Asian governments look stupid and self-destructive in an age of free trade and the extensive flow of information. With the adoption of modern Western printing technology and the import of many Western imprints, the book worlds of East Asia became increasingly immersed in global networks of book translation, production, distribution, and consumption centered in Europe. Aware, then, that the pre-1850 book worlds of Europe and East Asia by and large interacted only indirectly or intermittently, the authors of the chapters in this volume have pursued different strategies to show how these separate histories of Eurasia can still inform one another. More by accident than by design, the focus of their research overlaps with the way they chose to explore the perceived lack of connectivity between East Asia and Europe in book matters. One pair of authors has focused on distinctive features and problems of book production in just one of these book worlds, with the hope of casting light thereby on the practices of production in the other book world. A second pair has directly compared consumption practices in these book worlds by studying their shared features in readership and book use. And, the third pair has chosen the economic dimension of distribution. While relating the historical development of book distribution in either Europe or China, each has repeatedly woven into his or her analysis the knowledge gained from the other’s article, so that the conclusions they reach are deeply informed by one another’s findings in a way rarely seen in comparative research. In fact, the interconnectivity of these pairs of chapters and of all six of these chapters, we hope, will demonstrate the benefits that await historians of East Asia and Europe who collaborate in adopting any of these strategies to discuss key issues of Eurasian history and problems of interconnectivity between 1500 and 1850.

185. Iwao Seiichi et al., comps., Oranda fūsetsugaki shūsei (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 1976), vol. 1; and Matsukata Fuyuko, “From the Threat of Roman Catholicism to the Shadow of Western Imperialism: Changing Trends in Dutch News Reports Issued to the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1690–1817”: 130–46, in  Nagazumi Yōko, ed., Large and Broad: The Dutch Impact on Early Modern Asia (Tokyo: Tōyō Bunko, 2010). 186. Iwashita, Edo no Naporeon densetsu.

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McKitterick and McDermott each deal with production practices seemingly particular to the region of their expertise and thereby highlight important points usually overlooked by specialists in the other’s region of research. McKitterick identifies the pitfalls encountered by historians of the Western book in identifying, classifying, and counting the materials they use in their research. He then offers clear advice to East Asian bibliographers on what recent European bibliographical practices they should avoid as well as follow. In a deeply informed piece of historical bibliography he reminds us all how statistics often conceal as much as they reveal, how geographical or national units can be used only with great care for long-term analyses, and how changes in the readership of certain European languages greatly shaped the production and reception of European texts over time. McDermott likewise concentrates on just one region, East Asia, to identify a significant and distinctive feature of Chinese and Japanese book production: private noncommercial publishing. He shows how the frequency of such publishing in premodern East Asia seriously challenges efforts to apply to late imperial China those conventional Western historical narratives that identify the growth of publishing with the rise of capitalism, the growth of a “public sphere,” and the development of an integrated culture. In making extensive use of primary and secondary sources from both Europe and East Asia, Peter Kornicki and Peter Burke adopt a different approach. Each tackles differences in East Asian and European book consumption to make direct comparisons and contrasts. Kornicki examines women readers and books published for women in early modern East Asia, including Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, as well as China. He compares the rise of printing in the vernacular and the proliferation of conduct books for women in East Asia with similar trends in Europe, taking care to note important differences in their contents and reception. Educated males and governments in East Asia displayed far less anxiety about women’s literacy than did their counterparts in Europe, where males also worried about the religious message of books written for and read by women. Burke and McDermott in turn focus not so much on the male readers of reference books but on these books themselves and what they tell us about the culture and society that produced and consumed them. They discuss general reference books such as encyclopedias, large and small. They also call attention to the increasing number of different kinds of “how to” books in both East Asia and Europe in the early modern period, and to the relative lack of Chinese interest in dictionaries or translations. Tokugawa Japan is also considered, if only to highlight how distinctive the Chinese tradition of reference books and encyclopedias remained throughout the centuries covered by this book. Finally, James Raven and Cynthia Brokaw show how a comparative approach to the history of book distribution can disclose much about the economic obstacles to book production as well as to varieties of economic organization used to establish long-distance trade within Europe and China. James Raven’s chapter is concerned

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with the transmission of books in Europe and its colonies in the period between Gutenberg’s invention of the hand press and the nineteenth-century introduction of the steam press. Besides telling a story of market expansion for publishing, his wideranging chapter examines the geographical and social range of distribution. He considers whether publications circulated within a “closed” or an “open” circuit and whether the sellers remained at home or traveled with the books. Cynthia Brokaw, after reporting on her remarkable findings about local book production, devotes the last two-thirds of her chapter to distribution networks. In showing how the simplicity and portability of the tools of woodblock printing allowed for the spread of production sites and extensive networks of book distribution throughout much of South China beyond large urban centers. These, then, are the issues that the authors of this book have addressed in trying to write a Eurasian book history. In this introduction we have introduced their discussion of these issues by placing them within a broader context of an incompletely realized history of interconnectivity between Europe and East Asia up to 1850. We hope thereby to have found useful ways to answer the sorts of questions that readers are increasingly posing about the past of our now globalized world, especially about the role of European and East Asian book technology, knowledge, and information in the creation and circulation of shared knowledge in Eurasia.

2 Bibliography, Population, and Statistics A View from the West David McKitterick

There are some phrases that trip too easily off the tongue when people are speaking about the output of printing presses: “a world of print,” “print media,” “print culture.” They tend to be used without very much thought being given to the implications of describing environments in such summary fashion. In the case of the last, the phrase is actually misleading, like its equivalent designation “manuscript culture,” or even “oral culture.” None of these so-called cultures exists in a vacuum. They exist beside and among others. Oral communication, even in a world where there is no writing system or where there are no vehicles for print or manuscript, relates to visual, tactile, and social environments. Put at its simplest, an environment that includes printed communication will also include manuscript, oral, and various kinds of visual communication, the mixture depending on circumstance. Inscriptions—commemorative, laudatory, or merely admonitory—also play their own parts in this culture of communication. To use terms such as those mentioned in the first sentence of this paragraph tends to ignore questions of context, of environment, of balances between different modes of communication, of differing purposes, of choice of medium. By themselves, they have little meaning.1 The more interesting question concerns relationships between different kinds and vehicles of communication and memory. How and to what extent, in different societies, different economies, in different circumstances, do orality, manuscript and print, visual as well as verbal exchanges, influence each other?2 On the present occasion, we may begin to explore this question if we concentrate on just one aspect—in this case printed books—and seek to recover its extent. On that basis we may begin to establish the extent to which it is able to impinge on the others. This assumes that we have some grasp of what is printed, in what quantities, how it is circulated, and how different parts of society and different geographical regions 1.

2.

For help of various kinds, I am grateful to Peter Burke, John Flood, Mayke de Jong, Neil Harris, Lotte  Hellinga, Joseph McDermott, Horst Meyer, Paul Needham, David Paisey, James Raven, and above all to my wife, Rosamond. The opinions are, of course, my own. For some aspects of this complex relationship see, for example, Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Cambridge: Polity, 3rd ed., 2009).

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find it a useful medium. In turn, this gives rise to further questions. Most pertinently, while—to extremely varying extents—the output of much of the printing trade has been recorded, we are still far short of an adequate record for all save some strictly limited periods and regions. The following pages are concerned with parts of Western Europe, over the comparatively short period of about three and a half centuries, from the mid-fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth. Many of the questions about evidence, resources, and political, economic, and social backgrounds are more widely applicable: we will turn very briefly to these in an East Asian context at the end. The following comes with an immediate caveat. While it does not seriously address single-sheet prints, whether religious or secular, woodcut or intaglio, these images were a fundamental part of the printed environment, often as important as books or pamphlets and often reflecting the same needs, whether in politics, religion, medicine, social comment, or simply decoration. They ranged from the immense multisheet Arch of honour (ca. 1515–18), supervised by Albrecht Dürer and designed to celebrate the emperor Maximilian I, to hundreds of cheap, tiny devotional images.3 With respect to printed books, pamphlets, and single sheets containing type matter, the surviving output of the press from the 1450s to the year 1500 has been the subject of sustained investigation and recording for several hundred years, currently in the great mass of information gathered in the Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue (ISTC).4 That for the British Isles and the English-speaking world has attracted similar attention, currently summed up in the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC), which surveys publications from 1475 to 1800.5 For most of Europe, let alone the rest of the world, we do not yet possess similarly comprehensive and reliable surveys of survivals. But it is important to stress a bibliographical quirk. Thanks to disparate scholarly traditions, works containing matter printed from type have been better recorded—for post-1500 productions far more fully—than works printed solely from woodcuts or from engraved or etched plates. I will be concerned here with matter printed from type, primarily with titles and editions. Sitting beside this is the equally pertinent question of how many copies 3.

4. 5.

Larry Silver, Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). In an immense literature, and apart from the standard surveys of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by W. L. Schreiber (since much revised), the following offer some idea of the range of material: David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch, Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century Woodcuts and Their Public (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art; Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Peter Parshall, ed., The Woodcut in Fifteenth-Century Europe (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 2009); and Max Geisberg, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1500–1550, rev. Walter L. Strauss (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1974). http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc/ http://estc.bl.uk

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were printed of an edition. Clearly, it is only by considering this as well that we can establish the extent to which printed books penetrate societies or sections of society. For this complicated subject, where the easily recoverable evidence is extremely patchy, I present only some suggestions concerning sources of evidence. While the following must be regarded as a kind of first stage, it cannot be divorced from questions of edition sizes. In such a very brief summary, these must stand simply as an essential reminder. Edition sizes of books printed between the fifteenth and the late eighteenth centuries varied immensely in scale, from as little as a hundred copies or fewer, to the thousands. But this in itself does not help us very much to understand how many pieces of print were produced. For this, we must turn to the worldwide census of surviving publications between the 1450s and 1500, the Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue. The editors of this work estimate that it may eventually record about 28,000 separate editions, varying from large works such as the Gutenberg Bible to the scraps on which were printed indulgences, licenses, advertisements, and other more ephemeral matter.6 The celebrated advertisement printed by Caxton for a service-book measures only about 55 × 128 mm.7 But as far as numeration in ISTC is concerned, it is of status equal to the Latin edition of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), an imperial folio volume of about 330 leaves and surviving in many hundred copies. It is clear, once we look at the contents of ISTC, that we are not only dealing with a very broad spectrum of publications, by no means all books, or even pamphlets, but that we also face quite fundamental questions about survival. It must be emphasized that this is what has survived. Various attempts have been made to measure what has been lost, and, more particularly, what kinds of books, what formats, what broadsides or other ephemera as distinct from books. The answers are not conclusive, but they indicate some of the challenges that face a historian wishing to explore the question with which we opened: the extent to which print penetrated society. We need to refine this a little more. In particular, if we wish to consider the extent and influence of printed books, we then need to consider these overall figures in geographical contexts; and we need to consider them in social contexts. Put very crudely, the book trade for example in Venice, its presence amid nearby cities and its place in international trade, is very different from the situation in rural France. To a great extent—but not entirely—this is reflected in the history of printing in different localities. For example, the ISTC records over 3,770 entries for Venice, over 3,200 for Paris, over 2,000 entries for Rome, more than 1,600 for Cologne, and more than 1,100 for Milan. These and other large centers, all trading regionally and internationally, 6. 7.

istc.bl.uk/search/about.html Seymour de Ricci, A Census of Caxtons (Oxford: Bibliographical Soc. at the Oxford University Press, 1909): 21. Alan Coates et al., A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century Now in the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), no. C-155, gives the dimensions as 80 × 146 mm.

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stand at one extreme. At the other are dozens of towns and settlements where just one item is recorded as having been produced. The inadequacy of relying on production and survival figures alone lies in the different patterns across Europe of ways of trading in books, advertising books, and selling books: in the various characteristics of university towns, cathedral towns, local or international trading centers, religious centers, small market towns, rural or urban communities, professional needs, royal or other princely courts, scattered or concentrated populations, standards of literacy, and different levels of wealth among individuals or families. All expressed varied and changing ranges of needs. Output, needs, and expectations changed beyond recognition between the 1450–60s and the 1490s. For some kinds of books, the market became saturated, even oversupplied. All the while, the total stock of printed books and other publications was increasing as each year’s production was added to those of previous years. The second half of the fifteenth century is one period for which we both possess a reliable account of what has survived and the means to do some limited analysis online of patterns of publication. It leaves many questions unanswered, sometimes explicitly. But we can still use it as a guide. One further consideration in our search for ways of measuring the penetration of print was not available to earlier bibliographers or historians. From the ISTC we learn something of the relationship in output of different formats. Against about 8,900 entries for books in folio can be set about 15,700 for those in quarto. The discrepancy is in fact likely to have been very much greater, given the kinds of books published in quarto, many consisting of only a few pages, for schools, devotion, and other popular markets, categories that were from the first subject to hardware and that were for many years neglected by collectors. We may also safely speculate that the small number of broadsides and single sheets of various sizes, about 2,500, is a reflection of losses, not of production. Their fragile nature, and often their content, meant that there was less need for, or likelihood of, their survival. As a general rule (there are many exceptions), larger books survive better than smaller ones; and of these, those in Latin or Greek survive better than those in vernaculars. Similar caveats about survival apply to later periods, within very different contexts of preservation, but we can still see some of the principal changes in practice and fashion. The ESTC, listing books published from 1476 to 1800, reveals not just the very large number of publications in quarto during the seventeenth century (over four times those published in folio) but also a numerical as well as a proportional falling-off in the eighteenth century, as the smaller-format and usually cheaper octavos came to dominate British publishing. Such shifts in publishing practice, with their attendant consequences for prices, are—among other things—important indicators of how markets and reading demand altered.

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Recent Interest: Limitations and Challenges In the past few years there has been increasing interest in the long-term overall output of the book trades, both in manuscript and print. Some authors have taken a broadly European line, such as Uwe Neddermeyer in 1998.8 The possible output of European printers in the fifteenth century, and its relation to surviving copies, has been explored with some care, and suitable caution, by Jonathan Green, Frank McIntyre, and Paul Needham in a paper that brought together bibliographical analysis and statistical methods.9 While much remained indeterminate in this paper, depending on different mathematical models, the authors concluded that “the model that best fits the observable data suggests that the number [of missing editions] is very high, and that it is not unlikely that there are more missing editions than existing ones” (171). This dramatic conclusion needs to be read in a context of printing that ranged from broadsides (with very high loss rates) to multivolume works (with rather lower ones). In other words, these are possible loss rates for many different kinds of printing, in all kinds of circumstances and for all kinds of markets. Loss and survival rates will be different for different genres, different formats, and indeed for different periods.10 Others have been more country-specific. In 1989, a conference organized by the Bibliothèque Nationale concentrated mostly on the nineteenth century in France.11 In Britain, there have been several attempts to quantify the output of printed books in the early modern period. In an article in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America in 2000, Kari Konkola examined figures for the English Bible and popular theological texts, work subsequently used in collaboration with Diarmaid

8.

Uwe Neddermeyer, Von der Handschrift zun gedruckten Buch (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998). More limited in scope, but distinguishing between Latin and vernacular publication, Andrew Pettegree has offered summary estimates of known books published in different parts of Europe before 1601: Andrew Pettegree, “Centre and Periphery in the European Book World,” Trans Royal Historical Soc. 18 (2008): 101–28. Though some of the questions have earlier roots, current interest can be traced to discussions in L. Febvre and H.-J. Martin, L’ apparition du livre (Paris: Editions A. Michel, 1958), translated as The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 (London: Verso, 1976). See also Roger Chartier and Daniel Roche, “L’histoire quantitative du livre,” Revue Française de l’Histoire du Livre 46 (1977): 477–501. 9. Jonathan Green, Frank McIntyre, and Paul Needham, “The Shape of Incunable Survival and Statistical Estimation of Lost Editions,” Papers of the Bibliographical Soc. of America 105 (2011): 141–75. 10. For two more restricted studies of particular kinds of books in later periods, with predictably different conclusions, see Goran Proot and Leo Egghe, “Estimating Editions on the Basis of Survivals: Printed Programmes of Jesuit Plays in the Provincia Flandro-Belgica before 1773, with a Note on the ‘book historical law,’” Papers of the Bibliographical Soc. of America 102 (2008): 149–74; and Alexander S. Wilkinson, “Lost Books Printed in French before 1601,” The Library 7th ser. 10 (2009): 188–205. 11. Alain Vaillant, ed., Mesures du livre; colloque organisé par la Bibliothèque Nationale et la Société des Etudes Romantiques, 25–26 mai 1989 (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1992).

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MacCulloch for a much broader audience in the magazine History Today.12 Volumes of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain have likewise offered figures for output more generally.13 Most ambitiously, Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden, two economic historians at the University of Utrecht, have taken up the challenge for an exceptionally long period, from the sixth to the eighteenth centuries, spreading their wings from Portugal to Russia, with brief comparisons for China and Japan. They are not concerned with North America.14 They have followed this with a jointly written chapter in a monograph examining the European economy over eight centuries, from the year 1000 to 1800.15 Since this is easily the most ambitious attempt to chart book production across Western Europe that has so far been published, it demands careful attention and examination. At the beginning of their article, Buringh and van Zanden proffer some of their reasons for being interested in long-term book production”: as “a proxy for the production and accumulation of ideas—an important variable in endogenous growth theory,” and Also, the demand for books will to a large extent be determined by the level of literacy in a given society, although other variables such as income per capita and the relative price of books will also play a role, along with cultural influences such as religion. (409)

12. Kari Konkola, “‘People of the Book’: The Production of Theological Texts in Early Modern England,” Papers of the Bibliographical Soc. of America 94 (2000): 5–33; and Kari Konkola and Diarmaid MacCulloch, “People of the Book: Success in the English Reformation,” History Today October 2003: 23–29. 13. John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, with the assistance of Maureen Bell, ed., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 4: 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 779–84; and Michael Suarez, “Toward a Bibliographical Analysis of the Surviving Record, 1700–1800,” in M. Suarez and M. Turner, eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 5: 1695–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), ch. 1. Both provide references to earlier literature. See also, more amply, A. Veylit, “A Statistical Survey and Evaluation of the ‘Eighteenth-Century ShortTitle Catalog’” (PhD diss., University of California Riverside, 1994). For further brief remarks see James Raven, The Business of Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007): 8. 14. Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe: A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Economic History 69 (2009): 409–45. Their earlier working paper, with some further sources, is available at www.iisg.nl/bibliometrics/books500–1800.pdf. This includes two appendices: a method for estimating manuscript production in the Latin West, 501–1500, and estimates of book production, 1454–1800. See further Eltjo Buringh, “On Medieval Manuscript Production in the Latin West: Explorations with a Global Database” (PhD diss., University of Utrecht, 2009). 15. Jan Luiten van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution: The European Economy in a Global Perspective, 1000–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Ch. 3, “Book Production as a Mirror of the Emerging Medieval Knowledge Economy, 500–1500”: 69–91 was jointly written with Eltjo Buringh. I am not concerned here with their choice and interpretation of an assortment of datasets for manuscript production.

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They prudently warn that the latter is true “to a large extent.” But they do not mention one critical further underlying variable lurking beneath their figures, and that needs to be addressed. It is exposed in their calculating per capita consumption and presenting it as a uniform phenomenon over several centuries. This bald calculation neglects regional and social changes in the sale and use of books, in the nature of reading matter and its relationship to a continuing manuscript tradition, and in habits of reading. In other words, was printing demand-led, or to what extent did it feed demand? While there are many variables in earlier centuries, some of these changes have been most discussed in the seventeenth century and in the second half of the eighteenth century, where it has been represented that there was a so-called reading revolution.16 In this last, it is argued that instead of readers using books intensively, and relying on just a few, readers became much more promiscuous, using many. This is not universally true of the whole of Western Europe. But, for many social groups, there is substantial evidence to support this change, in book ownership, in the development of lending libraries and in publication patterns. If it is sought to link the output of printed books to the size of the population at large, and hence to literacy rates and levels, then considerable attention needs to be paid to such phenomena. As Green, McIntyre, and Needham noted concerning their revised estimate of missing editions, “Where general discussions of literacy have estimated the ratio of books per person, these estimates will need to be revisited to account for an early modern Europe that is by all appearances awash in ephemera. Above all, the print technology that generated tens of thousands more editions than usually assumed seems much closer to being a true mass medium” (173–74). This is not to say that such a mass medium was universal, or evenly distributed across Europe. Further, whatever the period or place, how far did the abilities of people possessing only basic literacy nonetheless relate to the statistics of printed and manuscript matter in so-called literate populations? What kinds of books or other printed matter did such people know? With only the most tenuous of skills, little or no spare cash, and limited access to print, they were a world away from those who could read with reasonable comfort. Yet it is exactly the kind of basic reading matter, including hornbooks, religious sheets, chapbooks, and sheet ballads, which formed their reading world, of which we have the least satisfactory bibliographical records. In  worlds increasingly dependent on printing at every level and for all kinds of everyday purposes, the attrition rates of such genres are among the highest of all. Most have 16. Rolf Engelsing, “Die Perioden der Lesergeschichte in der Neuzeit. Das statistische Ausmass und die soziokulturelle Bedeutung der Lektüre,” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 10 (1969), cols 944–1002; and Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser; Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500–1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974). Engelsing’s thesis, which was originally applied mainly to a broadly middle-class audience, has since been much discussed and modified.

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disappeared completely.17 Further, it must be constantly remembered that, quite apart from book ownership, reading is often a shared activity, not a solitary one. From the shared use of liturgical books to the shared reading of news, tales, and songs in partially literate groups, the environments of reading have a direct influence on demand from the printing and publishing trades.18 As one of the most recent more general considerations to appear, it is perhaps most appropriate to focus on Buringh and van Zanden’s paper though there is much that demands comment in some of the other work just mentioned. In their work, they sought, country by country and century by century, to accomplish four principal things. First, to estimate the numbers of manuscripts and editions of printed books;19 second, to estimate the numbers of printed books actually printed; third, to set these figures against population estimates; and fourth, to suggest how this might help the study of the history of literacy. Their summary of their article does not suggest anything new in its conclusions concerning the West. Their estimates, we are told, show that “medieval and early modern book production was a dynamic economic sector”; “rising production after the middle of the fifteenth century probably resulted from lower book prices and higher literacy”; “monasteries seem to have been most important in the early period, while universities and lay people dominated the later medieval demand for books.” These phenomena are familiar to specialists in the history of books.20 Nonetheless, the authors’ claim to link these matters to the “rise of the West” demands some attention even if we set aside the questions that such a phrase entails. One difficulty in their method, made acute because of the long period with which they are concerned, is that books are treated as if they are all the same, so that units for counting, and any price adjustments, assume manufactured items of consistent 17. Morris Martin, “The Case of the Missing Woodcuts,” Print Quarterly 4 (1987); 342–61; Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Sheila O’Connell, The Popular Print in England, 1550–1850 (London: British Museum, 1999); Mario Infelise, I Remondini di Bassano (Bassano: Tassotti, 1980); Mario Infelise and Paola Marini, eds., Remondini; un editore del settecento (Milano: Electa, 1990); Nicole Garnier, L’imagerie populaire française. 1. Gravures en taille-douce et en taille d’épargne (Musée national des arts et traditions populaires) (Paris: Ministère de la culture, de la communication, des grands travaux et du bicentenaire: Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1990); and Christophe Beauducel, L’imagerie populaire en Bretagne aux xviiie et xixe siècles (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009). 18. See, for example, Michael Frearson, “The Distribution and Readership of London Corantos in the 1620s,” in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., Serials and Their Readers, 1620–1914 (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1993): 1–25. 19. For confusions in determining editions and reprints, cf. the following: “The first printing of Gutenberg’s Bible is one title, new editions of the Bible will again be counted, but a reprint of exactly the same manuscript would not be included” (Van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution: 74). It is not clear what is meant by the final part of this sentence. 20. But for remarks linking lower book prices to smaller types, smaller formats, and thus less paper (the most expensive ingredient), see Peter M. H. Cuijpers, Teksten als koopwaar: vroege drukkers verkennen de markt (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1998).

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quality and size, printed in the same numbers. All books are not the same. Books (the term has been an accepted misnomer for a multitude of manuscript and printed matter for years)21 are not like bread, or the price of wheat. They come in different lengths, on different sizes and qualities of skin or paper, variously designed for show or economy, with or without pictures, in different sizes of handwriting or type, as everything from multivolume encyclopedias to penny broadsides. The authors appear indifferent to what they are comparing and are sometimes confused in their history. They overemphasize even so well-worn a commonplace as that concerning the emergence of new reading populations driven by the Low Countries reform movement of the late Middle Ages, the Devotio Moderna. This, we are told, “began to encourage all readers to read the Bible” (441). One of the troubles with this statement is that surviving evidence shows not so much that there was more Bible reading (or more Bible production)22 but that people read more, and selectively, about the Bible, its contents and their interpretation. The production of printed vernacular Bibles in the fifteenth-century Low Countries followed a trajectory that does not suggest immense demand. The Old Testament was printed in Dutch for the first time in 1477. Apart from several editions of the liturgical epistles and gospels, no edition of the New Testament appeared until the sixteenth century. The real change was in the numbers of devotional books.23 History apart, there are several further difficulties with the authors’ methods. Any estimates, of whatever figures, need to be founded on sources that are properly understood. As Buringh and van Zanden are frequently vague in their use of sources, it can be difficult to assess their work in detail. Rather than enumerate errors and assumptions in their methods applied to the world of manuscripts—which they take as up to the fifteenth century (thus ignoring the very substantial continuance of a manuscript tradition for the circulation of ideas, information, and recreation after 21. The French “histoire du livre” and the adoption in English of “history of the book” sit uneasily and inadequately together. In attempts in both languages to clarify matters it has sometimes been found desirable to add further terms as a supplement, such as “et histoire de l’imprimé,” or “bibliography and.” One obvious difficulty is that the study deliberately does not apply solely to the history of books or livres. Since the 1860s, when Edmond Werdet, an experienced bookseller-publisher, wrote his fourvolume Histoire du livre en France . . . jusqu’en 1789 (Paris: E. Dentu, 1861–64), the phrase has been much adapted. 22. For a concise summary of the earlier history of Dutch biblical texts, see De Delftse Bijbel van 1477; facsimile van de oorspronkelijke druk, introd, C. C. de Bruin (Amsterdam: Buijten & Schipperheijn, 1977); for books and the Devotio moderna, see Thomas Kock, Die Buchkultur der Devotio Moderna (Frankfurt a.M.: P. Lang, 1999). 23. Not just the Bible and the Imitatio Christi (as suggested in van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution: 87). The earliest surviving editions in Dutch of the latter date from the late 1490s: ISTC ii00036200 [Antwerp, not before 1496]; ii00036300 (Leiden [1498]); for early manuscripts, see C. C. de Bruin, De middelnederlandse vertaling van De imitatione Christi (Leiden: Brill, 1954): 282–92 and Stephanus G. Axters, O. P., De imitatione Christi: een handschrifteninventaris (Kempen-Niederrhein: Thomas Druckerei, 1971). In this environment at least, it seems as if print lagged behind.

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that date, a topic that is only beginning to get into its stride among historians)24— I have concentrated most comments in the following pages on the period of print, from the 1450s to 1800. Although much of the detail is drawn from the English trade, similar exercises on most of the issues can be carried out for other regions and groups of printers. A few general points about Buringh and van Zanden’s work suggest themselves immediately, and they are chosen here partly to warn book historians of East Asia of pitfalls to avoid in their research. So much unnecessary confusion has resulted from these basic errors in historical research on Western book history that it would be gratifying to see that East Asian book historians and bibliographers do not make the same or similar errors.

Measuring Evidence 1. Perhaps inescapably, given the bibliographical resources available, the geography of the figures is based on modern political boundaries. This has several disadvantages, of which two may be highlighted. The printed output of predominantly Flemish Antwerp, a key center of production until the end of the sixteenth century, and much closer linguistically to Amsterdam than to Brussels, is included with modern-day Belgium. Italy, likewise a country that did not exist as a unified political entity until the nineteenth century, is treated as a whole, where the stories of Venice and Rome, to say nothing of Naples, present very different accounts of the development and use of printing. The difficulties of using modern nationally based bibliographies for studying output are well known. For those who in the late nineteenth century founded the modern study of incunabula, Strassburg, for example, was a part of Germany.25 But in 1919 Strassburg again became French. So, the study of sixteenthand seventeenth-century output, a more recent scholarly development, incorporates it in France.26 2. How far is it valid simply to compare manuscript and print production, by breaking the two at the end of the fifteenth century? Manuscripts continued to be produced for many purposes for long afterwards. For religious controversy, for the circulation of literature (prose as well as poetry), for political argument, for household management, for news, for music, for sermons and for many other matters, authors and amateur and professional copyists alike continued to use the pen rather than the press, sometimes out of preference, sometimes because the press was denied to

24. See further below: p. 75. 25. ISTC records 1,240 entries for Strassburg publications, down to 1500. (The equivalent for Lyon is 1,459, and for Cologne 1,628.) 26. Cf. Josef Benzing, Bibliographie Strasbourgeoise (Répertoire bibliographique des livres imprimés en France au seizième siècle) (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1981–86).

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them. Work on this remains at a formative stage, but recent studies such as those by Harold Love and others on seventeenth-century England,27 François Moureau on eighteenth-century France, David Hall on the American colonies, and Mario Infelise, Brian Richardson, and others on early modern Italy,28 have demonstrated something of the range of the circumstances, and a little of the size, of this continuing production and circulation. 3. Paper. In 1958, Febvre and Martin rightly placed the manufacture and supply of paper in prime position at the opening of their study L’apparition du livre. Buringh and van Zanden also point briefly to the importance of paper, but without understanding its implications. The availability of large quantities of paper in the West did not merely lead to lower production costs for books (their p. 440). It actually made mass production—printing—feasible. They also allude to “important technological changes in the production of paper” (432) as being one of the reasons why book prices declined very rapidly from the 1470s onwards. It is not clear what these technological changes were, given that neither the materials nor the basic methods of manufacture changed. What did change was the volume of manufacture and the geographical development of paper mills. The structure of the paper trade changed, and this highly international commodity was traded across very large distances. The paper used by Caxton and his successors in England mostly came from Italy via Genoa, or from France via Antwerp and other Low Countries markets; the only paper mill known to have been active in fifteenth-century England did not last long, nor did its demise mean the end there of printing.29 On the continent, the easy access to paper mills of the upper Rhine and Lorraine was of critical importance in the development of Cologne, for example, as a major printing center.

27. Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Love, “Oral and Scribal Texts in Early Modern England,” in John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 4: 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 97–121; and Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 28. François Moureau, La plume et le plomb; espaces de l’imprimé et du manuscrit au siècle des lumières (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2006); David D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Mario Infelise, Prima dei giornali; alle origini della pubblica informazione (secoli XVI e XVII) (Rome: Laterza, 2002); Brian Richardson, “Print or Pen? Modes of Written Publication in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Italian Studies 59 (2004): 39–64; Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 12, 176–87; and Antonio Corsaro, “Manuscript Collections of Spiritual Poetry in SixteenthCentury Italy,” in Abigail Brundin and Matthew Treherne, eds., Forms of Faith in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009): 33–56. 29. Paul Needham, “The Paper of English Incunabula,” in Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century Now in the British Library, BMC Part XII (t’Goy-Houten: Hes & De Graaf Publishers BV, 2007): 311–34.

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4. Trade and mobility. Books, manuscript or printed, have always been traded and exchanged, whether between early medieval monasteries or between the population centers of five centuries and more later. For linguistic and a host of other reasons, some places trade more than others. This means that any statistics claiming to be based on centers of production need to be treated circumspectly. Let us take just printed books. English and the Germanic languages were little exported outside their own linguistic regions. Romance languages fared better, but only for some kinds of literature. Those regions that produced large numbers of books in Latin, the lingua franca of educated Europe until the sixteenth century, and still a main part of international learned exchange in the eighteenth, were major exporters of their own printing. Patterns of manufacture and consumption were always different to some degree. Books were printed for export also for religious reasons, or to avoid political or moral censorship, or simply because it was cheaper to manufacture in one place rather than another. Sometimes costs were shared across national boundaries. In the late seventeenth century, thousands of English Bibles were printed not in Britain, but in the Netherlands. In the eighteenth century, French-language exports to France, where the trade was tightly controlled, accounted for a large (and still incompletely understood) part of Dutch manufacture. The scale and extent of most of these international collaborations, speculations, and exigencies have been insufficiently studied, but some figures respecting the British/overseas trade may be a helpful reminder of the scale. Between the 1480s and 1600, forty-six members of the Antwerp trade were named on books intended mostly for the English market. In other words, they were sufficiently engaged financially for it to be worth printing their names on books. The number of unnamed dealers trading in books was of course far greater. The equivalent figure for Parisian printers and booksellers, for the same period, was sixty-four.30 Names from Portugal to Sweden appeared on books having some primary interest for the British market. The phenomenon was by no means restricted to the British trade.31 Conversely, the availability of imports affected what the local trade chose to print. By the time that the first printers established themselves in the Low Countries in the early 1470s, printers elsewhere were already producing supplies of the standard legal, theological, and classical texts. Accordingly, these could be imported, while local printers concentrated on supplying such needs as schoolbooks and popular religious texts. In England, where Caxton established his press even later, the emphasis was 30. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640 2nd ed., Revised & Enlarged . . . Completed by Katharine F. Pantzer (Bibliographical Soc., 1976–91; henceforth referred to as STC) 3: 215, 218. 31. See, for example, the Index of Places in David Paisey, Catalogue of Books Printed in the GermanSpeaking Countries and of German Books Printed in Other Countries from 1601 to 1700 Now in the British Library (London: British Library, 1994), v. 5. As a survey of a single library this obviously lacks the universality of a union catalog.

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on English-language books: he and his successors Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde made little attempt to print what could be more easily (and cheaply) imported. Other trade patterns could be more formally based. In 1571, the Antwerp printer Christophe Plantin obtained the exclusive right to supply breviaries to Spain, and it proved to be just one part of a major export market for him and his successors.32 As trade partnerships were better established, so international advertising became increasingly important. The early Mainz-printed books that were advertised by Peter Schöffer in 1469–70 were but the beginning of one of the dominant characteristics of trade in printed books.33 Copies of the Gutenberg Bible found their way within a few years at least to London, to Sweden, and to Hungary.34 By the end of the sixteenth century, firms from the Mediterranean to the Baltic were issuing printed catalogs, aimed at the book trade across Europe. By 1674, the catalog of books available from Daniel Elzevier in Amsterdam contained about 20,000 entries. It was circulated from Britain to Italy, from the Iberian Peninsula to Scandinavia.35 As the volume of international trade grew, so too did the disparities between the production and consumption of raw material (paper), and the production (printing) and consumption (retail sale) of reading matter. 5. Survival. As with all past artifacts, be they coins, ceramics, clothing, weapons, household implements, or larger and numerically scarcer objects such as ships or even villages, survival patterns of manuscripts and printed books are not evenly distributed either spatially or chronologically.36 Accordingly, the more precise and focused the evidence, the more valuable and reliable it is. It should need no emphasis that figures for survival which are based on locations are not local production figures. They are figures of possession, or of existence. The two can be easily confused. For printed books, we have hundreds of pieces of 32. Christoffel Plantijn en de Iberische wereld (exhibition catalog, Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp 1992); and Frans M. A. Robben, Jan Poelman, boekverkoper en vertegenwoordiger van de firma Plantin-Moretus in Salamanca, 1579–1607 (Antwerp: Vereeniging der Antwerpsche Bibliophielen, 1994). 33. H. G. Pollard and Albert Ehrman, The Distribution of Books by Catalogue to A.D. 1800 (Cambridge: Printed for presentation to members of the Roxburghe Club, 1965), Table 1. Reproduced, for example, in Gutenberg: aventur und kunst; vom Geheimunternehmen zur ersten Medienrevolution (exhibition catalog, Gutenberg Museum, Mainz, 2000): 213. 34. Eric Marshall White, “The Gutenberg Bibles That Survive as Binders’ Waste,” in Bettina Wagner and Marcia Reed, eds., Early Printed Books as Material Objects (Berlin: De Gruyter Saur, 2010): 21–35. 35. For background, see B. P. M. Dongelmans, P. G. Hoftijzer, and O. S. Lankhorst, eds., Boekverkopers van Europa; het 17de-eeuwse Nederlandse uitgeverhuis Elzevier (Zutphen: Walburg, 2000). 36. Many of the issues associated with the survival of printed books have been explored by Neil Harris, “La sopravvivenza del libro, ossia appunti per una lista della lavandaia,” Ecdotica 4 (2007): 24–65. Several authors have drawn attention to the lessons to be drawn from the survival of single or very small numbers of copies; see, for example, Ernst Consentius, “Die Typen und der Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke; eine Kritik,” Gutenberg Jahrbuch (1932): 55–109; and Neil Harris, “Marin Sanudo, Forerunner of Melzi,” La Bibliofilia 95 (1993): 1–37, 101–45; 96 (1994): 15–42.

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information, including that concerning books that were published but of which all physical trace has now disappeared. Further than this, a good deal can be reasonably deduced from patterns of survival. Here we are dealing with whole editions rather than single copies. Loss rates vary from genre to genre, and not only among small books. For example, just two copies survive, one imperfect, of Caxton’s first printing of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Yet it is a substantial book, a small folio of 432 leaves, and this attrition is despite a bibliophile market that valued Caxton well before the end of the seventeenth century. Together with Gutenberg in Mainz and Aldus Manutius in Venice, Caxton is the most studied printer of the fifteenth century. His output has been systematically listed since the early eighteenth century, and more recent work has suggested where the gaps are in what has survived: when he might have printed books that have now disappeared completely.37 As a general (if far from universal) rule, small, popular, and much-used books tend to survive in markedly fewer copies than do large ones. Books intended from the first for libraries, books in the larger formats of quarto and folio, books that are not readily pocketed and thus damaged by repeated use, tend (notwithstanding the example of Malory) to survive better. Genres such as domestic economy, including such matters as cooking or sewing, books of private devotion, schoolbooks, or short popular tales are all more liable to be read to destruction. This is true of all periods. The scale of this attrition can seem alarming. Paul Needham has drawn attention to the monastery of Montserrat, which in 1498–1500 commissioned over 200,000 indulgences; just six are known to have survived though we do not know how far the commission was ever executed. No copy at all survives of over 130,000 similar documents ordered for the Bishop of Cefalù in Sicily in 1500.38 Between 1476 and 1484, the press of San Jacopo di Ripoli at Florence printed about a hundred books, pamphlets, and other ephemera. Only just over forty are known today, even in a single copy.39 Of the tens of thousands of chapbooks printed in London for the street and country trade in the latter part of the seventeenth century, only a handful survives today.40 Almanacs, printed each year also by the tens of thousands, survive in similarly tiny numbers.41 37. See Lotte Hellinga, “Survival and Bibliometry,” in Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century Now in the British Library, BMC Part XII (t’Goy-Houten: Hes & De Graaf Publishers BV, 2007): 36–47. 38. Paul Needham, The Printer & the Pardoner (Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1986): 28–31. 39. Melissa Conway, The Diario of the Printing Press of San Jacopo di Ripoli, 1476–1484: Commentary and Transcription (Firenze: Olschki, 1999). 40. See, for example, the postmortem inventory of the chapbook publisher Charles Tias of London Bridge, 1664, discussed in Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (London: Methuen, 1981), ch. 4. 41. Cyprian Blagden, “The Distribution of Almanacks in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Studies in Bibliography 11 (1958): 107–16. Blagden’s figures date from post-1640, but there is no reason to suppose that the output in earlier periods was not similarly very large in proportion to production figures for most more “ordinary” publications. Losses have been further studied by John

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Some well-recorded British survivals proffer a warning against too hasty assumptions. It is possible to be more precise for British books (as for incunables) because so much more work has been done across the world to search out and record the surviving printed output. While it is often said (accurately) that the British book trade was unlike many of its continental counterparts, there is no reason to suppose that the kinds of evidence for survival differ very materially from the kinds that will in due course emerge from a closer study of the book trades of France, Germany, or  Italy. Gaps in long runs of editions of best sellers or steady sellers can suggest lost editions. We may take as an example Lewis Bayly’s best-selling Practise of pietie, a duodecimo. At least 54 editions seem to have been printed down to 1640, either now extant or having once existed, in a tally that can be partly tested against the edition statements that were regularly added to title pages for many years. One recent article42 counts 46 editions by 1640, but this calculation is in fact a partial one. No copies apparently survive of the first edition and at least the 6th, 10th, 16th, 22nd, 29th, and 34th editions, after which the numbering is so confused as to make similar gap spotting impossible. Of the surviving editions, no fewer than 18 are now witnessed in just a single copy. On a slightly smaller scale, Samuel Hieron’s Helpe unto devotion was first published in 1608. By 1639 it had reached a so-called twenty-first edition. No copies survive apparently of the 16th, 17th or 19th editions. But two editions are numbered the twelfth,43 and three are numbered the thirteenth. In other words, even for books for which we can follow the numerical order of edition statements for large parts of their history, there is still room for doubt as to whether the number of editions has been computed accurately, let alone whether any guesses at the numbers of copies printed may be plausible. Other books are still less straightforward. On the basis of the tiny quantities surviving of some of the most popular religious books, it would seem sensible that we should observe the lessons of Bayly. To that end, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider two other best sellers and to see how their survival rates seem to compare. Arthur Dent’s Sermon of repentance, for example, was entered in the Stationers’ Register on April 23, 1582, and was first published that year (STC 6649.5); in this case we do have a definite first publication. It proved enormously popular, so much so that in 1590 or 1591 a Shrewsbury bookseller published a pirated edition, and the press used for the purpose in London was ordered to be destroyed as a consequence.44 Barnard, “The Survival and Loss Rates of Psalms, ABCs, Psalters and Primers from the Stationers’ Stock, 1660–1700,” The Library 6th ser. 21 (1999): 148–50 and by Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 42. Kari Konkola and Diarmaid MacCulloch, “People of the Book: Success in the English Reformation,” History Today (October 2003): 23–29. 43. Only one “twelfth” edition is listed in STC; a further one has turned up since and is now in the British Library. 44. W. W. Greg and E. Boswell, eds., Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, 1576 to 1602 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1930): 36.

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Further troubles flared up over this most saleable of books in 1608 and 1616. But of the 38 editions recorded between its first publication in 1582 and 1638, no fewer than 28 survive either in single copies or as fragments. In the light of this loss, it is improbable that the series of editions we now know represents the whole of what once existed.45 Similar patterns are to be seen if we look at Eusebius Pagit’s Short questions and answeares, conteyning the summe of Christian religion, of which the earliest known edition dates from 1579.46 Of the nineteen editions published between then and 1639, only two survive in more than one copy. Similarly broken trails are left of some of the works of that most popular of all Puritan authors, William Perkins, and there are many other examples. 6. Output. The second half of the fifteenth century was a crossover period, when it has always been acknowledged that manuscript and print existed side by side. Hence, the figures for print production in this period need to be interpreted with especial care. It is perfectly true, as Buringh and van Zanden state, that the output of the press has been studied in more detail for this than for any other, taking Western Europe as a whole. But that does not mean that the presses’ output was representative either of demand for, or production of, reading matter. Whether we look at the evidence of surviving manuscript miscellanies of vernacular poetry, or at the production of prayer books for laypeople, or even at the surviving numbers of late fifteenth-century manuscript Bibles, the figures all suggest that the press was providing either less than what was needed or—perhaps more accurately—less of the right kind than was demanded: the continued large-scale production of manuscript books of hours even into the sixteenth century is one example of this. Much printing was naturally speculative, as  was reflected in the trade’s crisis of overproduction in the early 1470s in Venice.47 But much, too, was well focused. Hence, and quite apart from the considerable changes in production and the trade that took place in the half-century following Gutenberg, it is not useful to treat the period ca. 1450–1500 as one from which it is in any sense possible to extrapolate for other, later, periods.

Sources of Evidence Bearing these general points in mind, let us now turn to the sources for Western European printed books on which any large-scale calculations must depend. 45. See, for example, the remarks suggesting a lost edition of 1608 in P. W. M. Blayney, The Texts of King Lear and Their Origins: Volume 1, Nicholas Okes and the First Quarto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982): 39. 46. STC 18816, listed under Robert Openshaw, but see the note in the Appendix. A further edition of 1591 has since been recorded at the British Library. 47. Victor Scholderer, “Printing at Venice to the End of 1481,” Fifty Essays in Fifteenth- and SixteenthCentury Bibliography (Amsterdam: M. Hertzberger & Co, 1966): 74–89 (originally published in 1925).

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The retrospective bibliographies of printed books for the countries of Western Europe between the mid-fifteenth century and the late eighteenth are varied in several ways. First, and most obviously, by no means everything is as yet available online, for manipulation by historians and others seeking larger or smaller landscapes. For their work on printed books, Buringh and van Zanden chose to depend mostly on four databases then available electronically: (for Europe as a whole) the Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue (ISTC)48 and the Hand Press Book Database (HPBD, now called the Heritage of the Printed Book Database);49 (for the Netherlands) the Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN);50 and (for Britain) the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC). ESTC is both fuller and more advanced in its compilation than STCN.51 For France, there are pockets of details, such as Lyon in the sixteenth century (Baudrier, and the more recent work by Sybille von Gültlingen,52 both on paper, neither used) or Paris in the first half of the sixteenth century (Inventaire chronologique des éditions parisiennes du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1972–, not used), or the various local surveys by Albert Labarre and others in the Bibliotheca Aureliensis (none used).53 For Spain and Portugal, details are excellent for 1500–1520 (Norton, not used)54 but sketchy thereafter. For Germany, VD 16 (on paper and, now, online,55 neither used) and the less advanced VD 17 (on paper, not used) have been available at least in part for some time. Though both these are language-based, and have limited search capabilities, their files offer a substantial basis for statistical analysis. The situation is likely to be much changed as the world absorbs, supplements, and challenges the various surveys of sixteenth-century books that are being published 48. Cf. Paul Needham, “Counting Incunables: The IISTC cd-rom,” Huntington Library Quarterly 61 (2000): 456–529. 49. www.cerl.org /web/en/resources/hpb/main. Buringh and van Zanden refer to it as the Hand Press Book File. As will become clear in the next few sentences, a great deal has been achieved since their paper was published. 50. J. A. Gruys, P. C. A. Vriesema, and C. de Wolf, “Dutch National Bibliography 1540–1800: The STCN,” Quaerendo 13 (1983): 149–60. 51. A recent informal survey of the holdings of Cambridge University Library relevant to STCN suggested that as much as 30 percent was not at that time in the database. 52. Sybille von Gültlingen, Bibliographie des livres imprimés à Lyon au seizième siècle (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1992–). 53. Louis Desgraves, Albert Labarre et al., Répertoire bibliographique des livres imprimés en France au seizième siècle (Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1968–). The recently published work by a team in St.  Andrews, A. Pettegree, M. Walsby, and A. Wilkinson, eds., French Vernacular Books: Books Published in the French Language Before 1601 (Leiden: Brill, 2007) appeared too late for their work. The same team subsequently embarked on a survey of Latin publishing in France; see www.standrews.ac.uk/~bookproj. 54. F. J. Norton, A Descriptive Catalogue of Printing in Spain and Portugal, 1501–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 55. www.vd.16.de. For its early, manual, history, see Michael Hackenberg, “VD16 and the Control of German Imprints: A Review Article,” Library Quarterly 54 (1984): 412–17. See, more recently, William A. Kelly, “Index of Prints Not Listed in VD 16,” Gutenberg Jahrbuch 2009: 271–88.

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under the auspices of Andrew Pettegree in St. Andrews, Alexander Wilkinson in Dublin, and others. So far we have seen surveys of vernacular French books, of books from the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal, and books from Spain and Portugal. The accessibility of these and other surveys on the Universal Short-Title Catalogue (USTC) database56 invites further linguistic, chronological, and topographical analysis. The project has recently embarked on the seventeenth century.57 If we thus cast our net, to include both computer- and paper-based sources, some of the main surveys are more comprehensive than others in the sense that they are at later stages of their compilation. That for sixteenth-century Italy (the Censimento nazionale delle edizioni italiane del xvi secolo, EDIT16: http://edit16.iccu.sbn.it),58 not used by Buringh and van Zanden, draws on no fewer than 1,500 libraries and is well advanced in its electronic publication.59 Again, there is an issue of language versus geography, for EDIT16 is a census of publications in Italy as well as those in Italian published elsewhere. Here are comparative figures: Table 2.1 Publications in Italy, 1500–1600 1501–1550 1550–1600

Edit 16 18,034 44,452

B and vZ 16,719 41,641

These figures are striking not because of their disparity but because they are the opposite of what might have been expected were both methods of counting reliable. EDIT 16, based on extant copies, obviously does not count publications that have not survived. The figures quoted here are almost entirely limited to copies held in Italian libraries. Buringh and van Zanden are interested in absolute totals, losses as 56. www.ustc.ac.uk 57. Apart from the website, some of the national surveys have been published conventionally: Andrew Pettegree and Malcolm Walsby, eds., French Vernacular Books: Books Published in the French Language Before 1601 (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Andrew Pettegree and Malcolm Walsby, eds., Books Published in France Before 1601 in Latin and Languages Other than French (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Andrew Pettegree and Malcolm Walsby, eds., Netherlandish Books: Books Published in the Low Countries and Dutch Books Published Abroad Before 1601 (Leiden: Brill, 2010); and Alexander S. Wilkinson, Iberian Books: Books Published in Spanish or Portuguese or on the Iberian Peninsula Before 1601 (Leiden: Brill, 2010). See also Dick Wursten, “French Vernacular Books Put to the Test,” a long and detailed review of the entries for Clément Marot: www.renaissance.wursten.be/FVB-review.htm (consulted November 11, 2012). 58. Rosaria Maria Servello, ed., Il libro italiano del XVI secolo. Conferme e novità in EDIT16, Atti della giornata di studio, Roma 8 giugno 2006 (Roma: ICCU, 2007). For some of the early difficulties facing the Italian census, see further the review by Neil Harris of Le edizioni italiane del XVI secolo; censimento nazionale, (A), The Library 6th ser, 9 (1987): 181–84. I have used figures gathered shortly after Buringh and van Zanden’s paper, for better comparison. 59. Italian libraries are unusually well served by large-scale computer-based access to library holdings; see also www.sbn.it.

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well as survivals, yet theirs are the lower figures. If both authorities are correct— one from a limited census of surviving copies, the other from a formula designed to extend information drawn from the HPBD—then there are two obvious explanations other than bibliographical or cataloging errors. Were many books in Italian printed abroad? While there were indeed pockets of Italian printing elsewhere, including London,60 the numbers are not very large. Secondly, and more suggestively, there was a significant number of books with variant imprints that have led to separate entries in the bibliography. But neither of these addresses the more difficult question of survival. In all these cases, as with others similar, we can only estimate the real output as distinct from what has survived. On the basis of the (then incomplete) author catalog of the Bibliothèque Nationale, in 1969 Henri-Jean Martin estimated the number of volumes published annually in Paris as rising from under 400 in 1600 to about 1,200 in 1700. Production peaked in the 1640s and was not to be equaled until the eighteenth century. In Lyon, the second center, production peaked in the early 1660s. So as to emphasize the importance of understanding what was being measured, he showed from the same source how small-format books counted for as little as half the output in the mid-century before climbing to 80–90 percent by the 1690s.61 As Martin fully realized, the catalog of one library, even a national one, is not a sufficient guide to totals countrywide, and it omits many kinds of cheap literature, both from the provinces and produced in the capital city. In addition, this was only the printed, and then still uncompleted, author catalog: the printed catalog of anonymes was not published. In 1982–84, Martin returned to the problem, extending his studies to the eighteenth century but again emphasizing the limitations of the exercise.62 Buringh and van Zanden depend for much of their wider information on the HPBD, a database that combines the pre-1831 holdings of libraries spread across much of Europe, almost all of them either national or large university ones. While this is at one level reassuring in its size and wide geographical scope, at another it is by no means clear how far it represents categories such as local printing, or popular printing, or even a large part of official printing. For those countries and regions where there have been more detailed studies, it has been repeatedly found that these kinds of printing tend to survive at least as much in smaller, sometimes, more remote, 60. Soko Tomita, A Bibliographical Catalogue of Italian Books Printed in England, 1558–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). 61. H.-J. Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et société à Paris au XVIIe siècle (1598–1701) (Geneva: Droz, 1969), 1: 61–96; and 2: 1064–66. See the succinct admission concerning the limitations of this and other sources used, 1: 96. 62. H.-J. Martin, “La statistique de la production,” in H.-J. Martin and R. Chartier, eds., Histoire de l’édition française. 1. Le livre conquérant (Paris: Promodis, 1982): 441–49; and Martin, “Une croissance séculaire” in H.-J. Martin and R. Chartier, eds., Histoire de l’édition française. 2. Le livre triomphant, 1660–1830 (Paris: Promodis, 1984): 95–103.

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repositories. In some respects, Buringh and van Zanden are careful to explain their use of the HPBD. They emphasize some of its incompleteness, but they do not properly explain the reasons for this. They point out that, even when the listings of the catalogs of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Leipzig and Frankfurt book fairs are set against it, the incompleteness is manifest. Quite apart from the nature of these catalogs, where some of the entries seem to have been aspirational, this should have been a warning against using the HPBD more generally as the principal resource. As was pointed out by James Westfall Thompson as long ago as 1911, the fair catalogs are very far from comprehensive records even of the German trade.63 Secondly, what is actually recorded? Bibliographic records do not necessarily record books. The late Hugh Amory has drawn attention to some of the fallacies of bibliometric research.64 The fair catalogs are contemporary documents that naturally include publications no longer extant. Modern retrospective bibliographies are mostly agreed in recording only what has survived. But they do not record this in equal depth. ISTC records every individual publication, whether published commercially or privately, that contains typeset matter. It does not include block-books, printed from series of wooden blocks that were employed particularly for popular religious and educational texts. The loss rates in this kind of literature were extremely high.65 The ESTC varies dramatically in its inclusivity over its long period, from 1473 to 1800. Down to 1640, the period for which it is based on the second edition of Pollard and Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue, it includes every separate piece of printed matter apart from separate woodcuts and engraved sheets. It includes even letterpress bookplates and book labels. But from 1641 onwards ESTC ignores these ephemera and much other minor printed matter. To quote from its own publicity: The ‘English Short Title Catalogue’ (ESTC) is a comprehensive, international union catalogue listing early books, serials, newspapers and selected ephemera printed before 1801. It contains catalogue entries for items issued in Britain, Ireland, overseas territories under British colonial rule, and the United States. Also included is material printed elsewhere which contains significant text in English, Welsh, Irish or Gaelic, as well as any book falsely claiming to have been printed in London. But many printed items are excluded unless they were included in the older short-title-catalogues on which much of it is based: this mainly refers to the period pre-1641: Engraved music, maps and prints are excluded, although atlases and texts which are wholly engraved do appear in ESTC. Engraved items which 63. James Westfall Thompson, The Frankfurt Book Fair: The Francofordiense Emporium of Henri Estienne (Chicago, IL: Caxton Club, 1911): 85. 64. Hugh Amory, “Pseudodoxia bibliographica, or When Is a Book Not a Book? When It’s a Record,” in Lotte Hellinga, ed., The Scholar & the Database (London: Consortium of European Research Libraries, 2001). See also the cautions expressed by the same author in his “Note on Statistics,” in H. Amory and David D. Hall, eds., A History of the Book in America: Volume 1, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 504–18. 65. Sabine Mertens, and others, Blockbücher des Mittelalters: Bilderfolgen als Lektüre (Mainz, 1991).

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were included in earlier short title catalogues . . . also appear. Other categories of material are excluded from ESTC (except where these appear in earlier short title catalogues): Printed forms intended to be completed in manuscript; trade cards, labels, invitations, bookplates, currency; playbills, concert and theatre programmes; playing cards, games, puzzles. Advertisements are included in ESTC, even where they also act as trade cards or handbills for entertainments outside the theatres.66

In this as in other databases, music printed from type is included; engraved music is generally not. So, Purcell’s Orpheus Britannicus, printed letterpress and published by Henry Playford in 1697, is included. But most of Handel’s work published by the firm of Walsh, which was engraved, is not.67 Two results of this variability are that, first, the overall statistics contained in these databases and catalogs are dangerous to use for direct comparisons without considerable alertness to bibliographical limitations; and, second, that they do not provide consistent guidance to the numbers of books—long or short—manufactured within these geographical or chronological locations. This is quite apart from the loss rates suffered in different countries, at different times, and in different forms and formats of printed matter.

Survival: Measuring What? As we saw at the beginning, there is no need to be entirely speculative. For survival rates, we need further to draw not just on the printers’ or other trade records, which give specific edition sizes, but also on other kinds of contemporary records of a very miscellaneous kind, including mentions in private letters, legal records, publicity, records of licensing, records of patents and monopolies, and entries in guild records such as the London Stationers’ Company.68 Although any overall calculation of loss 66. ESTC website: estc.bl.uk. 67. William C. Smith and Charles Humphries, Handel: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Early Editions (Oxford: Blackwell, second edition, 1970); and Donald Burrows, “John Walsh and His Handel Editions,” in Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote, eds., Music and the Book Trade from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (London: British Library, 2008): 69–104. The first edition of the full score of Messiah (1767) was admitted to ESTC because the subscription list and the index were printed letterpress. 68. For one survey of lost books, based largely on the titles listed in Andrew Maunsell’s Catalogue of English Printed Books (1595) (London: Gregg, 1965), see Franklin B. Williams, Jr, “Lost Books of Tudor England,” The Library 5th ser. 33 (1978): 1–14. For France, see now the comparisons of La Croix du Maine’s Premier volume de la bibliothèque (1584) and Du Verdier’s Bibliothèque (1584) with Pettegree et al., eds., French Vernacular Books in Alexander S. Wilkinson, “Lost Books Printed in French before 1601,” The Library 7th ser. 10 (2009): 188–205. The essay by Andrew Pettegree, “Lost Books in the FVB,” takes a wider view based on the findings of the French vernacular books project at St. Andrews: www.ustc.ac.uk/resources/FVB%20-%20Lost%20books%20in%20the%20FVB.pdf (accessed January 1, 2013).

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rates must always be subject to some degree of guesswork, there are several guides that can help us. Most obviously, there are contemporary statements about the numbers of copies actually printed of specific publications. For the early period, many of these—of varying reliability—have been gathered by Neddermeyer.69 But his list is very far from complete, and in any case he is only concerned with the period down to 1600. Beyond this, there is much more evidence than Buringh and van Zanden seem to have realized. “We tentatively estimate,” they write, “that it [the ‘average sizes of editions’] went up to 1,000 in 1800.” While admitting that this is probably conservative, unfortunately they do not give the source for their further statement that “print runs of mass produced books, such as bibles, prayer books and primary school books increased to more than hundred [sic] thousand in some cases.” Perhaps in this very high figure for such books (we are not treating here about single sheets) there is a confusion here between a print run (the number of articles printed at one time, either in a single day or over consecutive days) and edition size (the number of copies printed from the same setting of type, at intervals and perhaps over a quite long period).70 In the seventeenth century, there are many figures derived from legal and trade records. During the 1630s, the University Printers at Cambridge were producing editions of some of the basic reading for grammar schools in quantities that are recorded. By the 1660s, the Stationers’ Company, the largest of the British publishers, was producing various kinds of almanacs by the tens of thousands each year. Production climbed from about 400,000 a year in the 1680s to perhaps half a million a century later.71 By the 1680s and 1690s, the numbers of sheet ballads, to be sold on the streets, or by traveling chapmen, or at fairs around the country for a penny or less each, had reached comparable figures.72 With the survival of more consistent publishers’ and printers’ records, we can be more specific still. The records of Cambridge University Press for the period 1696 to 1712 are exceptionally detailed. From 1710 to 1777, the records of the Bowyers, major printers in London, supply output details for a range of printed matter including journals as well as books and lesser material.

69. See above, note 8. 70. For distinctions between impressions and editions, see, for example, Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972): 313–20. 71. David Foxon, “The Stamp Act of 1712” (unpublished Sandars Lectures, 1978: copy in Cambridge University Library S250b.97.336). For other of the Stationers’ Company privileged publications, see John Barnard, “The Survival and Loss Rates of Psalms, ABCs, Psalters and Primers from the Stationers’ Stock, 1660–1700,” The Library 6th ser. 21 (1999): 148–50. 72. D. McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press: Volume 1, Printing and the Book Trade in Cambridge, 1534–1698 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 205–6; and C. Blagden, “The Distribution of Almanacks in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Studies in Bibliography 11 (1958): 107–16; Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories. For survival of this kind of material, see below.

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So, also, do the records of the Strahans, beginning in 1738.73 Overseas, from the early 1560s, the records of Christophe Plantin and his successors in Antwerp provide details not only of how many copies were produced but also, very often, details of where they were sold. Print runs at the Plantin printing house in the mid-1560s averaged 1,300 copies, and in the 1590s nearly 1,550.74 By the eighteenth century there is a wealth of statistical evidence across Europe. Other than Neddermeyer, the authors mention just three sources on print runs: Febvre and Martin, St. Clair on Britain, and a brief note in a general history of libraries.75 It is a disappointing base on which to work, where so much more is available, where questions of regional differences, and differences between kinds of books and subjects, are not addressed. Once we examine some of these records in more detail, we see that Buringh and van Zanden’s multiplier of 1,000 as the average figure for impressions during most of the period is a very crude tool indeed in trying to establish how many books (as distinct from how many editions) were printed. Since this is one of the central issues in attempts to measure how far printed books penetrated the book-owning population, it is worth pausing over some of the more obvious features of the evidence for edition sizes. The following relates to London and Cambridge over a fairly short period, but it illustrates a more general point. At the heart of all discussions, both in negotiations between masters and men and in disputes among members of the Stationers’ Company, was the accepted norm approximating an agreed day’s work. A total of 1,250–1,500 sheets printed on both sides for ordinary books were the accepted limit, which was linked to agreed sizes of impressions. For books in smaller type, or small books such as catechisms, impressions of twice that number were permitted. In London, this was laid down formally in 1587, and the agreement remained in place for fifty years.76 Agreement on much the same 73. D. F. McKenzie, The Cambridge University Press, 1696–1712: A Bibliographical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); Keith Maslen and John Lancaster, eds., The Bowyer Ledgers (London: Bibliographical Society, 1991); Patricia Hernlund, “William Strahan’s Ledgers: Standard Charges for Printing, 1738–1785,” Studies in Bibliography 20 (1967): 89–111; Hernlund, “William Strahan’s Ledgers, II: Charges for Papers, 1738–1785,” Studies in Bibliography 22 (1968): 179–95; and O. M. Brack, Jr., “The Ledgers of William Strahan,” in D. I. B. Smith, ed., Editing Eighteenth-Century Texts (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1968): 59–77. 74. Leon Voet, The Golden Compasses (Amsterdam: Vangendt, 1969–72), v. 2: 169–73. For more detail see Leon Voet and Jenny Voet-Grisolle, The Plantin Press (1555–1589): A Bibliography of the Works Printed and Published by Christopher Plantin at Antwerp and Leiden (Amsterdam: van Hoeve, 1980–83). 75. Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book: 216–22; William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and M. H. Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World (London: Scarecrow, 1984). 76. Greg and Boswell, eds., Records: 25; W. W. Greg, ed., A Companion to Arber (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967): 433–34, 94–95; Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640, A.D. (London: Privately printed, 1875–94) v. II: 43; and Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography: 162.

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figures was reached in the mid-1560s in the Plantin printing house.77 Not surprisingly, given the close similarity of the available equipment across Europe—hand-set type, the wooden press—potential daily output could not significantly differ. It must be emphasized that this was not, however, a norm for edition sizes. The systematic evidence that we have from the Plantin press at Antwerp in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from Cambridge University Press at the end of the seventeenth century, and from major London printing houses in the eighteenth century, is that edition sizes varied considerably, and many were very much smaller. More importantly, when the London regulations were revisited in 1635, after a dispute involving journeymen, special emphasis was placed on limits on the use of standing formes of type (that is, type from which reprints could be taken) and on the size of editions: The former [standing formes] are to be allowed only for the Psalter, the Grammar and Accidence, Almanacs and Prognostications, and the Primer and ABC, and in all these cases the type is to be distributed once a year; no impression of a book in nonpareil is to exceed 5,000 copies, or in brevier 3,000, except in the case of privilege books belonging to the Company and Cheeke’s New Testament, of which 6,000 may be printed; of all other books the limit is to be 1,500 or 2,000, which, however, may be raised to 3,000 with permission of the Master and Wardens [of the Stationers’ Company].78

With these caveats and modifications in mind, we can nonetheless remark that 1500 was the figure agreed, for example, in 1587 for editions of Bullinger’s Fiftie godly and learned sermons, generally known as his Decades.79 Among the books listed in 1587 for which double impressions were allowed were the nonpareil Bible in octavo and the Psalms in 32mo.80 But, to repeat, this was not to say that the figure of 1,250– 1,500 was the ordinary size of an edition. Many editions were smaller. John Dee’s ambitious and elaborate piece of bookmaking, General and rare memorials pertayning to . . . nauigation (1577), was printed in just 100 copies, or even, perhaps, 50.81 In 1598, Richard Bradock printed the anonymous Godlie garden, a popular book of devotion for sinners, in an edition of 500 copies, and Richard Day’s Booke of Christian Prayers in one of 1,200.82 Incidentally, not one copy of either of these editions, which got Bradock into trouble, survives. Other examples deserve quotation. In 1604, the bookseller George Potter was allowed to print an edition of 1,250 copies of a new translation of Philippe de Mornay’s Treatise of the church, a book originally printed in 1579 and republished 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

Voet, Golden Compasses, 2: 325. Greg, ed., A Companion to Arber: 95. Greg and Boswell, eds., Records: 23. Ibid.: 25. STC 6459. The Huntington Library copy has a note amending the size of the edition stated from 100 to 50. 82. Greg and Boswell, eds., Records: 63.

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three times by 1581.83 In 1606, Adam Islip was granted permission by the Stationers’ Company to print 850 copies of a book on canon and civil law.84 When in 1615 the bookseller John Budge sought to profit from an adaptation and abridgement of Foxe’s Book of martyrs, he was obliged to come to an agreement with the Stationers’ Company to pay 40s. to the company for each impression of 1,500 copies.85 The seventh edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a book that belonged not to individual stationers but to the company in general, was set at 1,600 copies in 1632.86 In 1621, there was a flurry of excitement when a new book of verse by George Wither, Wither’s Motto, was published. In his preface, he claimed to have decided on resorting to print, rather than risk errors in repeated manuscript transcription; this was perhaps a nonetoo-subtle attempt to encourage wider interest. No fewer than eight editions seem to have appeared that year. One was a piracy of 1,500 copies, and two were piracies of 3,000 copies each.87 In 1631, John Standish, a private gentleman rather than a stationer, was allowed to print an edition of 1,000 copies of the Psalms with their French and German tunes, in duodecimo.88 In 1638, The History of Josephus (a folio book, last printed as recently as 1632) was allowed in 1,250 copies, but only on condition that the booksellers concerned made a contribution to the Stationers’ Company poor.89 In 1636, an edition of 1,500 copies was permitted for The Golden Mean, a small format book of about 180 pages and originally published in 1613, “discoursing the nobleness of perfect virtue in extremes.”90 Both these last were evidently considered unusual, for the booksellers involved paid an agreed fine for the benefit of the poor in return for being allowed to print extra. The interesting point about these figures lies not just in their quantities but also, and perhaps more significantly, in the documents that record them. They come from the Court Book of the Stationers’ Company, the body charged with the overall administration and control of the book trade in England. The presses at Oxford and Cambridge, protected by royal privilege, lay outside the company’s jurisdiction though this did not prevent periodic disputes. But the court had no reason to intervene in the affairs of its members unless there was some unusual decision to be made. The court was in part disciplinary (it had, for example, the power to seize and break up illicit presses, and it frequently set fines that were to be paid for the benefit of the company’s poor), and in part designed as a body for reconciliation. It was not 83. Blayney, The Texts of King Lear: 360. 84. W. A. Jackson, ed., Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, 1602 to 1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1957): 24. 85. Jackson, ed., Records: 76, 456. 86. STC 11228; Jackson, ed., Records: 237. 87. STC 25925–25928.7; and Blayney, The Texts of King Lear: 299–300. 88. John Standish, All the French Psalm Tunes with English Words (London: Printed by Thomas Harper, with permission of the Company of Stationers, 1632); STC 2734; and Jackson, ed., Records: 231–32. 89. STC 4813; and Jackson, ed., Records: 313, 487. 90. STC 17757ff; and Jackson, ed., Records: 285, 487.

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concerned with matters that might be considered normal. In other words, the edition sizes that it set from time to time, on individual books or editions, were usually the result of unusual pressures and circumstances. While there is little to indicate that the figures for edition sizes were much out of the ordinary, it must be borne in mind that on some occasions, especially when there was a question of a popular book, the figures had to be compromises, financial or personal. Each figure was the result of a decision based not just on commercial considerations but also on considerations of property. It is not impossible that—apart from special projects such as Standish’s edition of French psalm-tunes—many or even most of the figures arrived at were on the high side, since they were the result of special pleading. If we leave aside broadside street ballads and the most popular chapbooks, the main exceptions to optimum-size editions (not the same as normal) of 1,200–1,500 copies are among Bibles, New Testaments, Psalters to be bound up with the Bible, and educational books, the last of which were dominated in the first half of the seventeenth century by the English Stock of the Stationers’ Company and by the University Printers at Cambridge. In 1633, the University Printers at Cambridge printed editions in black letter and in roman type of Sternhold and Hopkins’s metrical psalms, to be bound up with the quarto Bible. Each edition was of 3,000 copies. Apart from Dee’s book, the figures just quoted are all for books having some religious content; but the same arguments apply to most secular examples as well. The demand for basic educational books meant that by the 1630s, editions of some of the most popular Latin authors and titles were regularly being printed in double editions, or even more. Aesop was printed (in Latin) at Cambridge three times between 1630 and 1634, each time in an edition of 4,000 copies; Culemann’s Sententiae pueriles, a staple of elementary Latin teaching, was also printed three times in the same period, 6,000 copies on each occasion. School editions of Virgil, Ovid, Vives, Erasmus, and others, though printed less frequently, were printed in editions of 3,000. We know these edition sizes thanks to the records in the University Archives at Cambridge, kept in connection with a contract with the English Stock of the Stationers’ Company.91 The figures give some idea of how large the market for such books had become; but when they are compared with survival rates they become still more interesting. Of  the 18,000 copies printed of Culemann’s little book, just one copy is recorded today in STC.92 Of the 12,000 copies of Aesop, two are recorded, of the 1633 edition.93 Of 3,000 copies of Ovid’s De Tristibus, printed at Cambridge in 1634, no copy survives. Survival rates for some kinds of publications are of course lower still, sheet almanacs offering one obvious example. But though schoolboys may have read their 91. McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press: Volume 1, Printing and the Book Trade in Cambridge, 1534–1698: 205–10. 92. STC 6106.5: unique copy in the Bodleian Library. 93. STC 173.7: British Library and Exeter Cathedral only.

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books to pieces, and the disjointed procession of dates and editions listed in the STC hints at many more editions that have been lost completely, the figures for these muchused secular books are of some importance for assessing other demanding markets as well. They make it clear that when markets required it, and when there were not other conflicting interests (usually among the booksellers or printers), the trade was more than willing to countenance large editions, sometimes very large editions indeed. While it is reasonably clear in the contemporary manufacturing records what is being counted, when we turn to use the retrospective bibliographies it is very far from clear. They are not consistent internally, and it is unrealistic to expect them to be so. For example, the ESTC records an ABC printed at Aberdeen in about 1622. It was intended to be used in making a hornbook, and it survives in four settings of type on a single half sheet.94 The STC entry (but not the equivalent in ESTC) also refers to a full sheet of this text, having sixteen settings.95 Were those parallel settings not to survive in this form, material evidence of how they were printed, and instead survived only separately as four or sixteen small slips of paper, then they would almost certainly be given separate records. If we turn to other similar kinds of cheap, single-sheet publications, both for general circulation and for administration, listed elsewhere in this survey, we find other kinds of entry, where such surviving physical evidence—a sheet bearing two or more settings of the same short text—does not exist. Such occasions are admittedly rare and may be statistically insignificant if we are measuring overall numbers.96 ESTC records about 330 letterpress bookplates, gift plates, and even book stamps manufactured before 1641. Other bibliographical distinctions observed by some bibliographers have a greater effect. If we turn to the fifteenth century, for example, a group of short texts printed by Günther Zainer at Augsburg in the early 1470s is treated as ten separate publications by Goff ’s Census and by the ISTC.97 Copies are variously found bound separately or in different combinations. But the existence of copies of a printed leaf found in at least two copies of the set, listing all ten tracts, suggests that they were intended to be published together. In this example, some copies of the original composite volume have evidently been broken up since publication. At the time I write this, ten records have been made out of one book, and there is no record of the whole book. It is, of course, not clear on the basis of two surviving printed contents list whether all 94. ESTC S118881; and STC 21.9. 95. British Library MS Harley 5943/563–4, “prob. post-1640.” 96. Katharine F. Pantzer, “Ephemera in the STC Revision: A Housekeeper’s View,” Printing History 4, nos. 7/8 (1982): 28–36. 97. F. R. Goff, Incunabula in American Libraries: A Third Census of Fifteenth-Century Printed Books Recorded in North American Collections (Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprint Co., 1973), nos. A1089, A1225, A1333 (incl. A1337), E106, G221, H179, H192, I4 and P1001. See ISTC for further details (ia01225000 etc., not mentioning the imperfect copy of the printed list in one of the copies in Trinity College, Cambridge). I am grateful to Paul Needham for drawing this compilation to my attention.

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copies of these texts were intended to be bound up together, or only some of them, the rest to be sold separately. We must treat the evidence as ambiguous. On other occasions (the phenomenon is not unknown even today), composite volumes were the work of stationers seeking new ways of moving existing stock by dressing it up with fresh title pages.98 Whenever such divisions or amalgamations took place, the result can lead to misleadingly multiple entries in retrospective bibliographies. In other words, one number can serve for the same kind of bibliographical grouping as must elsewhere be awarded several numbers. Many books were printed with title pages bearing different names in the imprints, reflecting the way in which the investment had been shared out among two or more individuals: this was important given the high cost of investing in new books, and particularly in the cost of the paper required. Different names and different groupings warrant distinct entries and distinct numbers. So, too, do sometimes quite minor variants between different copies of a single edition. The Introduction to the revised edition of STC pre-1641 expresses something of the uncertain boundary between what in this project justified a new number, and what was simply mentioned in a note.99 The editor, Katharine F. Pantzer, was not concerned with counting entry numbers. But numbers of what? To repeat: we are certainly not measuring books, or even pamphlets, in any of the databases that have been mentioned so far. Even leaving aside the comprehensiveness of the ISTC and of the ESTC pre-1641, we are looking at the records of everything from broadsides printed on single sheets, half-sheets or quarter-sheets, to multivolume works such as polyglot Bibles. Each counts as one entry. In other words, we are measuring not just the surviving output but records that are based ultimately on literary criteria, units of publication, not on manufacturing ones. Let us now look briefly at quantities not as manufactured outputs, title by title and edition by edition, but as manufacturing needs. How much by way of material was needed for a printing trade that flourished in such variety? If we are interested in manufacturing as the basis of an economy, then we should be looking not just at bibliographical reference numbers but also at the resources needed for each of the objects these represent. This is best measured by edition sheets: the number of sheets of paper required for a book and (if the necessary information survives) for the printing of an edition.100 So, for example, a contemporary witness tells us that the Gutenberg Bible 98. See, for example, the complicated publishing history of the best-selling Puritan preacher Henry Smith in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. STC sets out much of the evidence. 99. STC 1, Introduction, xli. 100. This was used to some effect in D. F. McKenzie, “The London Book Trade in 1668,” Words: Wai-te-ata Studies in Literature 4 (1973): 75–92, reprinted in his Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays, eds. P. D. McDonald and M. F. Suarez (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). M. U. Chrisman used the slightly different, and here less useful, concept of master-formes in her Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg, 1480–1599 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982). The first measures materials used, the second measures labour though it needs to be used with very great caution when dealing with the small presses used in early printing.

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was printed in an edition of 180 copies. Each copy contains 323.5 sheets. Thus, we can say that the entire edition required (allowing for waste) something over 58,230 sheets of paper or parchment. If, as seems at least plausible, 140 copies were printed on paper and the rest on parchment, then we can more firmly say that it required at least 45,290 sheets of paper and at least 12,940 animal skins.101 This method, of measuring edition sheets, is doubly valuable. It tells us about the state of the manufacturing economy: paper production, the marketability of different kinds of publications, scales of investment, overall price patterns, and the capacity or employment of the printing presses in different towns in different periods. It also helps us understand the relationship of the printing and publishing trades to times of political crisis. The immense increase in titles of pamphlet literature in England during the 1640s, a time of civil war, did not mean that the printing industry was suddenly provided with a large number of new presses, or worked even longer weeks and was thus able to print much more, but, rather, that much production was switched from books to political pamphleteering.102 The same was true of Paris in the years of the Fronde (1648–53), when thousands of pamphlets, Mazarinades, dominated publishing for a few years.103 It was true, also, of the 1520s in part of Germany, as Lutheran and other propaganda made demands on printers who had thus to leave other work aside. Taken by themselves, titles and editions are not a reliable measure of economic activity.

Growth Finally, what of growth? Let us return to a European perspective. Buringh and van Zanden launch their conclusions (438) with the observation that “the estimates of book production presented in this article show remarkable and consistent growth during the long period studied here.”104 Their own figures show nothing of the kind, if  consistency is what is being looked for. Leaving aside manuscripts, for printed books they show declines in the output in France between 1651 and 1700, and 1701 and 1750; in Belgium between the same periods; in Italy between 1551 and 1600, and

101.

102.

103. 104.

For sheet counts of early English books, see, in particular, David L. Gants, “A Quantitative Analysis of the London Book Trade, 1614–1618,” Studies in Bibliography 55 (2002): 185–214. Paul Needham, “The Paper Supply of the Gutenberg Bible,” Papers of the Bibliographical Soc. of America 79 (1985): 303–74, quoting Aeneas Silvius on the size of the edition (308–9) and offering a clear collation of the two volumes, relating the structure to the text as it developed in manufacture (320); Buringh and van Zanden state that it was 200 (Appendix 2). Catalogue of the Pamphlets, Books, Newspapers, and Manuscripts Relating to the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and Restoration, Collected by George Thomason, 1640–1661 (London: British Museum, 1908). Hubert Carrier, La presse et la Fronde, 1648–1653, les Mazarinades (Geneva: Droz, 1989). The same phrasing is used in van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution: 88.

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1601 and 1650, and then between 1651 and 1700, and 1701 and 1750; and even a slight decline in Great Britain between 1651 and 1700, and 1701and 1750. This last, based presumably at some point on ESTC, demands some investigation and comment, not only because it runs counter to the more general history of the book trades but also because we have fuller figures for Britain than for any other region. In 2002, John Barnard and Maureen Bell published the fullest figures thus far of annual book production in Britain between 1475 and 1700.105 As they admitted, these figures were open to many criticisms. But they deserve repeating, arranged here decade by decade for the second half of the seventeenth century. Beside them, in the third column below, are shown the figures from ESTC as of August 2009 (very soon after the publication of their article). The differences are partly a result of discoveries and recordings in the intervening years, and partly a result of different ways of counting. The variation between the columns two and three and the last arises from other calculations. ESTC includes serials though not individual issues of each title.106 Buringh and van Zanden explicitly omit them. Since the geographical and linguistic coverage remained the same for the whole of the period in question, the relationship of the totals, if not the exact figures, rests on the same foundations at least in these respects. The difference lies in the growth of North American book production, which on a rolling average rose from a base of well below ten a year in the mid-seventeenth century to thirty-eight in 1700. This is included in ESTC but is excluded by Buringh and van Zanden, who are concerned with Western Europe. Hence, it is necessary to adjust the overall ESTC figures by subtracting those for North America. The output for the seventeenth-century colonies amounted to perhaps one thousand. For the eighteenth century, NAIP (the North American Imprints Program) holds records for about 40,000, approximately a fifth of them for the period 1701 to 1750 and the remaining four-fifths for the period 1751 to 1800.107 Thus, for the ESTC record for 1651–1700, a total of about 700 (serial titles) plus 1,000 (North American imprints) should be deducted. Besides these, such matter as recusant literature printed overseas needs to be removed,108 a category rather less marked in the eighteenth century, when Roman 105. John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie, with the assistance of Maureen Bell, ed., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 4: 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 779–84. 106. ESTC was thought in 1999 to include about 3,000 serial titles. 107. The North American Imprints Program is based at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. It must be emphasized that the figures offered here on the basis of NAIP figures are unavoidably approximate. Suarez has attempted more accurate counting by examining several thousand records and eliminating egregious ones including both American imprints and “duplicate” records for different issues of the same book. His sampling of 1703, 1713, 1723, etc., produces more reliable results, but he understandably did not attempt the same decade by decade: see Suarez, “Toward a Bibliographical Analysis of the Surviving Record, 1700–1800.” 108. A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, A Catalogue of Catholic Books in English Printed Abroad or Secretly in England, 1558–1640 (Bognor Regis: Arundel Press, 1956).

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Catholic printing was less frowned on in Britain. All these adjustments, which drive down the ESTC total, make the divergence from Buringh and van Zanden the more noticeable. Within both Buringh and van Zanden’s figures (not accessible decade by decade)109 and those from ESTC, the relative rises and falls decade by decade are no less important than the half-century totals. The sharp decline in the 1660s was due mainly to the Fire of London in 1666, which destroyed not only large quantities of unsold books but also most of the white paper stock held in the City, quite apart from printers’ equipment; the book trade did not regain its pre-fire output until 1670. Table 2.2 British book production, 1651–1700, by decade 1651–1660 1661–1670 1671–1680 1681–1690 1691–1700 Total, 1651–1700

B and B 13,991 9,624 12,695 18,530 17,520 72,360

ESTC 15,647 11,114 14,826 21,800 20,705 84,092

B and vZ

89,306

For the eighteenth century, the most recent work is by Michael Suarez, but unfortunately for our present purposes his figures, samplings of 1703, 1713, 1723, etc., are not directly comparable. Again, the ESTC figures are for August 2009. Table 2.3 British book production, 1701–1750, by decade 1701–10 1711–20 1721–30 1731–40 1741–50 Total, 1701–50

ESTC 23,842 25,025 22,035 22,221 25,480 118,603

B and vZ

89,259

Modest though it is, the decline suggested by Buringh and van Zanden between the second half of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth is a puzzle that flies in the face of other evidence. The decline in ESTC figures in the 1720s has been more precisely measured by Suarez, who points out that the lowest of his sampled years was 1723. As in France, there was a general tendency to publish 109. As they are working to an average edition size of 1,000 for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the figures in their table 2, “Production of Printed Books Per Half Century, 1454–1800 (in Thousands of Books),” offer straightforward arithmetic for translation into editions.

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in smaller formats, in octavos rather than quartos. This in itself did not necessarily affect overall figures for titles and editions, but it was directly related to demands on industrial capacity. One further way of assessing these totals of titles and editions against possible output is to consider the number of presses, each of which (depending on its size and condition) was in principle able to produce much the same number of sheets. The known numbers of presses in London were as follows:110 Table 2.4 London printing houses and presses, 1668–1723 1668

33 printing houses

65 presses in 26 printing houses listed

Probable total 82 presses

1686

44 printing houses

113 presses listed

Probable total 145 presses in 55 printing houses

1705

60 printing houses

Probably just under 70 printing houses in all

Number of presses not recorded

1723

75 printing houses

Probable total just below 80

Number of presses not recorded

Quite separately, there is evidence by the early years of the eighteenth century that some of the London printing houses, such as those belonging to Watts or Bowyer, were quite large, and certainly larger than those of twenty years earlier. Following the lapse of the Licensing Acts in 1695, printers were free to set up their own establishments outside London and the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge. By 1723, a contemporary list suggests that there were printing houses in perhaps 35 towns in England alone. The surviving output of books and pamphlets is better recorded for Britain and Ireland from the 1470s to 1800 than for anywhere else in Europe. Ordinarily, one particular example would not perhaps matter very much. And yet, here we are in the midst not of estimates, not of assumptions, but one of the best sets of data available to Buringh and van Zanden. The more general conclusion reached by them (“the estimates of book production presented in this article show remarkable and consistent growth during the long period studied here”) requires some modulation. It is not simply that there is a difference in the figures in these tables, sometimes relatively small. It is also unclear what is meant by “estimates,” where so little notice is taken of what has not survived. Indeed, the closeness of the figures (survivals listed in bibliographies, as against “estimates”) makes one suspect comparisons all the more. If one 110. The following is derived from Michael Treadwell, “Lists of Master Printers: The Size of the London Printing Trade, 1637–1723,” in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., Aspects of Printing from 1600 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1987): 141–70.

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considers a lost multitude of slight and often ephemeral publications such as pamphlets, chapbooks, and advertising literature, all of them major players in what we may call the impact of print, and a rapidly increasing presence in much of eighteenthcentury Europe, then we are dealing potentially with much larger numbers again. In any estimate of the press, it is essential to consider the output of periodicals and newspapers. Fundamental though this was to production patterns and to reading habits alike, this has not been counted in Buringh and van Zanden’s figures. By the mid-eighteenth century, magazines, newspapers, and a host of other periodical publications were a critical feature both of the European book trade economy and of the reading nations. Over 700 titles are recorded for Britain between 1641 and 1700. In the words of the standard census of this literature, “Approximately one-quarter of the publications in Britain between 1641 and 1700 were issues of serials.”111 A survey of periodicals published during the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14) lists just under 200 titles and is likely to be an underestimate.112 The first London daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, was published in 1702. In 1704, almost 44,000 copies of newspapers were published in London each week.113 The print runs are reliably documented for some of these periodicals: the London Magazine (founded 1733) was printed monthly in editions of up to 8,000.114 Though this pattern was not repeated exactly in other regions of Europe, the rise of a periodical trade was common to all. In the French language, for example, Jean Sgard has recorded details of 1,267 titles between 1600 and 1789.115 In Germany, the number of titles escalated in the early eighteenth century, in Hamburg rising from about four dozen in 1650–1700 to 185 in the following halfcentury. The scale of these publications, their numbers and their price range, means that to disregard them is to provide inadequate assessments of press output, of the meaning of literacy, and the penetration of printed matter into the population at large. And because periodical publication developed differently in different countries, the comparative figures overall are affected. 111. C. Nelson and M. Secombe, British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1641–1700: A Short-Title Catalogue (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1987): vii. 112. W. R. and V. B. McLeod, A Graphical Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1702–14 (Morgantown: The School of Journalism, West Virginia University, 1982). 113. James R. Sutherland, “The Circulation of Newspapers and Literary Periodicals, 1700–30,” The Library new ser. 15 (1934): 110–24. Foxon, The Stamp Act of 1712. St. Clair, The Reading Nation: 572–73, supplies a selection of circulation figures over the eighteenth century. 114. D. F. McKenzie and J. C. Ross, eds., A Ledger of Charles Ackers: Printer of the London Magazine (London: Published for the Oxford Bibliographical Society by Oxford University Press, 1968): 11; see also, more generally, Michael Harris, “London Printers and Newspaper Production during the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the Printing Historical Soc. 12 (1977/8): 33–51. 115. Jean Sgard, Dictionnaire des journaux, 1600–1789 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991). In his postface he presents a useful analysis if the changes in relative sizes of different parts of the trade. For Germany, see H. Böning and others, Deutsche Presse; Biobibliographische Handbücher zur Geschichte der deutschsprachigen periodischen Presse von den Anfängen bis 1815 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1996–). The early Hamburg press is surveyed in vol. 1.

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Accurate or not, misunderstood or not, so much counting and estimating by Buringh and van Zanden has produced very little that is new about book production. For Western Europe as a whole, according to their estimates, there was an “average annual growth rate [in book production] of around one percent.”116 It is an unhelpful statement. More seriously and fundamentally, it completely ignores the differences between regions, whether in the early Middle Ages or in (for example) the lead taken by Britain in the eighteenth century, where new financial opportunities, investment in technological change, and increasing prosperity set the country apart from the rest of Europe. Such long-term figures contribute very little. But when putative production figures are set beside population estimates, errors can be compounded. Only in a most limited way can population change be said to be a change in the numbers of people living in large areas like an entire country. It has been well observed by R. A. Houston that “pre-industrial societies are often lumped together as undifferentiated entities. The demographic histories of regions of the British Isles illustrate above all the great complexity and diversity of those societies.”117 The same can be applied to most of continental Europe. In other words, it is not simply a matter of the necessary crudeness, and the large element of guesswork, involved in producing figures for most regions before about the sixteenth century. It is also a question of difference. To take for a moment the longue durée of Buringh and van Zanden: the world of Carolingian Europe was not the same as the world of the Enlightenment, socially, demographically, economically, religiously, or educationally. There is no point in forcing longterm comparisons of the two. The uses to which books were put were different in geographical, social, and chronological terms. The range of manuscript or printed documents was very different. They were circulated in different ways, among quite different parts of the population. It was not simply a question of literacy. It was one of social expectation and changing social conventions and needs. Different age structures played a part. So did the availability of leisure time, which differed markedly across social and occupational groups. The development of an educated secular elite, the increasing use and ownership of books by women at different places and for different purposes area by area and generation by generation, the development of manuscript and print for administration, and the growth of ephemeral production, were all further varied by differences between town and country. Geography and communications were critical to all these. The implications of a world of print were very different in the densely populated Netherlands (an estimated 63 inhabitants per square kilometer in 1750), with a high proportion of town-dwellers, compared 116. Or (van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution: 76), “slightly more than 1 percent for Western Europe as a whole.” 117. R. A. Houston, “The Population History of Britain and Ireland, 1500–1750,” in M. Anderson, ed., British Population History from the Black Death to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 95–190, at 182; this essay was originally published in 1992.

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with the more diverse France (46 inhabitants per square kilometer), or the still more thinly populated Spain (17).118 By the eighteenth century, print was ubiquitous in many parts of Europe but by no means all. Thinly populated rural southwest France, with poor communications, was not the same as Bordeaux or Toulouse, let alone Paris. Calabria was not Tuscany. Highland Scotland was not Edinburgh. Whether for book production or for population numbers, gross national figures are no guide to the reality of book use. Buringh and van Zanden’s own population figures are drawn from old, and sometimes controversial, summaries.119 In their Table 3, they seek to present “per capita production of manuscript books annually, sixth to fifteenth centuries.” In Table 4, they offer “per capita consumption of printed books annually, 1454–1500 and 1751– 1800.” Given the difficulties of estimating, even very roundly, the population of any country before the early modern period, and given the weaknesses in the calculations of the numbers of manuscripts created in each area, it is difficult to find much of use in the table for manuscripts. For printed books, it is important to note the distinction between consumption (that is, presumably including imports) and the production figures for each country offered in Table 2. For most of Europe, we simply do not know enough about exports, or imports, to be able to make more than general calculations on this score.120 As has been stressed, the book trade was international. Heavy investment in some kinds of scholarly projects, whether the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493),121 Plantin’s polygot Bible of 1568–73,122 or the Encyclopédie of 1751–72,123 were 118. Figures from M. Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population (Oxford: Blackwell, 4th ed., 2007), Table 2.5. 119. Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978). But for England, see more recently E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (1981, reprinted with a new introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) (neither edition is cited by Buringh and van Zanden). 120. For the possibilities and limitations of such study for England in the late fifteenth century, see Paul  Needham, “The Customs Rolls as Documents for the Printed-Book Trade in England,” in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp, eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 3: 1400–1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 148–63. For the eighteenth-century British trade, see, for example, Giles Barber, “Books from the Old World and for the New: The British International Trade in Books in the Eighteenth Century,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 151 (Oxford, 1976): 185–224. See further his “Book Imports and Exports in the Eighteenth Century,” in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., Sale and Distribution of Books from 1700 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1982): 77–105. For some Venetian figures, see Mario Infelise, L’editoria veneziana nel’700 (Milano: Angeli, 1989): 217–74. 121. Adrian Wilson, The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle (Amsterdam: A. Asher, 1976); and Christoph Reske, Die Produktion der Schedelschen Weltchronik in Nürnberg (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000); at least 1,400 copies of the Chronicle were printed. 122. Voet, The Plantin Press (1555–1589), v. 1: 280–315, with further references; 1,213 copies of this Bible were printed. 123. Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); 4,225 copies of the Paris edition of the Encyclopédie were printed, of which perhaps 2,050 were sold outside France (37).

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only possible because of established international markets and international agencies. But the same was true of many more ordinary projects. It is reasonable to assume that most of the copies of recusant books printed in English in Douai and St. Omer in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were sent to the British Isles.124 In the seventeenth century, Dutch printers produced thousands of Bibles in English, undercutting English prices; most, again, will have been exported.125 In eighteenth-century France, the clandestine import trade in banned books served politics, learning, and pornography alike, and more again was imported with the approval of the censoring authorities.126 As for population figures, it is difficult (to select just one example) to square the decline in the population of England in the second half of the seventeenth century and its slow recovery in the first decades of the eighteenth with the alleged production of print.127 In themselves, Buringh and van Zanden’s figures for 1454–1800 proffer several surprises. In the Netherlands, annual per capita consumption apparently multiplied more than four times between the second half of the sixteenth entry and the first half of the seventeenth. In Sweden, it multiplied 36 times between the same two periods. Yet in Switzerland, it declined from a remarkable 78.5 books per thousand inhabitants in 1551–1600 to just 9.3 in 1601–50. These cannot be figures concerned with consumption though they may relate in some way to production. The figures given for Great Britain are further perplexing. They suggest that per capita consumption was almost exactly the same in the second half of the seventeenth century as in the second half of the eighteenth. And yet (very roughly) the population rose about 40 percent, while the output of the press rose very much more. There are issues at stake here much more interesting than these sometimes fruitless and fanciful exercises, where consumption is confused with manufacture, and where we know too little about imports. What are all these books for? Who used them? How did these change? How did the European political, religious, and social economies come to depend at almost every level on the written and printed word? The overall figures conceal a multitude of purposes, and the patterns of survival in different areas and at different times make clear that the nature of the exercise followed by Buringh and van Zanden is not sufficient. In the manuscript period, how much effort was devoted proportionately to the copying out and preservation of older 124. Books for the English-language market printed abroad down to 1640 are most conveniently set out in STC, v. 3: 215–25. 125. For references, see McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press: Volume 1, Printing and the Book Trade in Cambridge, 1534–1698: 468–69. 126. Martin and Chartier, eds., Histoire de l’édition française, 2, Le livre triomphant, 1660–1830. 127. The calculations of Wrigley and Schofield (note 119) suggest that after the 1650s the population of England declined and did not reach the same level until sixty or so years later. The population of reading age will not have recovered until a little later. For similar calculations, suggesting a slightly longer period for recovery, see J. Oeppen, “Back-Projection and Inverse Projection: Members of a Wider Class of Constrained Projection Models,” Population Studies 45 (1993): 245–67.

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texts, how much to the works of new and contemporary authors, how much to the maintenance of liturgical life, how much to administration, how much to the reordering of existing knowledge? As manuscript production shifted increasingly to secular centers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, how did these emphases change? Law books, secular tales, vernacular poetry, and all kinds of domestic compilations contributed to a very different landscape, and yet it was also a landscape in which the older concerns were no less important. Similar questions can be asked of the world of print. Religious and political pamphleteering absorbed much of the energy of the printing trades in France, Germany, Britain, and the Netherlands. In the late eighteenth century, St. Clair has shown how Britain saw a massive rise in production of what we might call classic texts of English literature, released for the first time from the perpetual copyright that had hitherto controlled most of their publication. Large as his study was, it presented only a minority of what came from the presses, stationers, and publishers. Across Europe, the eighteenth century witnessed an unprecedented rise in the use of print for the conduct of public life. But that did not, in itself, necessarily mean an increase in literacy, or in book ownership, among the population at large. Emphatically, distribution was not even. It is changes such as these, involving issues of manufacture, physical resources, purpose, and use, that can tell us much more about the place of books and the extent to which they can be employed as a measure of production, opportunity, and choice in the history of Europe.

East Asia: Parallels and Differences Finally, and by way of coda, what can all this this tell us when we try to compare book production in East Asia and in Western Europe? Much of the surviving evidence is very different in its nature and extent. Both regions came to depend to a greater or lesser extent on print. But different printing chronologies and technologies made for different attitudes to print. Woodblocks could be printed from at different times. They could be preserved and then made available to limited groups of people, for example in court circles. They do not imply editions in the sense that is inescapable from the use and reuse of moveable type, since copies can be produced in very small numbers and then produced again later, as needed. This chapter has been heavily concerned with survival. Reasons for and against book survival vary enormously across different parts of Europe and different kinds of literature. They depend partly on political and social stability or upheaval. Appalling though it is, the destruction of libraries in twentieth-century Europe may well pale in comparison to that in twentieth-century China with its ongoing wars and Cultural Revolution.128 But realistic statistical comparisons on this point, and especially on 128. Among recent general studies of library destruction, see James Raven, ed., Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections Since Antiquity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004); Rebecca Knuth,

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overall number of extant book titles, remain unfeasible. If Buringh and van Zanden’s figures are deeply flawed, those taken from the most recent and comprehensive Chinese national survey are unusable. This catalog’s separate listing of 177,107 pre1912 Chinese titles omits virtually all 52,401 known genealogies as well as a great number of unknown titles of Buddhist, Daoist, and other religious texts, primers, songbooks, and ephemera.129 Its frequent practice of clumping together under one title a host of different titles related, it appears, only by a common author requires far more clarification. And, like its European equivalents, it gives the same bibliographical value to multivolume publications as to the briefest of imprints.130 In Japan the recently announced figure of roughly 400,000 pre-1868 extant titles seems more feasible, but it has yet to undergo rigorous examination.131 Thus, although Endymion Wilkinson’s view that more titles were published in Europe than in China during the four centuries covered by this book presently seems reasonable,132 we are far from knowing credible figures for either region and even farther from knowing what such figures might mean. Nonetheless, some qualitative comparisons and contrasts deserve mention for the time being. First, while a great deal has been done concerning the output of the printing press in Western Europe, much less has been attempted to measure the circulation of its manuscript texts during the period 1450–1850. In East Asia, by contrast, the importance of both media coexisting in various circumstances is now clear. In a survey undertaken in the 1980s of the holdings of over 781 Chinese libraries, printed and manuscript titles survive in roughly equal measure (see Table 2.5).133 In Japan, where an awareness of the manuscript tradition has long been strong,134 manuscripts reportedly account for more than two-fifths of all surviving titles from

129. 130.

131. 132. 133. 134.

Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Knuth, Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction (Westport, CT: Praeger 2006); and Lucien X. Polastron, Livres en feu; histoire de la destruction sans fin des bibliothèques (Paris: Denoël, 2004), translated as Books on Fire (London: Thames & Hudson, 2007). For help with the following information on East Asian books, I am most grateful to Joseph McDermott. Zhongguo guji zongmu (Shanghai: Guji, 2009–12); and Shanghai tushuguan, ed., Zhongguo jiapu zongmu (Shanghai: Guji, 2008), vol. 1: 10. One of the difficulties in large-scale statistical comparisons lies in the fact that the dates of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) in China and the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) in Japan do not correspond with customary period divisions in Western bibliography. Hashiguchi Konosuke, Edo no honya to honzukuri (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2011): 251–90. Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012): 933–36. See Appendix 2.1; and Joseph P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006): 74–78. Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1998): 87–111.

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Table 2.5 Varieties of total non-imprint and imprint titles presently found in 781 Chinese libraries

Classics

Total Titles 5,239

Draft Manuscripts 659

Hand Copies 1,209

Annotated Copies 1,002

History

15,708

1,616

5,383

1,687

Philosophy

12,294

666

3,559

1,362

Belles lettres

22,924

1,906

6,970

2,813

Collecteana

622

108

91

51

56,787

4,955 (8.7%)

17,212 (30.3%)

Genre Type

Totals

6,915 (12.17%)

Non-imprint Titles 2,870 (54.78%) 8,686 (55.3%) 5,587 (45.44%) 11,689 (51.0%) 250 (40.19%) 29,082 (51.19%)

Source: Chen Xianxing et al., eds., Zhongguo guji gao chao jiao ben tulu (Shanghai, 2000), 1: 9. It is a statistical breakdown by traditional category of the 56,787 titles listed in the Zhongguo guji shanben shumu (Shanghai, 1986–).

the Tokugawa period.135 While many historians have been interested in comparing imprint totals for China and Europe,136 the relativities of manuscript and imprint may be of greater interest for measuring and understanding how and why their texts were created and circulated. Second, as Cynthia Brokaw demonstrates in her chapter for China (see Chapter 5), marked differences in local economies and in their trade links suggest the need to treat overall figures for large regions of Europe with circumspection in any attempts at general extrapolations concerning the reading, use, and influence of printed books in all their great variety of context, subject, size, physical qualities, and price.137 Further, and linked to this, the distinction made in East Asian publishing between private, noncommercial books (family, religious, etc.) and 135. Hashiguchi, Edo no honya to honzukuri: 257–66. Also, see the recent remark by Suzuki Toshiyuki: “L’histoire de l’édition s’interesse généralement peu aux livres manuscrits, mais si l’on envisage l’activité commerciale des libraires, on ne peut négliger la question de leur diffusion.” Suzuki Toshiyuki, “La diffusion du livre à l’époque d’Edo,” in Claire-Akiko Brisset et al., eds., Du pinceau à la typographie; regards japonais sur l’écriture et le livre (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2006): 293–319, esp. 309. 136. For example, van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution: 188–89, with further references. The summary figures for “titles published” [more correctly, recorded] in Ch’ing [also known as Qing] and Han China by Frederick W. Mote in Frederick W. Mote, Hung-lam Chu et al., Calligraphy and the East Asian Book (Boston, MA: Shambhala, Inc., 1989): 205, need to be treated with caution; those given in the same passage for Western Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries also are misleading. 137. For a useful example in China, see Cynthia J. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007).

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commercial publishing that Joseph McDermott discusses in Chapter 3 is a useful reminder of how many Western statistics need to be further categorized in any attempts to make general statements about the use and influence of print.138 For all the many instructive differences between Western Europe and East Asia in the chronologies of their printing inventions, in the nature and interpretation of surviving evidence, and in the expectations attached to print, it is still true that their book histories contain some remarkable similarities in their use of the printed and written word. As all the chapters in this volume demonstrate, historians of the European and East Asian book have much to learn from one another.

138. Estimates vary from 60 percent to 90 percent concerning the percentage of commercial books printed in Edo Japan (Kornicki: 140; Hashiguchi, Edo no honya to honzukuri: 251–90). For some aspects of the West, see especially James Raven, ed., Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing Since 1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).

3 “Noncommercial” Private Publishing in Late Imperial China Joseph McDermott

In Western Europe and East Asia, commercial publishing became the principal way of producing a book. The paths to this common destination, however, differed greatly.1 In the West, commercial production predominated in book production even before Gutenberg’s “invention” of the moveable-type printing press in ca.  1445. Not only had scribal multiplication of texts broken out of monastic workshops to become a thriving business in many towns and university centers. But also the related crafts of binding, illuminating, papermaking, and “stationery” (i.e., an inclusive term for book artisans) prospered in a book-production process that was thoroughly engaged in market activities long before ca. 1445.2 Printing, once introduced in Europe, likewise thrived commercially, often in sites that any alert merchant would have chosen as a suitable base for operations.3 In short, printing in Europe was a business; or, in the words of Febvre and Martin’s classic account of the origins of European book publication, “From its earliest days printing existed as an industry, governed by the same rules as any other industry; the book was a piece of merchandise which men produced before anything else to earn a living, even when scholars and humanists at the same time.”4 In his recent The Business of Books, James Raven has come to an equally definitive conclusion on the entrepreneurial nature of the English book trade: “From the late fifteenth century, cultural entrepreneurship promoted one of the most fundamental transformations in our history: the production and circulation of the book.”5

1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

I wish to express my thanks to Michela Bussotti for encouraging my interest in this topic. This chapter is part of the research I did to participate in a stimulating conference she hosted in Paris in 2009 on “Imprimer Sans Profit.” Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris, 1200–1500 (Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2000). S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing (London: Faber and Faber, 1959): 7, 17. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800 (London: Verso, 1976): 109. James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007): 2.

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Thus, ever since Gutenberg and his partners chose the Bible for their first major book publication, the fact that they printed even this core text of Western religious life for sale and for profit seems never to have aroused concern or surprise in the West. Indeed, so consistently commercial has Western publishing been that no alternative type of publisher—the state, the church, or noncommercial private publisher—has ever displaced the commercial publishing house as the predominant type of publishing institution in virtually all of Europe. Admittedly, regional or temporary exceptions can be found: episcopal and ecclesiastical financing for the printing of liturgical books, states’ and towns’ issuance of their administrative records, Jesuit publishing houses in Eastern Europe, and subscription publication, whereby men financed the printing of a friend’s or supplicant’s manuscript.6 Yet, far more typical was the situation in, to cite just one place and time, the Spain of the Inquisition. In the first half of the sixteenth century, just three printers in Spain were clerical and the rest all commercial.7 Even the liturgical books of sixteenth-century Spanish churches were printed by a commercial publisher, the prestigious Flemish firm of Plantin, headed then by a closet heretic.8 And, if an author sought other ways to publish his writings— for example, to publish his own work, for profit or not—then, in many European publishing centers like Paris, guilds and government would conspire to make such publishing ventures very difficult if not impossible.9 In East Asia, by contrast, noncommercial publishers, such as the private family publisher ( jiake), religious (literally, Buddhist and Daoist) publishers (siguan ke), and government publishers (guanke), dominated printing for so long after its invention in ca. 700, that commercial printing ( fangke) rose to dominate book production only many centuries—as many as eight centuries—later. It has long been known that in Korea noncommercial printing remained significant long after the introduction of printing, as government institutions dominated book publishing right up to the

6. 7. 8. 9.

Febvre and Martin, Coming of the Book: 127. See also James Raven, ed., Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing Since 1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Konrad Haebler, The Early Printers of Spain and Portugal (London: Chiswick Press, 1897): 21. William Pettas, A History and Bibliography of the Giunti (Junta) Printing Family in Spain 1526–1625 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2005): 60. Marie-Claude Felton, “When Authors Made Books: A First Look at the Content and Form of SelfPublished Works in Paris (1750–1791),” European Review of History 17.2 (2010): 241–63, esp. 242: “in Old Regime Paris, no book was to be sold or made by people outside the close corporation of booksellers and printers. Before the new Bookselling Code of 1777, authors who acquired Royal Permission for a book (after it had been authorised by a censor) only had the right to ‘have their book printed’ and to ‘have their book sold’ by a member of the corporation. Within this strict system, however, some authors decided to play a greater part in the whole publishing process, first by acquiring the privilège and printing permission in their name, then by hiring a printer directly, and finally by selling their book on their own.” Even then, such authors faced problems when they sought to finance, distribute, and sell their book.

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nineteenth century.10 In Japan as well, although commercial publishing has long been judged to have dominated book production after ca.  1650, recent research argues that commercial imprints accounted for less than half of all titles published in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868). Printing in Japan, from its introduction from China in the eighth century to the early seventeenth century, was undertaken mainly by Buddhist establishments to reproduce Buddhist prayers, sutras, and devotional writings, all in the Chinese language. Subsequently, during the Tokugawa period printing flourished. An average of well over 3,000 titles were published annually in Japanese and Chinese on a wide range of subjects. About a half or more of these titles and volumes, it seems, were issued not for profit, by and for the government, Buddhist establishments, and especially private families. While the traditional practice of hand-copying texts persisted and indeed possibly remained the most common Japanese form of text reproduction up until the nineteenth century, the great majority of imprint titles were published, it now appears, as not-for-sale books by private publishers throughout the Tokugawa era.11 Even if these new views fail to win universal approval, enough new information has been discovered to confirm a significant role for private noncommercial books in Tokugawa times. In China, the focus of this chapter, the government’s predominance in production lasted nowhere as long as into late imperial times as in Korea. In its decline, moreover, it appears not to have been immediately replaced by commercial printing but by other types of private printing, particularly family printing, which thrived long enough to assure that commercial book publishing became predominant in China far more slowly and far less comprehensively than in the West. In surveying the persistence and significance of private noncommercial publishing in late imperial China, this chapter falls into two parts, the first often quantitative and the second qualitative. The first part, concentrating on the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and at times on the south China prefecture of Huizhou, will highlight inherent ambiguities in the concept and practice of being a “woodblock publisher” in China; it will suggest, among other things, that it is more productive to use categories like commercial or noncommercial for publications rather than publishers. Next, we will consider shifts in the relative production level of noncommercial as opposed to commercial publication, first up to the end of the Yuan dynasty (1272–1368) and then during the Ming dynasty. After roughly charting changes in overall secular imprint publication levels during the 10. Beth McKillop, “The History of the Book in Korea,” in Suarez and Woodhyusen, eds., Oxford Companion to the Book: 366–73. The case of Vietnam is very hard to discern due to the scarcity of sources and research. Printing of any sort appears to have been uncommon right up to the nineteenth century (Christiane Pasquel-Rageau, “L’imprimerie au Vietnam de l’impression xylographique tradtionelle à la revolution du quôc ngu (XIIIe–XIXe-siècles),” Revue française d’histoire du livre 45, n.s.2 [1984]: 299–312). 11. Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan (Leiden: Brill, 1998): 124, 140; and Hashiguchi Konosuke, Edō no honya to honzukuri (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2011): 251–90. Clearly, the issue needs much more research.

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Ming,12 it will discern two shifts in the relative preponderance of these imprint types during the Ming: from government publications to private (i.e., nongovernment) publications by the end of the fifteenth century, and then within this world of private publishing from non-commercial to commercial by no later than the last third of the sixteenth century in the lower Yangzi delta. Private non-commercial publications are seen to have gained particular significance throughout the empire during the second century of Ming rule. Indeed, in prefectures like Huizhou, where large lineages predominated, private family not-for-profit titles appear to have predominated right to the end of the Ming, thanks to the great number of genealogies and other familycentered titles issued by this area’s wealthy lineages. In other words, a noncommercial sphere of publishing by private parties for themselves and for restricted circles of kin and friends thrived as a distinct and in places predominant feature of China’s publishing world through the Ming and well into the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). The final section of this chapter considers the qualitative impact of these private publishing arrangements on the culture and politics of late imperial China. Song and Ming private family publishers had a great variety of motives for their publications. Many printed privately either to keep information private or to achieve the opposite: to spread their fame and improve the chance of preserving their name (or that of an ancestor). If “vanity publishing” then was far from unheard-of, a few preferred private publishing because it gave them greater control of the publishing process and outcome. They could use their publications to shape opinion, at least among scholarofficials, and thereby hope to engage in a semipublic, semiprivate argument. The imprints with these views, once published by families as noncommercial books, could face government restrictions and sometimes harsh punishment. Nonetheless, even if their writings tended to be published in posthumous Collected Writings, their criticism could ultimately circulate and shape a wider body of readers thanks to the common Chinese practice of commercial publishers picking up popular titles and seeing to their transmission over time through the marketplace. Hence, the workings of the market could eventually give support to private noncommercial publishing by the families of officials, retired officials, and social critics, as intellectual, social, and even political criticism would spread beyond the confines of a scholar’s study or even his circle of friends. Before we explore these aspects of publishing history in late imperial China, we need to clarify the “common sense” of this publishing world, its commercial as well as noncommercial varieties. The aim is less to give a dictionary definition of the terms “publisher,” “commercial publisher,” and “noncommercial publisher,” than to describe the range of their activities. I hope thereby to show why a focus on publications rather 12. All serious scholars of Chinese book history acknowledge the omission of large numbers of religious publications in all our statistics for Chinese books; hence, this chapter’s focus on secular (i.e., no Buddhist, Daoist, or cult) publications.

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than on publishers will be more accurate and analytically productive to our assessing the significance of noncommercial publishing in Chinese publishing history.

Clearing the Air To us in the West today, a publisher is almost invariably a commercial publisher. As the intermediary between the creator (the author) and the customer (the reader), the publisher takes the financial risk for editing, printing, packaging, and selling a text. Even in today’s China, where a publisher may demand full prepayment of production costs from an author for the publication of a manuscript, the publisher is still concerned with sales returns. He or she may not be the figure disparaged by the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) as “half-grocer, half-pimp.”13 But, in the printing process many contemporary Chinese publishers remain the party most responsible and liable for a book’s commercial fate. In discussing publications of the Ming period, as well as in the case of early modern Europe, such a clear-cut definition disguises much about the actual meaning of three key terms so far used: publisher, commercial, and noncommercial. A Ming publisher, the commercial as well as the noncommercial, could manage and perform either one or many of the tasks involved in the process of financing, producing, and marketing books and other printed matter. He could be just its financier, that is, the party who owned the woodblocks, paid for the books’ printing and binding, and perhaps identified his publishing establishment on the title page ( fengmian). Or, he could also be the party who assumed responsibility for any of a great variety of tasks associated with the work of making an imprint. That is, in the creation and preparation of the text he was publishing, he could be its author, editor, collator, and/or owner as well. In the production of this text’s imprint he could be the employer and supervisor of the work done by the scribes, engravers, printers, and binders; conceivably, he could also, though it was far from common in late imperial times, do the carving of his own text’s woodblocks.14 And, in the distribution of commercial imprints he could assume responsibility for marketing and selling them either directly by himself or indirectly through servants, peddlers, bookstores, and market stalls. In the end, a Chinese publisher could probably be best described not by what he did but by what he owned: not the text, not a putative copyright (which as a legal notion took hold in China only

13. Milton Hindus, Céline: The Crippled Giant (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997): 112. 14. The story of the carver-publisher refers to the scholar-official He Yi (898–955), who is said to “have done the carving himself on the woodblocks” for his collected writings ( Jiu Wudai shi [Beijing: Zhonghua, 1976], 127:1673). Yet, the phrase translated here as “have done the carving” can also be correctly translated as merely “have done carving,” a change that I suggest is supported by the fact that He Yi’s collected writings amounted to 100 chapters ( juan). Hence, this statement can only mean that he did some of the carving or that he himself saw to the carving of the woodblocks.

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slowly over the twentieth century) but something far more tangible, the woodblocks that bore the text he intended to print. Furthermore, each of these publishing roles can be broken down into separate components, further highlighting the fact that the Ming “publisher” was not necessarily Céline’s pimp or grocer at all. A publisher might drop full responsibility for some of these financial, production, and marketing dimensions of book publishing. For instance, he might be merely the front man for a variety of parties who invested in or paid for his managerial activities. Often, he seems to have been a partner, though not necessarily the head partner, in a house’s endeavors. Financing might also be paid by a group of donors or subscribers (see Fig. 3.1). In these circumstances, who, then, was “the publisher”?15 Surely, not a person, but an unnamed group that acquired ownership of the woodblocks, or the shop the group had invested in. In the process of production, a book’s woodblocks might be first engraved at the orders of another publisher, who then would sell it to the man who managed and paid for the actual printing and so declared himself the publisher. The new publisher’s name might replace the previous owner’s name in the woodblocks, as he then became involved

Fig. 3.1 “A List of the Names of Those Who Helped [Pay for] the Carving of [This Book’s Woodblocks],” plus the amount of their donations, in Zhang Shiwei, Zhang Yidu xiansheng Ziguang zhai ji (1638 pref.), inserted after the Table of Contents (courtesy of the Naikaku Bunko Library, Tokyo). A second copy of this title in the Naikaku collection, for whatever reason, lacks this list. 15. For example, Zhang Shewei, Ziguang zhai ji (pref. 1638), located after the Table of Contents.

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with merely the printing part of the production process.16 The text that a publisher claimed to have edited, collated, or even composed might actually have been lifted from the writings of another imprint, to which no debt is indicated; the publisher then, to revert to Céline’s terms, was merely a grocer and the woodblocks’ owner.17 Yet, he might shed the work of the grocer as well, by having peddlers, retail houses, and even wholesale outlets distribute his publications for him; or, if a private family publisher, he might choose to restrict the circulation of his publications severely, intending to see them given as presents to friends and relations.18 Thus, being a publisher in Ming times was not as simple and as clear-cut a matter as Céline’s quip or our modern practices might have us believe. To allow for this great variety and flexibility in the roles assumed by a “publisher” during the Ming, I will tend to follow its loosest and most encompassing meaning, to indicate a party responsible for acquiring the capital, labor, material resources, or distribution outlets required for imprint publication and circulation, with the result that he owned the imprint’s woodblocks. Significantly, the range of activities performed by any publisher for one title might differ considerably from the roles he adopted for another title. In short, a woodblock publisher will be seen as a party engaged in one or many of the kinds of activity related to the production and distribution of imprints. When examined concretely, the key activity meriting this designation would often have been the party’s full or partial funding of publishing costs; and, the clearest sign or proof of that involvement would often be ownership of the book’s set of carved woodblocks (though the title page would often bear not his name but that of a shop). And, if the author (or collector) of a book in this sense happened to publish his own writings (or a book in his collection), it naturally could be said that the publisher had been intimately involved in the creation of the book as well. What, then, of the two other categories, “commercial” and “noncommercial”? As one might expect in a vast country like China with a long and complex history of printing, these terms took on and shed a variety of meanings over time. By no later than the eleventh century Chinese bibliographers were classifying imprint publishers according to the type of party deemed responsible for their publication. These book publisher categories—the government, family, religious, and commercial—all identify a particular party or institution as publisher, and the very fact that the first three are together considered distinct from the last one underlines the point that these three kinds of publishers and the books they printed have commonly been regarded as “noncommercial,” that is, not printed for profit. 16. For example, Lucille Chia, Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th– 17th Centuries) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003): 165. 17. Ibid.: 157. 18. Joseph P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006): 94–98, 102.

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How sensible and constructive are these still commonly employed categories of publisher? With her uncontroversial description of the “for profit” variety, Lucille Chia helps us answer this question. Commercial publishers, she observes, are “non-official publishers not known to be printing works under official auspices or those of a religious organization, such as a temple or monastery, and whose imprints often have some indication that they were meant to be sold on the open market.”19 As Chia recognizes, any definition of this term is problematic, and her definition seems intent on sidestepping two minefields of complications. First, it appears to assume, as she acknowledges, that “commercial publishers” were the only Chinese publishers engaged in printing books for sale and commercial distribution, when actually other categories of publisher commonly considered noncommercial—government offices at all levels, private and public schools, religious organizations, private families and individuals, and other seemingly “noncommercial” private and public institutions— commonly published books for sale. Some did this to cover production costs, others to make money; either way, it was a practice that violated conventional bibliographical boundaries for these four categories of publisher. Commercial publishing, one is forced to conclude, was more common in China than strict adherence to these formal categories would suggest. If we remain anxious to distinguish “commercial publishers” from the other types of publishers, we might follow up Chia’s association of this category with her claim that commercial imprints “were meant [my italics] to be sold on the open market.” In suggesting that any consideration of this term focus more on intent than on practice, she seems to be making use of a common neo-Confucian distinction between mind and action in discussions of the moral and immoral pursuit of self-interest. Yet, this mentalist approach toward classifying publishers confers undue significance on the often nebulous wishes and at times vanities of an individual or family. Chia wisely does not take up her suggestion, and we are left to explore on our own the complexities and suitability of this distinction in the actual activities of any publishing outfit, be it “commercial” or otherwise. The best way forward, I suggest, is to examine in detail what commercial publishers actually did: specifically, I would like to study the activities of two very different kinds of publishers, two generations of the Qiu family and Wu Mianxue, from She county in Ming-dynasty Huizhou. From at least 1494 to 1514, two generations of Qius ran a publishing enterprise,20 and at the same time some of them worked for other firms as woodblock carvers.21 Indeed, in the production of one imprint’s text they worked both as the carvers as well as the publishers.22 Even more revealing is 19. 20. 21. 22.

Chia, Printing for Profit: 6–7. Liu Shangheng, Huizhou keshu yu cangshu (Yangzhou: Guangling shushe, 2003): 68. Ibid.: 304n23; 305nn26, 28 (note the difference in the publication of this title from that given it on 68). Ibid.: 68, 305n28.

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the case of Wu Mianxue, a very prolific publisher whose diverse career belies not only Céline’s two-dimensional understanding of a commercial publisher but also the conventional alternative understanding of him as the owner of books he had others print for him. This member of a large and powerful Huizhou lineage took up commercial publishing as a career after finding the lucrative life of a salt merchant not to his liking. Successful as a woodblock publisher in both Huizhou and Nanjing, he regularly shared the tasks and risks of publishing with others, especially his fellow lineage members. He would sometimes provide the capital and ask some of his sons and grandsons to do the collating and editing for him and be listed as such in the final publication; sometimes he did the collating and editing, and they or others provided the capital; and, sometimes he handled all the financing and publishing work but had others do the marketing. In the case of his very large collectanea of medical texts, the Gujin yitong zhengmai congshu, he shared the work of editing with the famous Suzhou literati-doctor Wang Kentang.23 A similar variety of arrangements was possible with the ownership of woodblocks for some of his editions. His publication of Sima Guang’s great comprehensive history, Zizhi tongjian, was based in part on carved woodblocks purchased from another Huizhou native then working as an official in Kaifeng; the usual costs for collating and carving were presumably included in the purchase price. Sometimes, however, he reversed the arrangement, so that he paid for the woodblocks, the carving, and the collating and then, after printing some copies, sold the woodblocks to others (e.g., his editions of the Dongyuan shishu and the Shanghan liushu).24 When he died after a very profitable career, his son inherited the woodblocks still in his possession and eventually sold some of them to other publishers, who in their impressions actually removed Wu Mianxue’s name and inserted theirs instead as the imprint’s collator, compiler, and/or publisher.25 From these cases we confirm that a commercial publisher might perform many separate tasks, not all of them financial or even commercial, as well as in the end possess something very concrete, the carved woodblocks. Trying to parse these different tasks and apply the qualification of woodblock owner to anyone identified as a publisher inevitably becomes a very complicated job, one that ideally requires careful examination of the different stages of creating, editing, collating, producing (with physical labor), and distributing each imprint he has issued. A completely consistent conclusion on this man’s role as publisher of a wide range of titles is unlikely. If so, why not focus, then, on the imprints themselves as the object of our classification and analysis? Our study could then more easily avoid 23. Qin Zongcai, “Ming zhonghouqi fangke zhi liubian yu Wu Mianxue de keshu tese,” Lishi dang’an 2008.1: 24. 24. Xu Xuelin, Huizhou keshu (Hefei: Anhui renmin, 2005): 84, 87; Liu Hengshang, Huizhou keshu: 72; and Cui Mianliang, comp., Zhongguo guji banke cidian (Jinan: Qilu shushe, 1999): 73. 25. Joseph P. McDermott, “How to Succeed Commercially as a Huizhou Book Publisher,” in Zhou Shengchun and He Zhaohui, eds., Yinshua yu shichang (Hangzhou: Zhejiang daxue, 2012): 383–99.

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the two-dimensional definitions we have of publisher, widen the scope of our interests from biographies to the diversity of publishing arrangements in the world of book publishing, and acknowledge the complex character of various stages and tasks in the process of “publishing a book.” As a focus on the imprint rather than its publisher will almost certainly expand our appreciation of the role of commercial publishing in premodern China, it will have the added benefit of reducing the possibility of our downplaying the role of commercial publication in China in the next two sections, when we paradoxically seek to show the significance of noncommercial private publishing in the mid- and late Ming. Noncommercial private printing, then, in theory would have one or more parties pay for the carving or a printing of a text into woodblocks, so that the resulting imprints would be distributed for free. Sometimes, as the author or editor of a title, the publisher paid for all the expenses himself. Other times, he found an official patron with access to surplus government or private funds to assume the costs. These arrangements might last for just one title, but they could, funds willing, cover a selection of titles that the owner and publisher wished to distribute to friends and other collectors as his collectanea (congshu). Also, he might work for this party on just one job or be taken on as an in-house carver for his employer, a high official wishing to see his verse and prose printed up for distribution to his friends. But as a range of examples presented by Chow Kai-wing indicate, this kind of private publisher might establish an even more complicated relation to commercial printing than seen so far. For instance, out of the earnings made from separately commissioned compositions (e.g., biographies, prefaces, or notices of another’s birthday or funeral) he might pay for their composite republication and free distribution as his collected writings to friends and relations.26 Or, as Cynthia Brokaw argues in her chapter in this volume (see Chapter 5), a family publisher could “work through kezidian [a character-carving shop] to hire cutters” or “invite particularly skilled cutters to come to their home and, in return for room and board and a small wage, cut blocks for texts they wished to publish.” Once their job was done, the family publisher would hire another set of workers to print the text or commission the kezidian to see to “the finishing” of the book. Thus, the repeated efforts of twentieth-century bibliographers to classify a publisher as “commercial” or “noncommercial” and to search no further into the record for instructive detail about his publication strike me as misguided. Their resort to quasi-Confucian categories, even when restricted to a person’s publications, is also misleading, since it tends to confuse the writing of book history with the making of moral and social judgments. Instead of locking men and books into clear-cut categories, bibliographers and historians need to discern the actual circumstances 26. Kai-wing Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

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of imprint production, distribution, and consumption, to look, whenever possible, at the imprints themselves for telltale marks. The resulting judgments may at times seem to derive from rough observations made in response to even more subjective questions: the quality of the book’s carving or paper (the worse the carving or paper, the more likely the imprint is thought to have been printed for commercial gain), the total number of a nongovernment publisher’s recorded titles (the greater the number of his published titles, the more likely he was a successful commercial publisher in all but name), or the official status or otherwise of the publisher (an official would surely have not published for profit). Yet, what we really want is detailed consideration of the surviving documentation for each of these books. Only then can we persuasively clarify the complicated history of commercial versus noncommercial publications in Chinese book printing from its origins in the Tang dynasty to its great expansion over the last two centuries of Ming rule.

Commercial and Noncommercial Publishing before the Ming These general reflections will shape the following brief discussion on the relative weight of “noncommercial” versus “commercial” publications in China. In turn we will consider the noncommercial origins and practice of early printing in China, as  well as the prominence of first religious, then governmental, and finally private noncommercial printing in this long stretch of time. All of these topics need to be treated in turn, to provide a historical context for understanding the persistence of noncommercial publishing’s predominance and at the same time commercial publishing’s relatively slow ascendance and incomplete predominance in the Chinese book world before the sixteenth century. Regardless of the dates scholars choose for “the invention of printing” and the earliest printing of sheets and books—the general consensus is that these Chinese innovations first occurred in the early eighth century27—early Chinese printing activities were dominated by Buddhist establishments and the Tang dynasty (617–906) court.28 So far not one scholar has ever argued for the commercial origins of printing in China. Indeed, as Timothy Barrett and Peter Kornicki have shown, the earliest surviving examples of printing were ritual objects intended neither to be read nor sold. The earliest evidence of commercial printing (as well as of censorship) in China and elsewhere in the world dates from 835, in a report on the unauthorized private printing of almanacs for sale in the distant southwest province of Sichuan and in the 27. McDermott, Social History: 10. 28. Timothy H. Barrett, The Woman Who Invented Printing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); and his From Religious Ideology to Political Expediency in Early Printing: An Aspect of Buddho-Daoist Rivalry (Croydon, London: Minnow Press, 2012); and Peter Kornicki, “The Hyakumanto Darani and the Origins of Printing in Eighth-Century Japan,” International Journal of Asian Studies 9.1 (2012): 43–70.

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Huainan area in east central China.29 In other words, after the invention of printing, more than a century passed before any mention of a commercial imprint entered the surviving historical record. The difference from Western Europe’s post-Gutenberg rush to printing, especially commercial printing, is striking. Part of the reason for China’s apparently tardy adoption of commercial publishing was the slowness of its adoption of any kind of publishing, or a lack of demand for all kinds of imprints, be they for profit or not for profit. Traditionally, historians have held that the imprint replaced the manuscript as the main form of book production during the Song dynasty, either the Northern Song (960–1127) or the Southern Song (1127–1279). In the past two decades, a series of books and articles have cast serious doubt on this once conventional piece of wisdom.30 The small number of surviving pre-1500 imprint titles, the low share of imprints in pre-1500 private and government book collections, the expense of producing an imprint as opposed to a hand copy, and the observations of Song readers and collectors on imprint shortages, all this evidence has been marshaled to support the revisionist claim that in most parts of China the imprint gained its initial and probably permanent dominance of the manuscript, at least in scholar-official collections in the richer and better-educated areas of the country, only from the sixteenth century.31 Recently, a nationwide bibliographical survey by members of the Shanghai Library found that the manuscript copy was perhaps more resilient than even the revisionists have imagined (see Appendix 2.1). Its prevalence, according to these Shanghai researchers, persisted up to the close of the eighteenth century: of the 56,787 titles made in China before 1796 and presently held in 781 libraries in the People’s Republic of China, just less than half are, strictly speaking, imprint titles. That is, 30 percent of the titles recorded are hand copies (chaoben), 9 percent draft manuscripts ( gaoben), and 12 percent hand-annotated imprint titles ( jiaoben); the remaining 49 percent are the imprints. While this vast survey is far from comprehensive,32 its figures are large enough to suggest that manuscripts remained an important and arguably the dominant part of China’s textual culture and text reproduction up to as late as 1800, at least in its scholars’ collections. They also provide additional support for the revisionist view of only a sixteenth-century shift from manuscript to imprint book culture, since the printing and reprinting of many old and new titles in China’s publishing booms of 29. Seo Tatsuhiko, “The Printing Industry in Chang’an’s Eastern Market,” Memoirs of the Tōyō Bunko 2004: 1–42. Production of almanacs was long considered an imperial prerogative. 30. Inoue Susumu, Chūgogku shuppan bunka shi (Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku, 2002); and McDermott, Social History: 43–82. 31. Ibid. 32. Firstly, the compilers of the original 1980s catalog that served as the basis of these statistics are said to have omitted a large number of additional manuscripts in provincial libraries. Secondly, a new catalog of extant pre-1796 titles has been published, listing 9,000 or so additional titles. The precise format of these books, imprint or manuscript, has not yet been indicated in detail and calculated.

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the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries would have tended to reduce the manuscript copies’ share of the total number of copies of these titles in circulation at an earlier date. The pre-1700 nonimprints would surely have constituted an even smaller share of the overall book supply in previous centuries. The traditional view that the Song marked the transition of Chinese textual culture into the age of the imprint would seem, when examined carefully, a wobbly proposition. The role of commercial publishing in Song and post-Song publishing is complicated. The delayed adoption of printing at the very least suggests the delayed practice of commercial printing as well. Yet, the evidence for dating the extent of this delay is less precise than one would like, if only because all the figures we have are based inevitably on extant imprints rather than on titles actually composed and printed in these centuries. Since commercial printing covered a very wide range of subjects and since much of its production in the early centuries was of ephemera and topics not likely to find their way into the book collection catalogs of governments and private collectors, we unfortunately have no way to know how many titles were commercially printed at any time in pre-twentieth-century China. A nuanced view is nonetheless possible for the overall scope of commercial printing in the early centuries of Chinese publishing. From the mid-eighth to the mid-tenth centuries, commercial printing had for sure predominated only for certain genres of books: lexicons, unofficial almanacs, divination texts, dream interpretation books, medical texts, collections of model examination essays, and examination manuals. The subjects of these publications clearly show the use of this “new technology” for books on popular, especially religious, subjects. But they also suggest its relatively limited impact at this time on the circulation of books within the high tradition of literati writings that Chinese scholars and readers have commonly considered the mainstream of their culture and the focus of their collection activities.33 Admittedly, over the next three or four centuries, that is, during the Song dynasty, a considerable expansion in the production and scope of commercial printing took place. The area of Jianyang in the north of Fujian province became a celebrated center of commercial imprints, and the Southern Song capital of Hangzhou and the western city of Chengdu saw a notable increase in commercial printing as well. Their publications, in addition to the categories already mentioned, expanded to encompass religious manuals, illustrated fiction, literary compendia for nonelite readers, and a wide variety of utilitarian publications. A more lasting contribution from commercial publishers to the core Chinese textual tradition came with these same publishers’ issuance of an increasing number of editions of scholar-official and literati writings on literature, history, art, and thought. And so, commercial publishing may well have predominated in the vicinity of major publishing centers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But for the books now extant and for literati writings in general, only from 33. Chia, Printing for Profit: 6.

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the late sixteenth century do overall commercial imprint titles outnumber noncommercial imprint titles for sure. Yet, for whatever reason, strikingly little of this pre-Ming commercial production is extant. Just 5,100-odd imprint titles of all sorts, commercial as well as noncommercial, survive from the Song, Jin, and Yuan dynasties, when China’s overall population ranged at any time from 70 million to over 100 million persons.34 Of the 210 surviving Song imprint titles presently cataloged in the collections of the National Library in Beijing, the National Library in Taipei, and the Seikadō collection in Tokyo, the majority are noncommercial. And, from the tenth to the last third of the fifteenth century, one type of noncommercial imprint—government publishing—was alone responsible for virtually half of all the imprint titles that survive today in the National Library in Taipei. Seen from any of these vantage points, noncommercial and especially government publications account for a significant portion of the extant imprints published for China’s political elite up to the close of the fifteenth century. The category “government imprints,” it must be said, includes a larger range of titles than modern Westerners would infer from such a classification. First, there are the court editions, done by the Imperial Household, court institutions, or princely establishments elsewhere in the country. These imprints tended to set a very high standard of editorial and production quality for other publishers.35 Next come government office editions. These were linked sometimes to government work (e.g., almanacs, laws, edicts, and legal forms), sometimes to government schools’ teaching matter (e.g., the Confucian classics, other examination texts), and sometimes to no government matters at all but issued for sale to make money to support local schools or other good works.36 And, finally, many government imprints in the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties were printed and issued under government auspices from government institutions and with government funds but actually chosen by and for officials. These editions, more common at the local rather than central government level, tended to be of titles that the responsible official-publisher personally preferred, that he or his ancestor had written, or that he wished his name to be associated with. Upon publication, the woodblocks would belong to the issuing government office and remain with it as well. But their first run of imprints often ended up in the possession of the official in charge, as gifts to be sent to friends, as goods to be sold 34. This figure consists of about 3,500 titles inside China and another 1,683 outside it (European collections are excluded) (An Pingqiu, “Chūgoku, Nihon, Taiwan, Amerika jozai no Sō, Genban kanseki no gaishō,” in Ōsawa Akihiro, ed., Higashi Ajia shoshigaku e no shotai (Tokyo: Tōhō shoten, 2011), v. 1: 157–74, esp. 160–68. The Song imprint share appears to be roughly half and thus represents an increase over the (approximate) 1,500 figure previously known to scholars from Poon Ming-sun’s pioneering “Books and Printing in Sung China” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1979: 9–11, 219–466) listing all Song imprints for which the place of printing is known. 35. Zhang Xiumin, Zhongguo yinshua shi (Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji, 2009), v. 1: 46–48, 51–52, 198–99, 242–43, 251–53, 282–92. 36. Inoue Susumu, “Zōsho to dokusho,” Tōhō gakuhō 62 (1990): 409–26.

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to bookstores at the site of his next appointment, or as heirlooms to be conferred on descendants of their ancestors’ writings.37 In short, government imprints from the start were intended—and actually treated—by their “publisher” to be private imprints. What was “government” about these books was the identity of the funder and owner of the woodblocks.38 Given the variety of these noncommercial imprints, their inclusion from the late tenth century of many titles in the literati tradition, and their common use by Song and Ming officials as gifts, any commercial publication of serious literati writing, both old and new, would have faced a clear disadvantage in seeking sales from the same readership. The commercial imprints on serious topics that survive today from the Song through the Ming thus tend to be solid literati best sellers, such as an anthology of Tang-dynasty poetry, the writings of the famous scholar-official Su Shi (1037–1101), standard medical texts in new editions, anthologies of literati compositions, and some classical commentaries by noted scholars. One may argue that these observations reflect the collecting biases of traditional collectors and thus ignore a flood of popular commercial imprints that do not survive. Yet, the evidence so far assembled by Chinese and non-Chinese scholars points to the conclusion that a clear shift away from the nongovernment imprint in the Chinese world of book publishing came only at the turn into the sixteenth century, when a drop in the cost of paper and carving began to affect the cost of books and led to a surge in the commercial publication of examination manuals, honorific writings, and entertainment reading materials.39 This shift would initially involve, however, the rise of family, as opposed to strictly commercial, publishing.

Categories and Figures for the Ming To this general description of Ming publishing trends a statistical study by Katsuyama Minoru adds much detail and nuance. Drawing extensively on the bibliographical data in Du Xinfu’s list of 5,251 extant Ming imprints, Mingdai banke zonglu (A comprehensive list of Ming-dynasty publications), he has compiled a series of tables and charts that show a major increase in text production over the course of the Ming and basic changes to the relative importance of these imprints’ publishers (especially as regards whether a book’s publisher was a government office, a religious institution, a family firm, or a commercial house). He thereby argues for the growth of private printing in this expanding Ming book production and for the varying fate 37. Zhang Xiumin, Zhongguo yinshua shi: 56–63, 256–60, 274–81; and McDermott, Social History: 84–94. 38. See also the wise strictures against loose uses of terms like state, government, commercial, private, and family, by Martin J. Heijdra, in his review of Lucille Chia and Hilde de Weerdt, ed., Knowledge and Text Production in an Age of Print: China, 900–1400 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), in Journal of Asian Studies (Nov. 2012): 1099–102. 39. McDermott, Social History: 67–78.

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for different types of this private printing, the commercial and noncommercial (see Charts 3.1 and 3.2).40 Firstly, from 1400 to 1600, annual imprint production, expressed in decade-bydecade averages of new imprint titles, increased as much as twentyfold. During the fifteenth century, but for the 1468–77 decade, book publication showed steady growth. It reached a significant turning point in the early sixteenth century, when 60 50 40 Commercial 30

Family

20

Government

Temple-Shrine

10

1368 1378 1388 1398 1408 1418 1428 1438 1448 1458 1468 1478 1488 1498 1508 1518 1528 1538 1548 1558 1568 1578 1588 1598 1608 1618 1628 1638

0

Chart 3.1 Annual number of Ming imprint titles produced by decade and by type of publisher 100%

80%

60%

Commercial Family Temple-Shrine

40%

Government 20%

1368 1378 1388 1398 1408 1418 1428 1438 1448 1458 1468 1478 1488 1498 1508 1518 1528 1538 1548 1558 1568 1578 1588 1598 1608 1618 1628 1638

0%

Chart 3.2 Decadal shifts in the production share of Ming imprint titles by type of publisher 40. Katsuyama Minoru, “Mindai ni okeru hō kakubon no shuppan shōkyō ni tsuite—Mindai zenpan no shuppanshū kara miru kenyō hōkakubon ni tsuite,” in Isobe Akira, ed., Higashi Ajia shuppan bunka kenkyū, niwatazumi (Tokyo: Nigensha, 2004): 83–100.

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the average annual number of imprint titles doubled from fourteen in the 1508–17 decade to twenty-seven in the 1518–27 decade. Thereafter, for virtually the rest of the sixteenth century, imprint title figures continued to rise decade by decade, surging in the last third of this century and peaking at an average of forty-seven published titles per year during the last decade or so. Secondly, by identifying, whenever possible, the type of publication—the categories being the four mentioned as the common classifications of publisher beloved by modern book historians and bibliographers—for each title in Du Xinfu’s catalog, Katsuyama in Charts 3.1 and 3.2 has provided an overall account of these different types of publications’ share in the total number of book titles published under Ming rule. Of all published Ming imprint titles, government-issued publications accounted for 1.16 percent, temple and religious publications 0.11 percent, family publications 45.5 percent, and commercial publications 48 percent. Admittedly, variations in readers’ demands for specific titles, in publishers’ preferences for certain titles, and in the quality of woodblocks and their carving mean that the increased number of titles is no sure guide to total book publishing figures and the reading preferences and practices of book readers. Nonetheless, from no later than the end of the fifteenth century, Ming court and local government institutions clearly played a very insignificant part in Ming book-publishing activities, in sharp contrast to their apparently far greater role—as much as 48 percent of all extant published titles in the National Library in Beijing, the National Library in Taipei, and the Seikadō Library collection in Tokyo41—in the Song, the Yuan, and early Ming publishing worlds. Thirdly, and most germane to our present concerns, Katsuyama’s figures point to two significant changes in the relative share of Ming book title publications represented by different types of private, that is, nongovernment and nonreligious publications. Just as the mid-fifteenth century introduced more than a century when family publishing replaced government publishing as the principal sector of publishing activity, so did the 1570s mark another sea change in both private Ming publications and overall Ming publishing. From this time on, commercial publication is said to have replaced this private noncommercial family publication as the principal category of imprint for the rest of the Ming dynasty. Put statistically, this later shift is dramatic: whereas in the decade of 1538–47, noncommercial family publications accounted for 61.76 percent of the titles and commercial publications just 30.39 percent of the titles (in the year 1537 the former put out as much as 74.42 percent of all published titles in Du’s catalog), the last full decade of Ming publishing in Katsuyama’s Chart 3.1, 1628– 37, saw a reversal in the relative position of these types of publications. Commercial publications now represented 65.88 percent of the recorded imprint titles and private noncommercial family publications just 31.75 percent. By the year 1633, four times

41. Inoue, “Zōsho”: 426–29.

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as many recorded imprint titles were commercial rather than family publishers’ publications (79.25 percent versus 18.87 percent). This switch, in Katsuyama’s view, dates from the last two decades of the sixteenth century, when the printing of many novels and other types of entertainment titles expanded Ming publishing activity and greatly commercialized it. The overlapping of the previously different trajectories of Chinese and European publishing toward a strongly commercial basis of operating for imprints on virtually all subjects dates only from this period. Katsuyama’s figures for overall imprint title production and for four separate categories of publications constitute the largest collection of statistical data presently available on these topics, and at least some of the conclusions they point to are, I believe, very broadly accurate. Yet, as I suspect Katsuyama would acknowledge, these data have now come to be uncomfortably thin. Based solely on Du Xinfu’s Catalogue, it contains bibliographical information from just forty-four presentday Chinese book collections (mainly in Beijing and the Yangzi delta cities). Thus, in  addition to excluding the sizeable collections of Ming imprints in libraries in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Europe, and North America, it fails by far to match the domestic coverage of Chinese book holdings achieved in the two editions of Zhongguo guji shanben zongmu (A comprehensive catalog of old and rare Chinese books) and the more recent Zhongguo guji zongmu (A comprehensive catalog of old Chinese books [Shanghai, 2009–12]).42 All three catalogs include those used by Du plus hundreds of others inside and outside of China. Also, Katsuyama’s and Du’s coverage of these forty-four Chinese collections explicitly includes no Ming local gazetteers (usually government printed)43 and relatively few religious and especially lineage publications like genealogies. In short, their figures reflect the traditional concerns of literati collectors rather than wider book-production realities and thereby downplay the more popular and plebeian taste of the ordinary Ming reader. A more serious problem with Katsuyama’s statistics concerns his conclusions about the four conventional categories of publishers—government, temple and shrine, family, and commercial. Not only do these categories, as we have seen, have problems, not least their ambiguities and inability to encompass all the varieties of activity that went into the production of a Chinese book. But Katsuyama is either vague or inadequate at indicating his grounds for determining which of these categories is most apt for any of his 5,251 imprint titles (Du, on his part, merely arranges separate imprint titles under specific publishing houses and refrains from placing the publishers and their publications into any other category). For family publishing he provides the parenthetical identification of “metropolitan and provincial degree 42. Unfortunately, the data in this twenty-six-volume set await careful sifting and counting, as the grounds for assigning various titles to one edition remain to be clarified and confirmed, before they can be used for this kind of analysis. 43. Du Xinfu, Mingdai banke zonglu (Yangzhou: Jiangsu Guangling guji keyinshe, 1983), pref.: 16b.

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holders” ( jinshi juren).44 Presumably, he is talking about the actual publishers. If so, the use of this approach alone, as noted above, is a short way to obfuscation and confusion. Since more detailed research remains to be done on individual titles and editions, his research focus on publishers rather than publications has him push Du’s data arbitrarily into categories that conceal the complexities of the actual process of Ming book production and publishing. In sum, Katsuyama’s charts and incomplete figures can best be used to draft rough hypotheses to suggest but not conclude an argument about each of these points. His estimate of decadal book-production levels is based on data far too incomplete for charting overall levels of imprint production at different periods of the Ming. More detailed work is needed to build on this type of work to determine precisely when, where, and how the private sector of Ming book publishing in the sixteenth century made a sharp break from previous practice and became the dominant sector of the late imperial publishing world. On the separate question of different types of publishers’ varying shares in these overall production levels—especially the ascendance of commercial publishing—far more focused research is required if this conclusion is to persuade. Yet, his figures, read as rough indicators of changing trends, do support the hypothesis that private noncommercial printing represents a significant—and at times preponderant—portion of the entire body of extant Ming texts. It is this hypothesis that I wish to test and probe in the following section.

Huizhou Book Production: Complexities and Conclusions At this stage of our research, further analysis of private nonprofit publishing can benefit, I suggest, by adopting a local perspective,45 if only to discern concretely the changes in the relative importance of government and private publications as well as changes in the preponderant type of private publishers. In place then of Katsuyama’s empire-wide and three-century-long perspective, the spatial and temporal frames of reference in this section will be far more modest: they concentrate solely on the Huizhou area at the southern edge of present Anhui province and mainly on the last half of the Ming dynasty. This choice of locale makes sense for two reasons. Firstly, by the end of the sixteenth century, Huizhou had become an important center for the publication of books. Famed since the tenth century for the quality of its timber, paper, ink, and ink stones, it first produced a government imprint at the start of the eleventh century and a private imprint by no later than the early thirteenth century.46 Yet only in the middle of the sixteenth century did its imprints and prints—mainly in the private 44. Katsuyama, “Mindai ni okeru”: 87. 45. As in Lucille Chia’s study of Jianyang and Cynthia Brokaw’s study of Sibao, both in Fujian province. 46. Liu Shangheng: 17, 21.

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sector—commonly exhibit a quality worthy of its natural resources. Its woodblock carvers became celebrated for their carving skills, and its publishing houses for the quality of their paper, ink, prints, and printing methods.47 A more important reason for focusing on Huizhou is that its sources provide enough information to test and refine Katsuyama’s conclusions. Most relevant are the figures that Michela Bussotti has compiled for the number of extant imprint titles published in Huizhou during the Ming. Their publication dates, once they are chronologically arranged, largely confirm the trajectory of Ming publishing expansion that Katsuyama depicts in Chart 1. After very limited printing activity in the first nine decades of Ming rule, Huizhou publishing establishments printed 60 titles from 1457 to 1506, 190 titles from 1506 to 1566, ca. 380 titles from 1567 to 1620, and 120 to 130 from 1619 to 1644.48 This growth in total production to some 760 titles (an artificially low figure, as we will soon see) was paralleled by a remarkable surge in the number of Huizhou men—508 according to a recent survey by Xu Xuelin— who are known to have either individually or in a group published one or more titles during the Ming.49 Unsurprisingly, these trends were partly fuelled by a great expansion of book compilation and composition within Huizhou. Two-fifths of all its book titles recorded in the 1,500 years between 502 and 1827 were written or compiled in the Ming; or, more precisely, 1,546 Ming titles out of a total of 4,237 titles represents a threefold increase of the corresponding figure for the Song dynasty.50 Or, if we desire a wider if still only a provincial perspective, one-third of the 6,000 authors listed in Jiang Yuanqing’s authoritative Wanren shulu (Record of books by men from Anhui [province]) were Huizhou natives, and these 2,000 or so men composed a quarter of the total 17,000 titles this book has attributed to natives of Anhui province in all of Chinese history before 1912.51 In short, during the Ming, Huizhou became a very important center for both the composition and publication of books, and the chronological trajectory of its book production by and large matches that of Katsuyama’s chart for Ming China as a whole. Secondly, Katsuyama’s more qualitative conclusions about the two shifts in the identity of publishers during the Ming—from a publishing world dominated by government to nongovernment publishers and then from private noncommercial family publishing to one dominated by private commercial family publishing—can be refined by additional information. In particular, the considerable number of 47. Michela Bussotti, Gravures de Hui, Étude du livre illustré chinois ( fin de XVIe siècle-premiere motiée du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2001). 48. Michela Bussotti, “Zhongguo shuji shi ji yuedu shi lunlue—yi Huizhou wei li,” 68, in Michela Bussotti and Han Qi, eds., Zhongguo he Ouzhou: yinshua shu yu shuji shi (Beijing: Shangwu, 2008). The dates are those found in Bussotti’s essay. 49. Xu Xuelin, Huizhou keshu: 43–45. The corresponding figure given here for the Qing is 786. 50. Ibid.: 9. 51. Ibid.: 10.

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Ming Huizhou’s private noncommercial imprints prompts a close look at the role of numerous, large, and wealthy merchant lineages, many of whose members separately published books. By examining the complex relationship these families had with both commercial and noncommercial publishing during the Ming, we can see how they acquired a preeminent position in Huizhou’s publishing world overall and shaped its distinctive noncommercial character. Their wealthy members funded not just some key government publications but also the development of a profitable niche in market-based production of imprints in both traditional literati culture and more recent entertainment and literati texts. The Huizhou path to commercial printing, however distinctive, will then lead us to examine the broader implications of such a commercial sector for a publishing world whose production was so concerned with private printing not aimed for the market. The sway of noncommercial Ming publishing is underlined by the fact that these publishers were often members of highly successful merchant families well attuned to the workings of the market for a wide number of commodities. These publishers appear to have made enough profit from other kinds of commerce to keep at least some of their publications noncommercial.

Government publications Seventy-nine extant imprint titles, three-fifths issued by Huizhou’s prefectural government office and two-fifths by its county offices, have been designated “Ming government publications” by recent research. Nearly a third of them are local gazetteers. The other two-thirds cover a wide range of books, but almost all of them deal with scholar-official thought and culture.52 Their publication, again as expected, overwhelmingly predates 1523. But, as the publishing date for more than three-quarters of the fifty-seven non-gazetteer titles is concentrated between 1466 and 1523, they account for about half of the titles that Bussotti has determined were printed during this period. Thus, just at the time when family publications were beginning to become prevalent in the lower Yangzi delta, these figures suggest that Huizhou’s government offices had now become highly active publishers in Huizhou, accounting in these fifty-four years for a major share of Huizhou’s total production of imprints then. Thereafter, however, government book publishing quickly receded and became a minor player in Huizhou’s thriving publishing industry.53

52. That is, government publications in Huizhou, as elsewhere, included a ruling magistrate’s or prefect’s own writings, those of his ancestor or teacher, of a famous local Huizhou figure, of a proponent of the examination orthodoxy of the Zhu Xi school, as well as of some other local writers with a countrywide reputation. 53. Liu Shangheng: 40–46; and Xu Xuelin: 31–35. The former lists seven prefectural gazetteers and seventeen county gazetteers; the latter claims five and twenty-five, respectively, but as it does not identify them, I prefer to accept the former’s figures.

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Yet, there are problems with this high assessment for government publishing between 1466 and 1523. For sure, government printing activities in Huizhou during these five decades may well have been more significant than in other periods of the Ming and than Huizhou’s commercial printing in this period. But, Bussotti’s and Du’s figures omit enough genealogy titles from this period so that adjusted overall figures would have government imprints actually account for less than half of the titles published in Huizhou during these years. Furthermore, as seen in the publication history of two well-known collections of local writings by and about Huizhou men and institutions—the Xin’an wencui (1460) compiled by Jin Dexuan and Su Jingyuan and the Xin’an wenxian zhi (1491) compiled by Cheng Minzheng—some Huizhou families helped to finance the publication of these ostensibly “government” imprints. The first, and the shorter, of these compilations appeared under government auspices in 1460, only after twenty-seven private Huizhou individuals (from twelve different surname groups) had agreed to “help the carving (zhukan)” with a collective donation of about 30 ounces (liang) of silver.54 This contribution may not have paid for the bulk of the expense of carving blocks and printing versions of this text, some 341 sheets long, but it helped to assure the manuscript’s publication, already delayed for decades since its compilation by Jin. Private and public parties thus cooperated in an ostensibly “government” publishing venture with a decidedly local appeal and local base of support. Interestingly, only one of these donors ever acquired an official degree or position, and the book’s editor identifies all the donors merely as “rich families ( fujia) of our prefecture.”55 The production process for the second, and much larger, of these Huizhou compilations reveals far greater private financial involvement (in what was still billed as “government publishing”) and greater involvement of Huizhou degree and post holders in the ranks of donors.56 On the one hand, financial support for this publishing project mainly came from 250 local individuals listed at the end of the published book as “the descendants of former worthies and righteousness-revering families who delight in helping with the wages and food [of the workers].” Registered as living in 100 specified communities in the six counties of Huizhou (Xiuning [95] and She [51] counties account for over half of all these local donors), they represent the interests of some 130 surname groups (which then were by and large separately functioning 54. Jin Dexuan and Su Jingyuan, comps., Xin’an wencui (National Library of China Collection, microfilm), last sheet, following the book’s postfaces. Unfortunately, this sheet, at least in the microfilm copy, has been torn, and so two or three names plus the size of one or two donations remain unclear. 55. Ibid.; and Huizhou fuzhi (1699), 10.16a, which identifies the first name in this list, Wang Yongan, as a tribute student chosen between 1432 and 1441; he rose to become magistrate of Longyu county in Zhejiang province. 56. Cheng Minzheng, Xin’an wenxian zhi (Hefei: Huangshan shushe, 2004), 95, xia: 2,616. Its 100 chapters make it six to seven times longer than the Xin’an wencui’s 16 chapters.

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lineages). Neither the cost nor the expense is specified, but certain figures given for their purchase and carving of woodblocks—1,600-plus woodblocks and 1.2 million characters—indicate the scale of the project and the necessary level of their contribution (a Ming prefect’s official salary was paltry, barely enough to live off ). Nearly ten times as many persons were listed as its supporters than had been for the Xin’an wencui, as the issuance of yet another “government publication” was being paid for by private individuals and their families. On the other hand, these 250 individuals had not been the main organizers for this publication of writings by and about local men and their institutions. From start to finish a few government officials remained in charge of the project, initiating and directing the publication in the direction they wished even while lacking the public funds to accomplish it on their own. The initial stimulus for the printing of this huge compilation of compositions by Huizhou natives came from a local prefect, that is, a non-Huizhou person, who was impressed by the manuscript of the book shown him in 1489 by its well-known compiler, Cheng Minzheng. In the following year this same official, by then promoted to a provincial position, put further pressure on Huizhou’s serving officials and wealthy residents to contribute to this publication. He gave a second order to have the book printed, donated part of his official salary (as did his replacement as Huizhou prefect), obliged ten other officials serving in Huizhou to announce their support for the project, and called on locals to make their contributions. The central role of serving officials (not really the government) may have derived from the still minor share of official degree or post holders among the book’s local donors: just 20 percent had a degree or official position. Yet, with this mixture of official management and local commoner funds, it is not surprising to read that the site where the book’s woodblocks were eventually carved was not a government office. It was a Buddhist temple (sengshe) off in the mountains south of Xiuning county seat, chosen presumably for its convenience of access to newly felled timber for woodblocks and the subsequent ease of their storage in the temple’s halls and adjoining buildings. In short, these two Huizhou “government imprints” are hybrid publications, whose process of funding and production ill fits the clear-cut distinctions that modern bibliographers have used for categorizing Chinese imprints. Yet, instead of complaining about the inadequacies of these categories, it is wiser to see in these “impurities” an indication of the actual diffusion of power and authority in this area from the yamen to the wealthy and the officially titled. To that extent, the complex involvement of the different local parties in this publication speaks volumes about the evolution of state-society relations over the course of the mid-Ming and thus the strength of families and lineages’ involvement in the publication of books, even “government books,” in Huizhou.

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Lineage involvement in private publishing The basis for any claim of the predominance of private noncommercial printing in Huizhou during the second and third centuries of Ming rule is the great number of Huizhou family and lineage publications, privately published and privately distributed not for profit. These works, by my estimate, account for over half of all extant Huizhou imprint titles from the Ming and thus constitute the largest single category of extant publications from Ming Huizhou. Although some of these titles are listed in rare book catalogs like that of the National Library, only occasionally are they found in traditional-style Chinese bibliographies like Du’s, which are overwhelmingly concerned with literati writings and the government record. Surprisingly perhaps, these genealogies are largely absent also from Bussotti’s figures, doubtless because she too has had to depend on Chinese library catalog listings, which, to repeat, have tended to omit this kind of imprint. Of these private family publications, the best-known type of imprint is the lineage genealogy. Though often overlooked in modern bibliographers’ book listings, large numbers of these Huizhou imprints survive in Chinese libraries and institutes today. Two figures have been provided for all those titles from Huizhou, irrespective of their date of compilation or publication: 778 in virtually all government-run Chinese libraries today and “close to 2,000” presently in the hands of both libraries and private families.57 As the first figure unfortunately omits the hundreds of unique titles surviving in China’s largest genealogy collection, that of the Shanghai Library, the actual total figure for Huizhou’s genealogies in present-day China’s libraries must be considerably more than 778. With this comprehensive nationwide library figure thus well over 1,000, Xu Xuelin’s estimate of 2,000—based on library research and knowledge of local conditions in Huizhou—appears more reasonable than the far lower figure of 778. Surviving from the Ming dynasty alone are approximately 330 genealogy titles, 256  (about three-quarters) of which are imprints. Even after they are added to Bussotti’s figures for total extant Huizhou publications in the Ming, these 256 Ming Huizhou printed genealogies represent a quarter of all surviving Ming Huizhou published titles. Their weight in the entire Huizhou historical record becomes even clearer from two other facts. Firstly, Huizhou genealogies were reprinted and in some cases recarved into distinct editions issued regularly every two or three generations. Hence, the total number of all surviving titles from Ming- and Qing-dynasty Huizhou comes to just 4,000 titles, of which more than 800 (about 20 percent) are its extant genealogies. Two particularly flourishing periods for their publication in the Ming were the early sixteenth century, when many of Huizhou’s lineages were tightening up 57. Zhongguo jiapu zonghe mulu (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1997), on the basis of a survey of all surnames listed herein; and Xu Xuelin, Huizhou keshu: 47.

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their formal organization, and the early seventeenth century, when they seem to have been consolidating a century’s growth in power and influence. Thus, this noncommercial printing tradition remained strong well into the third century of Ming rule, even when, according to Katsuyama’s statistics (based mainly on lower Yangzi delta imprints and collections), it supposedly gave way to commercial publishing. Secondly, lineage noncommercial publishing in Huizhou consisted of far more than genealogies. These types of imprints, virtually all of which have escaped the attention of traditional bibliographers like Du Xinfu, concern the entire scope of family and lineage activities, showing how “common” the printed book had become in their circles in late Ming Huizhou. Educated men there regularly compiled verse and prose contributions to celebrate the fiftieth, sixtieth, seventieth, and eightieth birthdays of family members with the issue of a new title. Though they constitute one of the most popular types of family publications (prefaces to such incidental commemorations take up, for instance, four full chapters of the Taihan ji [Collected writings of Wang Daokun]), they are rarely if ever listed in a book collector’s catalog. They simply were not seriously collected even by the descendants of those who sponsored them. In addition, collections of ancestors’ writings, gravesite contracts and location lists, family instructions, accounts of migration, ancestral hall appeals, hall construction accounts, legal case decisions, ritual prescriptions, lineage-wide agreements, and even a member’s diary—the list of book types along such lines could be doubled—were commonly printed by the major Huizhou lineages in the Ming.58 These imprints were intended for distribution solely to lineage members, to prevent others from using their private information to claim for undeserved benefits.59 Their omission from book collectors’ catalogs is perfectly understandable. We are led, then, to a pair of no longer surprising conclusions and one intriguing hypothesis. First, the genealogy was probably the most common and most representative type of imprint title in Ming and Qing Huizhou even though it was usually kept away from the sight of others, including many lineage members who did not receive their own copy. Second, as genealogies were not for sale and were normally published by a lineage or by some of its wealthier members,60 and as there were many other types of lineage-related publications sponsored by Huizhou lineages, private noncommercial printing was overall a very common, and in all likelihood the most common, 58. For example, see the titles listed in the rare book catalog of the National Library (Beijing tushuguan guji shanben mulu) (Beijing: Shumu wenxian, 1989): 505, 513, 516, 519, 520, 531. 59. Ibid.: 341–45. 60. Xu Xiaoman, “‘Preserving the Bonds of Kin’: Genealogy Masters and Genealogy Production in the Jiangsu–Zhejiang Area in the Qing and Republican Periods”: 332–71, in Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005). To the best of my knowledge, the use of non-kin to compile a lineage’s genealogy was not practiced in Ming Huizhou, in contrast to the lower Yangzi delta in the Qing dynasty, as Xu relates.

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type of imprint publishing in Ming Huizhou. Any decisive shift from the family to the commercial publication in the late Ming seems to have been much weaker in Huizhou than Katsuyama found in China as a whole. Indeed, the popularity of such lineage publications leaves us with a surprising hypothesis. Since prolonged disorder in the second half of the seventeenth century led to a serious economic downturn that would have damaged Huizhou’s commercial publishing, the ongoing publication of lineage genealogies and other noncommercial private publications (up to the twentieth century) make it possible that commercial printing never really gained a clear predominance, if any predominance, in publishing activities within Huizhou. Its role would have been important for Huizhou publishers primarily outside of Huizhou.

Commercial family publishers and publications This conclusion holds true in a direct analysis of the data about Huizhou’s commercial publishers. In fact, any study of Huizhou’s commercial publishing is confronted with a paradox: the slow arrival and reluctance or inability of Huizhou men to dominate the Ming publishing world despite their wealth, their access to excellent local resources, and the strong interest of some of them in publishing books. No fewer than forty-three Ming publishing houses are listed by Du and others as commercial publishers in Huizhou prefecture and its counties. As publishers they enjoyed considerable advantages over their contemporary rivals, commercial as well as noncommercial, elsewhere. They had ready and cheap access to the necessary natural and material resources (hard woods, pure water, quality inks, fine paper). Huizhou’s carvers were highly skilled, and from the mid-Ming some of them, like the Qiu and Huang families, won a well-deserved reputation for the delicacy and elegance of their carving.61 Huizhou’s notable book collectors, no fewer than fifty in the Ming dynasty alone, had separately and collectively accumulated an impressive body of texts that could be used to produce new editions of rare titles.62 Its merchants had developed highly profitable and extensive connections to many of the wealthiest markets of the empire, particularly in the Yangzi valley and south China, where they were commonly considered the most powerful regional group of merchants. And, many of these book merchants themselves were wealthy. The capital required to be a publisher (usually to buy and carve woodblocks) had been accumulated in abundance by a fair number of Huizhou families from their work as salt merchants, grain traders, and pawnbrokers as well as from inherited wealth.63

61. Zhou Wu, Huipai banhua shi lunji (Hefei: Anhui renmin, 1984); and Bussotti, Gravures: 175–79. 62. Liu Shangheng: 63–68; and Fan Fengshu, Zhongguo sijia cangshu shi (Zhengzhou: Daxiang, 2001): 168–87. 63. Fujii Hiroshi, “Shin’an shōnin no kenkyū (2),” Tōyō gakuhō 36.2 (1953): 32–60.

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These investments were realized sometimes with ruthless guile, as witness the case of the otherwise inconsequential Huizhou merchant Cheng Rong. With a fortune made from commodity trading, Cheng overnight became famous as an important book collector. He bought 100 or so already edited manuscripts of hard-to-acquire titles from a rare book collector and then had these Han and Wei dynasties’ texts carved into woodblocks and published in 1600 with himself listed as the compiler (bian). He thereby realized his goal of winning permanent fame as educated and civilized, since these titles reconstituted as the Han Wei Collecteana became in the eyes of subsequent bibliographers the first privately printed “comprehensive collectanea” of texts in Chinese history.64 Several Huizhou publishers of note established publishing houses that remained active for two or three successive generations.65 Furthermore, several publishers showed an interest in technological novelties, publishing Western calendars, reengravings of Western prints and maps with the use of Roman letters, and information on Western astronomical instruments.66 As a group then, the Huizhou book publishers had access to, if not also ownership of, capital, materials, distribution networks, books, and experience to a degree matched by few of their regional rivals in the Ming book trade. Why, then, did books, especially books that their family or other Huizhou families published, not become a central part of their marketing merchandise? Why did they, already the foremost traders in timber and rice, not realize their potential to become south China’s foremost book publishers as well? These questions, while reasonable and necessary, probably misunderstand how book publishing fit into the strategy of at least some of the major Huizhou publishing families. As can be seen from a list of their publications, Huizhou commercial publishers commonly printed books that had a market narrower than that of most late Ming commercial publications. By and large, they did not promote two genres of writing whose publication had fuelled the late Ming surge in commercial publishing: entertainment literature (e.g., fiction, drama) and examination manuals. Admittedly, a few exceptions can be found: the notable dramatist-publisher Wang Tingna, who published his own plays with striking illustrations that aroused much interest, and Hu Wenhuan, who likewise published his own plays and other writings.67 Yet, the firm of the first was based in Nanjing as well as in Huizhou and the second operated only in Hangzhou. Moreover, the normal topics of Huizhou publication (pace their Western novelty theme) were far less adventuresome in their selection of texts for publication: Tang-dynasty poetry in verse, Sima Guang’s writings in history, Zhu Xi’s 64. Liu Shangheng: 73; and Xu Xuelin, Huizhou keshu: 81–82. For the occurrence of this practice elsewhere in the Ming, see Chia: 157 and 165. 65. For example, Xu Xuelin, Huizhou keshu: 80 (Wang Xie-Wang Zongni), 88 (Wu Guan-Wu Yue), 92–93 (Zheng Siming and his descendants). 66. Ibid.: 74–76, 90, 106. 67. Xu Xuelin, Huizhou keshu: 64, 98–101.

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in philosophy, and Tang and Song doctors in medicine.68 They tended to choose dead authors for publication, even in the categories of entertainment literature and examination composition. When they did put out a contemporary writer of literature or thought, they preferred to promote the writings of more conservative Ming stylists like Wang Shizhen (1526–90). Yet, this default recourse to conservative taste and clever business tactics only begs the question of why these men had this particular focus, which appears not to have aimed so keenly at what we today would call “market share.” A clue to understanding the underlying reason for this focus may be found in these publishers’ stress on high-quality products. Their regular use of quality paper, ink, and carving as well as a careful editing process resulted in high-end products whose prices would have put many ordinary readers out of their targeted market. The Huizhou illustrations that won applause from bibliophiles and collectors made their books even less affordable to ordinary readers, who were mostly interested in fiction, drama, and examination manuals. Their publications of these types of works or more commonly the standard literary works often have an elegance that declares their commitment to an elite literati culture, even if they themselves did not create it. It is as if Huizhou publishers or their families, after they had acquired great profits from trading in mass consumer goods like salt, fish, grain, and cotton textiles, sought through these publications to distance themselves from their customers and colleagues in their usual markets. Publishing was only one (and probably one of the least remunerative) of these families’ commercial activities, and, as in the cases of Cheng Rong and possibly Wu Mianxue, their publications would have been meant to improve their social position as much as their account book.

The Uses of Private “Noncommercial” Printing As a result of the importance of private noncommercial printing in Song, Yuan, and Ming publishing, books in late imperial China arguably circulated in three contrasting modes: a network based on often degree-holders’ privileged access to government publications, a market-based network of transactions open to everyone able to afford the purchase of a book, and a personalized network of exchanges restricted to those with the social contacts that qualified them to receive a newly printed title as a gift. These extremely contrasting practices certainly existed (as did outright gifts from religious institutions and the traditional practice of lending books to close friends), but the ability of a Chinese book to circulate is in most cases more accurately and instructively measured along a varying scale of openness or secrecy. Two well-known models of circulation—one mapped out by Robert Darnton for the different parties engaged in producing and distributing book knowledge and another proposed by 68. Du Xinfu, 4, shang, 8a–28a, for a listing of 381 Huizhou titles.

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Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker for the circulation of books themselves among institutional and individual collections—are initially helpful for suggesting the extent of a Chinese imprint’s circulation.69 Yet, these two Western models are market-based and so are not necessarily relevant to the initial circulation process of private noncommercial Chinese imprints. Private family imprints, such as were common in the second century of Ming rule, need a distinct circulation model that allows for highly variable, even conflicting paths of book circulation. With their contents, format, paper, and other production details all determined by the family, these imprints at times had a very limited circulation, being kept tightly within the control of a kinship group. At other times, such as in the late eleventh century in the Song and the early seventeenth century in the Ming, they could be public, even very public, when scholar-officials published their own work privately to inform and shape educated, especially official, opinion on past and present political issues. In surveying here the various degrees of privateness and publicness for private noncommercial imprints, I will start with the most private and restricted mode of circulation within a kinship group, then move on to family filtering of the record to shape its public reputation, and end with a consideration of this use of private noncommercial publishing to shape private and ultimately scholarofficial opinion on public matters. The aim, then, is to see how private publishing was basic to the development of a Chinese political culture, whose members—officials and scholars—would have been by the late Ming more informed about the workings of their government than were the political elite of other countries in East Asia and arguably much of Western Europe up until the eighteenth or nineteenth century. By starting with the more restrictive end of the spectrum for the circulation of private noncommercial publishing we can engage with the family-based nature of much of this type of publishing, as some imprints published by families and lineages were for strictly private consumption within a family or larger kinship group. As mentioned, very few of the great number of genealogies and other lineage publications printed in south China during the Ming ended up in the catalogs of public or private book collections until the second half of the twentieth century. Their reception in post-1949 Chinese public collections was initially cool. Rejected as thoroughly biased and inaccurate histories, many were destroyed not only by the Red Guards and other radical groups but also by library staff convinced that these books were full of feudal lies and errors.70 Where they were accepted, they won admission at least as much for being examples of historical printing as for being historical documents. 69. Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111.3 (1982): 65–83; and Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker, “A New Model for the Study of the Book”: 5–43, in Nicolas Barker, ed., A Potencie of Life: Books in Society (London: British Library, 1993). 70. Xu Xiaoman, “‘Preserving the Bonds of Kin’: Genealogy Masters and Genealogy Production in the Jiangsu–Zhejiang Area in the Qing and Republican Periods”: 332–67, in Brokaw and Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, provides much useful comment on the uses of

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One type of lineage publication that suffered even more restricted circulation was the lineage account book, such as Doushan gong jiayi (The family agreements of Lord Doushan). This book details the management rules and history of the property of the largest and wealthiest branch of the Cheng lineage of Shanhe in Qimen county. Compiled in the early 1540s by a retired official who was a member of this branch, it was printed first in 1545 and then slightly revised and reprinted in 1575, after a fire in 1565 had destroyed the original woodblocks. But from its first printing up to apparently the start of the eighteenth century, it was printed once every ten years in regular ten-copy batches, apparently to match the ten-year cycle of the government’s population censuses.71 Each imprint copy was to be used initially as a yearly account and rule book. Over the course of a fiscal year it recorded not just the branch’s revenue from its listed properties and other assets but also its expenditures in managing these estates and the branch’s other activities. At the same time, each imprint copy was to serve all managers as a rule book on land, labor, and lineage management. Upon the completion of a year’s record keeping, each of these imprints—its printed rent quota figures now accompanied by figures brushed in with ink to record the actual rental income that year from each paddy field—was to be preserved by the branch as part of its archival record, to be referred to in family disputes over property and management practice. Once printed and filled with data, these books were locked up in a designated iron box. Although they were to be consulted for their rules and historical information, they could be removed from this box only with permission from all the trust’s managers, just one of whom held onto the box’s key. Likewise, the woodblocks carved with this text—well over two hundred—were kept under locked lineage storage.72 Though several later publications of the lineage mention this book’s title, no publicly available text did so, to the best of my knowledge, until around 1980. Meanwhile, the branch reprinted copies from its woodblocks until at least the early eighteenth century and claimed control over these imprints right up to the 1950s. Used or not, these imprints were considered part of its archives and thus kept hidden from all outsiders. Some branch members as well complained of not having access to copies old as well as new. Yet, many private noncommercial imprints enjoyed a more public dissemination. Sometimes, the publisher desired to assure the long-term future of the imprint’s text.73 genealogies; her comments at the Oregon conference where this paper was first presented indicated the discarding of many genealogies during mid-twentieth-century political movements. Note that the use of professional genealogy masters in the latter half of the Qing period was not common in the Ming; I have seen no evidence of the practice in Ming Huizhou. 71. Cheng Chang, Doushan gong jiayi jiaozhu, eds. Zhou Shaoquan and Zhao Yaguan (Hefei: Huangshan shushe, 1993), shuoming: 1, 5–8. 72. Ibid.: 8. 73. An introductory discussion of this goal is found in Ye Shusheng and Yu Minhui, Ming Qing Jiangnan siren keshu shilue (Hefei: Anhui daxue, 2000): 145–86.

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He would distribute his luxuriously produced copies of well-known editions, free of charge, to famous collectors, with the hope that the recipients would accept his copy and eventually insert it and its publisher’s name into the published catalog of his collection or even reprint it with the original publisher’s name.74 Being gifts for men with common disinterested commitments, these books cloaked active patron-client ties among officials, particularly those returning to the capital from a provincial post and anxious now for a court appointment.75 Other times, the publisher published his own compositions (or those of a father or friend). His explicit aim was usually either to honor a text worthy of a wider readership or to expand knowledge for the betterment of the world (books by artisans and tradespeople in Ming China are alas far fewer than in Enlightenment Paris). Most often, we can surmise, the real quest was the author’s greater glory, especially if as a rejected author he was desperate to see his name in print, whatever the cost, and so disprove his critics. Such imprints inevitably have more than a whiff of “vanity publishing,” especially when they were entitled “Collected Writings” to honor and memorialize a close, usually deceased family member, to whom the publisher felt indebted. This genre of imprint, conventionally containing a wide range of verse and/or prose compositions by an individual, accounts for a substantial portion of the surviving Ming textual record, and a fair number of them are stuffed with socially obligatory compositions distinguished primarily by their recondite language and skillful expression of clichés. For example, the most recent edition of the collected writings of the mid-Ming high official Fei Hong consists of twenty chapters ( juan), four of which are devoted to his verse, four to biographies, two to honorific expressions and memorials, one apiece to local records, to lectures and talks, to letters and encomia, and one to sacrificial texts, colophons, appeals, discussions, and miscellaneous compositions, and six to prefaces.76 Of the 177 prefaces, over half introduce collections of writing by him and others to see off another official retiring or moving to a new appointment. In all, well over half of this collection is sweet talk. And so, it is not surprising that in the year 2007, one of the editors for this volume, published by the Shanghai Old Books Bookstore (Shanghai guji shudian), was a descendant of the mid-Ming author and that the other editor is a native of the author’s home county in Jiangxi province. All an exasperated reader can say is that at least it is not as vain an exercise in self-promotion

74. The equivalent today is the regular presentation of privately printed Chinese publications, even collectanea, to major overseas institutional libraries by Chinese anxious to assure that their name (and sometimes even their poetry) survives the next millennium (and will somehow gain admission into future poetry anthologies). 75. McDermott, Social History: 90–91. 76. Fei Hong, Fei Hong ji (Shanghai: Guji, 2007).

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as the Collected Works of one unnamed Ming author—two-thirds of his published Collected Works was reportedly ghostwritten for him.77 A less obvious and ultimately more deceptive type of vanity imprint occurred when the author or his family sought to have the first public edition of his writings become the accepted standard version. The author (or his family) excised from his collected writings any material judged detrimental to his and his family’s reputation; in other words, his Collected Works or Complete Collected Works were actually, despite their title, his Selected Works. A classic instance of this practice concerns the treatment of the writings of the great Suzhou painter and calligrapher Wen Zhengming (1470–1559). This master of the Suzhou literati school of painting has left nearly 1,000 poems and several prose compositions that have come to constitute his Collected Writings. Recent bibliographical studies have shown how important his descendants were in the editing and publishing of these writings even while he was alive. Their editing, plus their work on two other selected editions that survived in manuscript in his family’s possession, have determined the contents of all subsequent editions of his writings, including the most recent 2003 edition published, once again, by the Shanghai Old Books Bookstore.78 Its editor, Zhou Daozhen, has also carefully coedited a biographical chronology of Wen that is based on prose and poetry that Wen composed for his paintings and pieces of calligraphy.79 All of these editions, regardless of their editor’s diligence, contain few pieces of verse not included in the family’s first private edition of its most famous member’s writings. Yet, none of these editions includes a single reference to ten surviving letters that Wen sent to his sons from Beijing during his unhappy visit there from 1523 to 1525. These letters recount the slights and misfortunes that Wen suffered at the hands, it seems, of almost everyone he met in Beijing, from the eunuchs to the high officials and from the horse trader to his landlord. They give the distinct impression that he was not appreciated in the capital by both his obvious betters and his supposed inferiors. “My official position,” he writes, “is low; my salary is small. I cannot support myself. I am afraid I cannot stay very long. For two days now I have wanted to write to second uncle, third uncle and elder brother. However, I am in a bad state of mind—and without a single vacant day writing poems and compositions for social occasions.” Furthermore, although Wen has regularly been presented in subsequent accounts of Chinese painting as a paragon of the literati painter indifferent to commercial concerns, these letters of his from Beijing constantly harp on about money matters, the high cost of buying or renting a house and his piddling government salary: “here what I receive in salary is like that of a servant. It is just enough to meet 77. Sawada Masahiro, “Ban Min bungaku no kumon—sakubun irai no taiei shite miru,” Daitō bunka daigaku kangaku shi 26 (1987): 44. 78. Wen Zhengming, Wen Zhengming ji (Shanghai: Guji, 1987). 79. Zhou Daozhen and Zhang Yuezun, comps., Wen Zhengming nianpu (Shanghai: Baijia, 1998).

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my daily expenses.” This string of private complaints, about the insults and indignities he was forced to endure and about a cost of living he could not afford, did not fit the image that his children wished to impart to their Suzhou contemporaries and posterity. Consequently, these letters survive today only in their original manuscript form, undoubtedly saved from oblivion only by the vibrancy and reputation of Wen’s calligraphy.80 Blotches of ink, cross-outs, rushed abbreviations, and a striking directness in his brushstrokes testify to a level of anger and resentment, which the original editors of his Collected Writings did their best to silence. If, then, we must be alert to vanity publishers’ excisions of passages from the editions on our shelves, there were still some private parties who relied on private funding and publishers to air and spread their contentious views. This use of private noncommercial publications is related to two issues central to any assessment of Chinese political culture: the degree of political criticism tolerated by the government and the impact of state censorship practices. No simple comprehensive answer is valid for either of these questions, since so much depended on the status and connections of the offender, the place and time of the offense, and the person or policy subjected to criticism. Ming official records are full of officials not punished for their criticism of government policies and practices (less so for their criticism of a reigning emperor), and scholars and officials could learn a considerable amount about the governments of their time from publications, government and nongovernment alike. Yet, Ming emperors, their eunuchs, and high court officials could turn at will on any of their critics, arbitrarily punishing them and suppressing the publication of their writings. Not content with muzzling the offender, they also had offending books and woodblocks burned, the books’ owners beaten, and their publishers punished. These harsh acts of censorship have received strikingly different assessments from modern scholars. Some speak of literary inquisitions and a hell for scholarofficials, others of a reign of terror and fear, and others (usually not Chinese) of a government that found it far easier to ban books than to keep readers from reading them, easier to threaten punishments for authors and publishers than actually to inflict them. Certainly, Ming laws on censorship were far less comprehensive and consistent than were their Song counterparts (and less rigorously enforced than their Qing successors).81 Whereas the Song government during the course of the eleventh century gradually spread its controls over an increasingly wider net of book world

80. Richard Edwards, The Art of Wen Cheng-ming (1470–1559) (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1976): 86–92. The historical provenance of these letters is not clear, but by the mid-twentieth century they were in the hands of the Suzhou collector Wang-go Weng. Precisely when and how they left the Wen family’s control is not indicated. 81. Lin Ping, Songdai jinshu yanjiu (Chengdu: Sichuan daxue, 2010); and R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Ch’ien-lung Era (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987).

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activities, people, and writing genres,82 the first and third Ming emperors in roughly the first six decades of their dynasty focused their controls on banning specific books already printed, on punishing their authors harshly, and on beating the collectors of “books that one ought to ban” (ying jin zhi shu).83 The use of vague umbrella terms as these in Ming law can be read as an indication of government disinterest in censorship. More accurately, I think, they should be seen as designed to allow the Ming government to act legally when and how it wished; that is, to rule more by fear than by brute force. In the sixteenth century, Ming government controls over private publishing became more focused but were still not institutionalized in the Song manner. The court banned and ordered officials to burn certain books and their woodblocks for violating morality (1521), the books and the woodblocks of specific unorthodox authors like Wang Yangming and Chen Ruoshui (1537), private academies’ publications (1537, 1538), and Buddhist and unauthorized examination essay manuals (1587). Only from 1601—in the wake of a seemingly coordinated campaign by some officials against the unconventional thinker Li Zhi—did the Ming order the establishment of prepublication inspection requirements for books and threaten to punish the texts’ commercial publishing houses (shufang). Yet, as was recognized at the time, the impact of these bans was uneven and short-lived.84 When we shift our focus to Ming imprints themselves—and especially the private noncommercial imprints—it is easy to see why many modern non-Chinese scholars have downplayed the impact of these government bans and decrees. Privately compiled and privately published histories of the Ming flourished in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century book markets.85 Government and official denunciations of a book appear in the long run to have only increased its reputation and circulation.86 Local students and scholars at times published sheets of criticism against unpopular gentry and yamen officials, apparently without official retaliation.87 The (in)famous cultural critic Li Zhi, having retired from officialdom, was arrested on charges of “corrupting public morals” with writings like Lishi Fenshu (Mr. Li’s book for burning) and Shuo shu (Writings and talks), both printed privately by him in 1590 for 82. 83. 84. 85.

Inoue, Chūgoku: 124–39. Li Mingshan, ed., Zhongguo gudai banquan shi (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian, 2012): 176–79. Inoue, Min Shin: 110–45. Wolfgang Franke, “Historical Writing During the Ming”: 756–70, in Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, The Cambridge History of China: Volume 7, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 86. Ibid.: 78–82: “Prohibition is actually the most effective form of advertisement”; and Inoue, Min Shin: 131. 87. See Cecilia Carrington Riely, “Tung Ch’i-ch’ang’s Life”: 417, in Wai-Kam Ho and Judith G. Smith, eds., The Century of Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555–1636) (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Atkins Museum, in association with the University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1992), vol. 2, for mention of handbills used by some Songjiang area residents to defend their kin from others’ oral denunciation.

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Fig. 3.2 The first page in a copy of a banned title, Li Zhi, Lishi Fenshu (Mr Li’s book for burning) (Wanli era, 1573–1620, edition) (courtesy of the Naikaku Bunko Library, Tokyo). Chinese woodblock books as a rule begin with a title page ( fengmian). Its absence in this copy (as well as in another copy of this title in the Naikaku collection) possibly suggests its omission by the publisher or vendor or its removal by a reader in the face of state censorship of Li’s writings.

private distribution (see Fig. 3.2). But he suffered only a relatively light sentence of house arrest for his books, and his books, privately printed and privately distributed before being reprinted by pirate publishers to meet readers’ demands, grew ever more popular partly because of the notoriety they acquired from officials’ denunciations and government bans.88 His decision to cut his throat and die in jail was prompted by despair less over state censorship than over the shabby “public morality” that dominated official life and respectable society. Other major Ming social and political critics relied for at least the initial issue of their writings on private noncommercial publishing, and for most of the sixteenth century they appeared posthumously. For instance, according to Nagatomi Seiji’s comprehensive study, the highly influential and in some quarters highly controversial 88. Inoue, Min Shin: 119–21; and Ray Huang, 1587: A Year of No Significance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981): 189–221, esp. 197 for indicating that Li in retirement had a storage room for his imprints’ woodblocks.

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Fig. 3.3 An objectionable idea in print. The view expressed here at the start of an essay entitled “Husband and Wife”—“Only after there were husbands and wives were there fathers and sons”—was the kind of common-sense sentiment that won its author, Li Zhi, the enmity of generations of committed neo-Confucians (Li Zhi, Lishi Fenshu [Wanli era], 1573–1620, edition), 3.17a (courtesy of the Naikaku Bunko Library, Tokyo).

philosopher Wang Yangming (1472–1529) allowed the printing of only a few of his compositions until the issuance of a fairly complete edition of his writings two years before his death.89 This initial 1527 edition as well as the next few were published by his disciples, many of whom would see their own writings likewise issued by their own disciples or descendants: Wang Ken (1483–1544) thanks to his son in the mid-sixteenth century and his grandson in 1631,90 Wang Ji (1498–1583) thanks to his sons and disciple in the early seventeenth century,91 Zou  Shouyi (1491–1562) thanks to a disciple in his own lifetime,92 and He Xinyin thanks to a friend in 1625.93 All these followers of Wang Yangming and his criticism of the Ming government’s 89. Nagatomi Seiji, Ō Shujin chosaku no benkengakuteki kenkyū (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2007): 528–31. 90. L. Carrington Goodrich and Fang Chao-ying, eds., Dictionary of Ming Biographies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974; henceforth DMB), v. 2: 1, 385. 91. Ibid., v. 2: 1, 354–55. 92. Zou Shouyi, Zou Shouyi ji (Nanjing: Fenghuang, 2007), preface: 2. 93. He Xinyin, He Xinyin ji (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1960): 7; its circulation was very limited.

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narrow interpretation of Zhu Xi’s thought were first published posthumously by private noncommercial publishers. The printing dates of the prolific writings of one Wang  Yangming follower, Luo Rufang (1515–88) highlight the prevalence of the practice of delayed or commemorative publication: of the ninety-three titles attributed to him in the Ming, only two were published in his lifetime (a total of eight chapters [ juan]), and at least thirty-four others were compiled but never carved and printed. All his published titles were first put out by private noncommercial parties: his disciples, his descendants, and government offices and officials. Two titles were reprinted by commercial publishers, on the basis of previous printings by private noncommercial parties.94 Political criticism written by degree holders or officials may well have gone through a similar evolution. For most of the Ming, the political elite wrapped their slightest criticism in the plumage of officialese, taking care to avoid the lash and threats that awaited those more daring. Witness the fate of Cheng Tong, an early Ming critic from Huizhou, and his writings. Having sided with the ruling Jianwen emperor (r. 1399–1402) and proposed plans to defend him from his uncle’s insurrectionary army, Cheng Tong was obliged upon this uncle’s victory to hand over 100 chapters ( juan) of his writings and hang himself. His papers were all destroyed, but a century and a half later, when the ban on his writings had grown lax, a descendant collected and compiled some of his surviving writings. Another century passed before Cheng Tong’s writings, now judged to be historical evidence, were finally published, in the late 1620s.95 By then, as fear about the fate of the Ming dynasty was mounting, its critics, such as the Donglin faction’s leaders and admirers, found it easier to have some of their writings appear in private noncommercial editions while they were alive. To list just a few of the more famous figures: Gu Xiancheng (1550–1612) thanks to himself in 1606 and 1610 and later to his descendants in about 1630,96 Gao Panlong (1562–1626) thanks to his friends and disciples in 1632,97 Wei Dazhong (1575–1625) and his son Wei Xueyi thanks to family members in ca. 1630,98 Feng Congwu (1556–ca. 1627) thanks to an admirer in a government office in 1617; and Huang Zongxi’s (1610–95) Mingyi daifang lu (completed in 1663) thanks to admirers from his native county a century and half later.99 The Donglin faction’s successors as political activists, the 94. Luo Rufang, Luo Rufang ji (Nanjing: Fenghuang, 2007), editor’s explanation; and Luo Mingde gong shumu, 2–9. 95. An Pingqiu and Zhang Peiheng, comps., Zhongguo jinshu daguan (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua, 1990): 276. 96. DMB, v. 2: 741, 743; and, Guojia tushuguan shanben, jibu, v. 3: 45–46. 97. Ibid., v. 3: 80. 98. Ibid., v. 3: 123, 150. 99. Huang Zongxi, Mingdai yifang lu (Beijing: Guji, 1955): 3; and Arthur W. Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing (Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1945): 1: 354, 2: 804.

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leaders of the Restoration Society (Fushe), proved more forthright in publishing writings on the political crises of the time: formed in 1629 after the court’s violent suppression of the Donglin faction, it published collections of members’ writings and membership lists in order to have its members gain high office and reform the court.100 Its members either individually, like Chen Zilong, or in separate groups published collections of their own or others’ essays on current politics (or classical learning). In 1641, several members went so far as to publish an “open letter” to the emperor, in which 140 scholars in Nanjing petitioned for the removal of an official from high office. Social and political criticism by commoners and lower-degree holders in these years was often oral—songs, ballads, and other verses that sharply criticized local government officials or local gentry members and that sometimes ended up in editions of their collected writings published usually after the departure of offensive official.101 Others chose to have such criticisms printed as single sheets of “public opinion” (shilun) to be posted around towns and cities in the lower Yangzi delta.102 Yet, this kind of posted material appears only rarely in the collected writings of late Ming scholars and gentry, since the purpose of these private noncommercial publications were meant more to honor and commemorate than to persuade. If, then, an  official appointed by the Ming government to investigate such materials was usually not “the elephant in the publisher’s room,” neither can we consider him a mouse. Instead, it is best to think of him as “the elephant in the closet,” enough of a presence to persuade most men most of the time not to publish books, even private books, with unconventional thoughts. Some authors even burned the draft of their book out of fear that a local official would demand to see it and discover something objectionable.103 Only rarely did private book publishers in the Ming acquire the independent political voice that the world of privately funded publishing might seem to offer. And, when the publisher took on that risk, he and his descendants were far more likely to direct his message to a public consisting of officials and scholars than to what we today call “the public.”

100. William S. Atwell, “From Education to Politics: The Fu She,” in Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974): 337, 339, 349, 353–54; and Xie Guozhen, Ming Qing zhi ji dangshe yundong kao (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1982): 135, 156–57, 161, 176. 101. For example, ibid., 78 (1452), 149 (1510), 245 (1555), 279 (1567), 255 (1588), 276 (1566), 537 (1638); and Atwell, “From Education to Politics”: 354. 102. Kishimoto Mio, “Minmatsu Shinsho no chihō shakai to ‘seiron’”: 1–25, esp. 10–16, in her Min Shin koeki to Kōnan shakai (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1999). 103. For example, Zhang Huiyuan, Ming Qing Jiangsu wenren nianbiao (Shanghai: Guji, 1986): 209 (1532).

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Conclusion It is tempting to attribute the importance of noncommercial “family publishing” in China, as opposed to the West, principally to differences in their printing technology: the West used the complex and costly machinery of the printing press, while China usually preferred to use the simpler and cheaper techniques of woodblock printing. Consequently, it could be argued that the lower entry cost and investment required for woodblock printing enabled far more Chinese, many of them amateur publishers, than Europeans to resort to this form of publishing and thus have their books printed noncommercially. They did so to assure full control over contents and format, fulfill filial duties, publicize their writings, encourage the reading of a favorite text for noncommercial purposes, and at times to shape a debate among fellow officials on current affairs and recent history. The parallel case of Tokugawa Japan strengthens this argument, as most Tokugawa publishing was with woodblocks, and much of it (or in the view of some, most of its titles) was private and noncommercial. Yet, culture and politics—in short, cultural politics—also had much to do with Song, Ming, and later scholar-officials’ decisions to spend their money publishing books this way with woodblocks. Admittedly, the skeptic may well find evidence that these not-for-profit private publishers actually printed at least some titles for sale—not a surprise when in the eleventh century all the book merchants were said to be scholars (shi) and when in the last century of Ming rule many scholars (often examination failures) became commercial publishers.104 Nonetheless, imprints and publishing persistently remained important marks of identity in scholar-official culture. If by the eleventh century all the book merchants were said to have been scholars, then how much closer was the scholar’s identification with private noncommercial printing and its imprints, which might list him as publisher, perhaps author, and possibly even calligrapher-scribe. In fact, as we have seen, by the mid-sixteenth century, Huizhou commercial publishers were printing books which were partly intended to boost their image as scholars rather than as merchants. Look again at those late Ming portraits that depict a scholar holding a book so naturally that the book appears to be an extension of his body; or notice the books, and not the woodblocks, in the upstairs studio in the house of the seventeenth-century publisher Mao Jin (see Fig. 3.4). Similar social and artistic links between studios and scholars can, of course, be found in the West.105 But not even Enlightenment intellectuals with their insistence on intellectual autonomy created a tradition of asserting their control over the means of book production as thoroughly as did some Chinese scholars. Denis Diderot, the son of an artisan who dedicated two decades to writing, editing, publishing, and 104. Anon., Daoshan qinghua (Congshu jicheng ed.): 6; and the seventeenth-century case of Mao Jin (McDermott, Social History: 109, 145). 105. For example, Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

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Fig. 3.4 The idyllic book-printing site (Wang Xian, “The Jigu Pavilion of Mr. Mao of Yushan” 1642, detail) (Ren Jiyu, ed., Zhongguo guojia tushuguan guji zhenpin tulu [Beijing: Beijing tushuguan, 1999]: 264). Note the books—not woodblocks—on shelves in Mao Jin’s back room. In this highly idealized landscape painting (contrast it with the mordant wit of the Japanese print in Plate 1.1), these books are the sole suggestion that this was a site for producing books.

selling his Encyclopédie volumes, would in 1763 write, “I have come close to practicing both professions, bookseller as well as author; I have written, and I have on several occasions printed works on my own account; and I can assure in passing that nothing accords less well with the active life of the businessman than the sedentary life of the man of letters. Incapable as we are of an endless round of petty chores, out of a hundred authors who would like to retail their own works, ninety-nine would suffer and be disgusted by it.”106 Even though he for good reason castigated his publishers as “my pirates,” Diderot was happy to be solely the author and surrender the right of cultural reproduction to a commercial publisher who assumed full responsibility for the printing of his books. Many Ming scholars, as we have seen, begged to differ. They preferred to present themselves and their ideas to the world through books compiled, edited, and published by them, their sons, or their disciples, so that they as authors or their associates 106. Denis Diderot, Oeuvres complètes, v. 8, Encyclopédie IV et lettre sur la commerce de la librairie, eds. John Logh and Jacques Proust (Paris: Hermann, 1976): 465–567, as quoted in Roger Chartier, “Property and Privilege in the Republic of Letters,” Daedalus 131.2 (Spring 2002): 64.

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and descendants controlled the means of producing not just books but also their imprint voice and identity. Even in the more commercial world of Qing-dynasty publishing, Chinese scholars were loath to surrender such power. Indeed, they expanded their role in the Qing publishing world by publishing and circulating copies of rare and valuable books in their collections, calling these reprints “collecteana.”107 Only from the close of the nineteenth century did they widely relinquish this power, when the end of the imperial order dethroned them and the textual knowledge that they had mastered. The introduction of mass-production printing technology, commercial publishing houses, and cash payment and even royalties for authors of popular books transformed the publishing world in large coastal cities like Shanghai108 and made the option of private noncommercial printing seem reactionary and irrelevant to a much wider readership. If in the twentieth century Chinese scholars have often felt alienated from the public life and culture of their country, their disenfranchisement was due not simply to their absence from the corridors of power and to their longstanding fear of being muzzled by government censors. It was also true that they had lost control of their traditional means of transmitting their writings and of asserting the special place and privileges that they as scholars had so long enjoyed in the Chinese world of private woodblock publishing.

107. Joseph P. McDermott, “Rare Book Collections in Qing Dynasty Suzhou: Owners, Dealers, and Uses”: 248–49, in Lu Miao-fen, ed., Learning and Culture in Late Imperial China (Nangang, 2013). 108. Chen Changwen, Dushihua jincheng zhong de Shanghai chubanye, 1843–1949 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 2012): 110–15, introduces this topic.

4 Distribution: The Transmission of Books in Europe and Its Colonies Contours, Cautions, and Global Comparisons James Raven The establishment of the printing press in some fourteen European cities by 1470, and in 110 by 1480, required the transformation of book distribution systems to handle printed editions. The question of transmission, of distribution possibilities, and limitations, is a crucial aspect of the history of European printing, publishing, and communication, and it is one where comparison with practices in East Asia offers valuable insight. The distribution of books, a crucial agency of cultural transaction, both created and breached frontiers for the written and printed word, vernacular or otherwise. Across Europe, the distribution of texts enabled both revolution (intellectual and economic as well as political and religious) and the creation of new systems and locales of shared knowledge. As also shown in this volume in Cynthia Brokaw’s study of China, book distribution challenged privilege and cultural entrenchment yet also created bounded routes and readerships. Differences in what was meant by “commercial” and “private” are critical to comparative global histories of the book. Such differences also essentially affect the modes, extent, and effectiveness of distribution. As a comparison of the introduction of printing in East Asia and Europe shows, the push of the market is not the only means to publish and transfer knowledge. Rather, the market is often geographically, economically, and socially specific. In Europe, the extremes of distance that publications, new and secondhand, traveled are perhaps not a surprise, given that by the fifteenth century, manuscript circulation was extraordinarily far-flung. For at least two centuries, cargoes of written books had traveled by land and water as part of increasingly sophisticated international trading networks, focused on urban, religious, and university centers.1 What instead astonishes is the rapid advance of the social as well as geographical penetration of print, enabled by the development of new production, trading and transport methods, and initiatives. Soon after the introduction of printing with moveable type in the mid-fifteenth century, European merchants, stationers, and publishers 1.

See David Rundle, ed., Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Europe: Medium Ævum Monograph vol. XXX (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2012) and especially his “Structures of Contacts”: 307–35.

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exploited inland transport and coastal and marine shipping to expand their business in printed products. Thereafter, the extent of printed book advertisement and catalog circulation increased with the transported volume of expensive as well as cheaper printed matter. Nearly four centuries after Gutenberg, distributive changes in the 1840s marked a transition from one age of bookselling to the next. The transformation to the book trade brought by steam-driven ships and trains was even more apparent than the much-vaunted divide of the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1814 and the advent of the steam-driven printing press and papermaking machines. “Distribution” and “transport” have featured prominently in models offered of communications circuitry, from the pioneering “media studies” questions of Harold Lasswell to the much-replicated diagrammatic pathways of Robert Darnton (with modifications by Thomas Adams and Nicolas Barker). “Who?”, “what?”, and “in which channel?” were the first three questions of Lasswell’s challenge to understand the impact of manuscript and printed publication. They appeared before his more taxing questions of “to whom?” and “with what effect?” Nevertheless, the “channel,” the methods of distribution, invites further investigation. Comparisons with other parts of the world offer a certain reevaluation and finessing of the history of European book transportation, distribution, and the means by which readers and clients received texts. Distribution was as important for noncommercial as commercial publications but involved different originating motivations and effects. Chinese commercial printing developed within centuries of the first widely accepted instance of printing in China in the early eighth century,2 and just as in Europe, noncommercial, private publication in East Asia tended to privilege questions of impact, of how an audience might react to a text, with distribution often as assured as the identity of the recipients; by comparison, in commercial printing and publishing, distribution might determine the economic survival of the originator producer in a more uncertain marketplace. Dissemination is crucial in both scenarios, but economic imperatives are variable. As Ian Maclean has observed of the early modern European book trade, “profit in this world did not necessarily mean surplus profit or mercantile expansion.”3 This refines twenty-first-century models that privilege business strategies and supply-side economics over other early modern concerns. It notably downplays a concern for scholarly and intellectual goals that courted and depended upon enduring forms of patronage, subsidy, and forms of business enterprise that were restricted by social, political, and ideological objectives. 2. 3.

See Joseph McDermott’s chapter in this volume. Ian Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion: The Learned Book in the Age of the Confessional 1560–1630 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012): 5; cf. James Raven, “Book Distribution Networks in Early Modern Europe: The Case of the Western Fringe (La rete distributiva del libro),” Produzione e commercio della carta e del libro secc. XIII–XVIII, Istituto Internazionale de Storia Economica F. Datini Prato, 23 (1991): 583–630; and James Raven, “Selling Books across Europe,” Publishing History, 34 (1993): 5–20.

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Conceptual Issues Four abstract questions are helpful: First is the matter of whether publications were circulated within a closed or an open circuit and how that relates to the type of product. What did publication mean in making a text “public”? That degree of publicness rested on the nature of the market or patronage. Both might also be part of the giving, commissioning, or selling of other products alongside books. Books themselves were physically highly various, from the huge lectionary (or Bible used for public and communal reading out loud) and the luxury finely illuminated manuscript or finely printed book to the humbler small ballad or chapbook of few pages, small size, and often poor typography. In research terms, modern European social histories of the book offer a fascinating counterpoint to what Cynthia Brokaw identifies as the relative neglect of “popular” book culture by Chinese historians, bibliographers, and bibliophiles. By comparison, works of sophisticated scholarship and beautifully produced works circulating among a restricted elite (objects cherished by Chinese book historians) are often marginalized in European histories.4 Second is the question of the agency used for book distribution. There is a distinction here between itinerant, peripatetic, agents (such as colporteurs, chapmen, or traveling merchants) and traveling books, moved by clients or purchasers or borrowers from a fixed site (from which books might still travel far, and certainly across borders and seas). In the case of commercial circuits, agencies included advertising and sales innovations such as auctions and auctioneers, quite beside peddlers, booksellers, and librarians. Commercial distribution also encompasses the financial arrangements of sale or loan, of credit agreements and credit lines, and of discounts offered by wholesalers to retailers or other onward selling agents. Third is the question of geographical and social range, of the expansion and the limitation to the distances that books traveled and to their penetration of different social groups. Geographical range varies according to the possibility of satisfying any given demand (or perhaps creating one) by surmounting physical barriers and obstacles to book distribution. In the social range of that demand, gender and age differences are particularly significant. The fuller profile of distribution engages with questions of literacies, readership practices, and the aural as well as reading audience for books and print. Fourth is the question of the timing of changes in distribution practices as related to issues of production. Distribution can never operate in complete isolation from changes to manufacturing processes, product development, or transport innovation. Resurgent interest in historical bibliography has inspired dozens of new studies of the 4.

Magnificently disclaiming the trend is Giles Barber, The James A. De Rothschild Bequest: Printed Books and Bookbindings (Aylesbury: The Rothschild Foundation, 2013).

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transmission of texts in Europe since the late fifteenth century, in which the circulation of the written and printed word, vernacular or otherwise, invited instruction and entertainment, confrontation and consensus. Broad questions of the sociology of textual production, circulation, and reception, assisted by new digital resources, have encouraged reevaluation of an early modern republic of letters and a European and transatlantic realm of popular and scientific literature stretching from Lisbon to St. Petersburg, and from California to Constantinople.

Cautions for Comparisons In Europe, printed texts, in all their variety, accompanied and interacted with continuing scribal publication and correspondence after 1450. Print, a new product, but one that also often required the incorporation of writing (notably on printed forms and certificates) inspired new modes of social engagement and a revolution in the construction and dissemination of knowledge. Key words are “circulation” and “dissemination” but also “publication,” which for all its financial denotation is also about making books public. The changing mechanics of textual transmission have to be explained in relation to changing demand, financial acumen, and technological and transport innovation. It is exactly here that comparative perspectives highlight three important explanatory cautions. First, to extend the comparison between different economic modes of book production and dissemination, any survey of “commerce in print” must recognize that even in Europe, where noncommercial printing as described by Joseph McDermott was far less common than in China and Japan, large collections accounted for a sizeable proportion of the overall book market. Books sometimes traveled as gifts, as the pawns of religious contest, and as trophies of war. Royal deaths brought the dispersal of great libraries like the Corvina of Matthias of Hungary and the great collection of Zygmunt August of Poland. The Reconquista, the advance of the Ottomans, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the revolutions of the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries caused widespread upheaval in the book market. Private, institutional, and monastic libraries, from Tunis to Pozsony (then Pressburg, now Bratislava), were pillaged or broken up and sold. The bibliographical price Sweden paid for the abdication of Queen Christina in 1654 was her eventual transference of thousands of manuscripts and books to the Vatican library. Much other looting during the Thirty Years’ War rejuvenated the exchange of ancient books and manuscripts. Sakularisation under Joseph II and Napoleon forced monasteries to disgorge their holdings and sent crates of books across the mountains of Western Europe and down the Danube and the Rhine (and there are many more examples). This does not, of course, diminish the impact of war or religious struggle on the sale of books.

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Few gluts or dearths after conflict or pillage have been without their commercial beneficiaries, and booksellers (and book buyers) are certainly not excepted.5 The second caution is that European and Western bibliographical studies and book history have been framed and divided up by nation-states. In many ways, as David McKitterick in his contribution here reminds us, the nation-state is a misleading geographical unit for such research. The political (not always linguistic) unit is the obvious enabler for retrospective national bibliographies (which some countries have yet to complete), but books circulating within that unit were and are international commodities. The Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN), for example is the online Dutch retrospective bibliography for 1540–1800 (currently 130,000 titles). It is designed to contain bibliographical descriptions of all surviving books published in the Netherlands and of those in Dutch published abroad between those dates. The companion Short Title Catalogus Vlaanderen (STCV) describes surviving Dutchlanguage materials printed between 1601 and 1700 within the present-day boundaries of Flanders (including Brussels) and, in its second working phase, works printed in other languages than Dutch (notably Latin, Spanish, and French). French and German STCs are ongoing but so far limited by chronological range,6 and nothing as accessible or comprehensive yet exists for those attempting to identify the scribbled titles of books and pamphlets originating from Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian territories.7 More suggestive national (and linguistic and British colonial) counts of titles published between 1550 and 1800 can be constructed by use of the online English Short-Title Catalogue, while the Universal Short-Title Catalogue Project at the University of St. Andrews comprises 52,000 pre-1601 entries in and is the boldest

5.

6.

7.

Alodia Kawecka-Gryczowa, Biblioteka Ostatniego Jagiellona: Pomnik Kultury Renesansowej (Wroclaw: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1988); Elmar Mittler and Wilfried Werner, Mit der Zeit: Die Kürfursten von der Pfalz und die Heidelberger Handschriften der Bibliotheca Palatina (Wiesbaden: L. Reichert, 1986); Mathias Erzberger, Die Säkularisation in Württemberg von 1803–1810 (Stuttgart: Aalen Scientia-Verlag, 1902); Alfons Maria Scheglmann, Geschichte der Säkularisation in Rechtsrheinischen Bayern, 3 vol. in 4 (Regensburg: J. Habbel, 1903–8); Eberhard Weis, Die Säkularisation der Bayerischen Kloster 1802/03: Neue Forschungen zu Vorgeschichte und Ergebnissen (Munich: Bayerische Akademie de Wissenschaften Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, 1983): 6; and Jörg-Ulrich Fechner, “English Holdings from the Library of Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn, PrinceBishop of Wurzburg” (MLitt diss., Cambridge University, 1972). CCFr (Catalogue Collectif de France) is accessible via the website of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; more advanced, but limited to pre-1701 imprints, is the German VD16 and VD17 (Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachaum erschienenen Drucke des 16/17, Jahrhunderts—Bibliography of Books Printed in the German-Speaking Countries from 1501 to 1600 and from 1601 to 1700 respectively); VD18 is in the planning stages. For Spanish printing, the Biblioteca Nacional de España has commenced an online STC of fifteenthand sixteenth-century imprints; and in Italy, EDIT16 Censimento nazionale delle edizioni del XVI secolo is also ongoing.

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attempt so far to escape the boundaries imposed by nationally based STCs.8 Yet any national history of the book is really a history of book exchange in and out, complicated by nightmarish identification problems. For example, the imprints of many editions declared that they were printed in the Netherlands when they were not, and many that were printed in the Netherlands stated that they were printed in France, or Germany, or elsewhere. Among many research projects engaged in transnational book circulation are those tracing the Russian and Eastern destination of books from the Netherlands, Amsterdam and the Hague, and the German links forged with St. Petersburg and the Baltic towns.9 A third interpretational difficulty concerns small printing jobs, such as the printing of pieces requiring only a sheet, including most chapbooks, and fractional parts of a sheet, including most “job-work” of forms and other non-book printing. Job-work was the financial mainstay of the vast majority of printers. Ranging from sales and auction posters to business and social stationery, job printing was extremely important in the development of trade and finance. Commerce rather than religion often provided the drive to numeracy and alphabetization in Europe. The social impact of jobbing printing, however, remains neglected by book historians, while the history of numeracy is particularly underdeveloped.10 Although non-survival of this material is not apparently as acute as in China, where pre-1500 imprints are especially rare, staggering statistics have been provided revealing past undertakings by major European printers for forms and certificates in batches of 10,000 or more but for which not a single copy now survives.11 The counterparts in East Asia, to mention but a few examples, include government tax and registration forms, ritual and religious prayers and offering statements, paper money for ancestral worship, embossed impressions 8.

http://www.ustc.ac.uk/#; see also Andrew Pettegree, Malcolm Walsby, and Alexander Wilkinson, eds., French Vernacular Books: Books Published in the French Language before 1601 (Leiden: Brill, 2007); and Alexander S. Wilkinson, “Lost Books Printed in French before 1601,” The Library 7th ser. 10: 2 (June, 2009): 188–205. 9. Otto S. Lankhorst, “Nos espoirs sont surtout tournés vers les pays de l’Europe de l’Est,” in C. BerkvensStevelinck, H. Bots, P. G. Hoftijzer, and O. S. Lankhorst, eds., Le Magasin de l’Univers: The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the European Book Trade (Leiden: Brill, 1992), esp. 206. 10. Pioneering contributions include Keith Thomas, “Numeracy in Early Modern England,” Trans. Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 37 (1987): 103–32; Peter L. McMickle and Richard G. Vangermeersch, The Origins of a Great Profession (Memphis, TN: Academy of Accounting Historians, 1987); Patricia Kline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982); ibid., “Reckoning with Commerce: Numeracy in Eighteenth-Century America,” in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1992): 320–34; and Margaret Spufford, “Literacy, Trade and Religion in the Commercial Centres of Europe,” in Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen, eds., A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 229–84. 11. Various examples are given in James Raven, “Choses banales, imprimés ordinaires: ‘travaux de ville’, l’économie et le monde de l’imprimerie que nous avons perdus,” Histoire et civilisation du livre: revue internationale 9 (2013 [2014]): 243–58.

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for private and government use, standardized contract forms, advertisements, and divination slips.12 Although there are parallels with East Asia, the blind spots in European book history are often either less applicable or concern questions so central to the distribution of books in Japan and China that they could never have been ignored. In this sense, comparative book history between East and West is not only timely but would have saved many earlier scholars from hasty assumptions. As other chapters in this volume describe, in many periods the sale of books in China and Japan paled in comparison to the nonmarket circulation of texts financed by government, temple, shrine, and family or private patronage. Distribution networks were necessarily prescribed and self-fulfilling. Caution regarding retrospective national bibliography is less applicable in Asia where equivalent projects are either less developed or differently conceived (e.g., the Japanese import of large amounts of Chinese imprints in the Tokugawa period [1600–1868]). Distribution across borders is nonetheless a critical issue and a key explanatory force in linguistic and orthographic adoption and change. Given the different business (and indeed often “noncommercial”) models of some non-Western printing and book production operations, the importance of “small jobs” also takes a different focus. But it is important to identify, as Cynthia Brokaw does in her contribution, the different distributional circuits that developed from very different textual products. Beyond the West it is also helpful to avoid both overconcentration on canon and genre and conservatism in thinking about what constitutes the material “book.” In many different parts of the world, for example, financial publications and newsbook printing might be regarded as intermediate to jobbing and book production, and a further crucial component in the changing history of textual transmission. Nonetheless, the focus for a history of the international circulation of print in Europe and the West remains with commercial book distribution. The mechanics of book supply had been very much the product of the medieval university and in certain cities of Europe, where there was both a central administration and a major university. The commercial development of the distribution of the printed book relied heavily upon existing business structures of the stationers and their guild or privilege. Of itself, demand had not necessitated the invention of printing in Europe, but once printing was available and new markets identified, demand grew well beyond existing clients and customers, who were so heavily concentrated in learned circles in universities, religious houses, and legal institutions. The very rapid success of Gutenberg’s printing of the Bible confirmed his speculative instincts. In the mid1470s, the Florentine book merchant Gerolamo Strozzi used agents in Rome, Siena, Pisa, and Naples to service his relatively trouble-free switch from manuscript to 12. The list is extremely extensive. For a brief account of Chinese examples of Chinese ephemera including jobbing, see Qian Yongxing, Minjian riyong diaoban yinshua pin tuzhi (Yangzhou: Guangling shushe, 2010).

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printed editions and to undertake orders of more than 1,500 volumes. From Mainz, Gutenberg’s backer, Peter Schőffer, ran a sales organization stretching to Switzerland, Paris, and Scandinavia. During the next hundred years production and distribution soared. From Antwerp, Christophe Plantin sent 3,000 copies of his 1566 Hebrew Bible to his agent on the Barbary Coast, and between 1571 and 1576 dispatched 52,000 service books from Antwerp to Spain. Book merchants in Copenhagen managed a trade to the north with the products of Antwerp and Venice.13 Many agents contributed to the extension of long-distance distribution and the creation of diverse print circuits. Most easily distinguished are the organized distribution systems originating with central publishers and wholesalers (and thus, in at least some respects, similar to the concentration of book production and distribution centers—and regions of uneven and limited distribution—in the lower Yangzi delta in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China).14 Great cities boasting many printers and publishers by the end of the sixteenth century developed as major distribution centers. Paris boasted an active if relatively localized circulation network; more farflung were the book routes emanating from Venice, Basel, Antwerp, and Lyon and other cities on major European crossroads and ports. Paris before the Thirty Years’ War also differed from Venice and Antwerp in that its publishers hardly bothered to send representatives to the Frankfurt Fair. By contrast, the Kobergers of Nuremberg kept stocks with distribution agents in Venice, Danzig, Hamburg, Basel, Frankfurtam-Main, Lübeck, Prague, Augsburg, Amsterdam, Vienna, Lyon, and a dozen more cities. As Koberger had extolled in a printed advertisement that accompanied the more than 2,500 copies of his great Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493: “Speed now, Books, and make yourself known wherever the winds blow free.”15 In what might be described as the “Hansa model” of marketing books, merchants traveled to fairs and other marts selling to other wholesale merchants, employing numerous factors, licensed itinerant salespeople, and warehousing along leading and developing trade routes.16 Books, many exported as sheets and packed in barrels, traveled in a network connected to the great freight routes. Contemporary illustrations of the packing of printed sheets and books in barrels are shown in Fig. 4.1. Key overland routes 13. Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979): 15; Aleksander Frøland, Dansk Boghandels Historie, 1482 til 1945: Med et Kapitel om Bogen i Oldtid og Middelalder (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1974): 22–31; Max Rooses, Christophe Plantin, Imprimeur Anversois (Antwerp: J. Maes, 1882): 168–76; Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Peter Schőffer of Gernsheim and Mainz (Rochester, NY: Printing House of L. Hart, 1950): 97; Oskar  von Hase, Die Koberger: Eine Darstellung des Buchhändlerischen Geschäftsbetriebes in der Zeit des Űberganges vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1885); Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Carlos Gilly, Spanien und der Basler Buchdruck bis 1600 (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1985). 14. See Cynthia Brokaw’s contribution to this volume. 15. Cited in Adrian Wilson, The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle (Amsterdam: A. Asher, 1976): 209. 16. Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion: 175.

Fig. 4.1 “Der Buchhändler” by Jan Luyken in Johann Christoph Weigel the Elder (1654–1725), Abildung der gemein-nützlichen Hauptstände, Regensburg, 1698.

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included the Amsterdam to Breslau route and the Iter Italicum, the two-way route from Poland to Rome followed by clergy, diplomats, scholars, students, and books.17 A contrasting, but in some ways variant, “branch” system was exemplified by the Italian trade in books, for so long dominated by Venice. Wholesalers relied on barter and books sold by unit price, the sales to retail booksellers based on discounts and commissions. The opening of branch stores in major cities developed in order to minimize the financial risks to which the wholesalers were exposed. In addition, much trade was also conducted through the established great fairs of Lyon (dating from 1420 but eclipsed by the mid-sixteenth century), Leipzig (established since at least 1165), Antwerp, and Frankfurt. Frankfurt, a free Imperial city with its great trading embankments on the Main, was the focus of a twice-yearly international book fair (like Leipzig) from at least 1485.18 The fair catalogs, dating from 1564, became international trading resources. Publishers’ lists were used by booksellers to publicize their own printed or financed titles and those books bought or exchanged with other retailers or wholesalers.19 Fig. 4.2 reproduces the title page from one of the annual Frankfurt catalogs, this one dated 1622. Centralization was far greater in some states than in others. Paris dominated France, Lyon providing short-lived independence as an early publishing and distributive center. Quite aside from the foremost European suppliers (Venice, Frankfurt, and Antwerp), the states of Germany, the Low Countries, and Italy boasted a number of important, interconnected distributive centers, while England and later Ireland (but not Scotland) bore more resemblance to the single metropolitan model of France. This model differed again from that of early modern China, where the lower Yangzi delta cities were the central clearinghouse in the empire, collectively producing by the Ming dynasty’s end more texts than any other publishing center and sending them off to Beijing and other far-flung cities.20 In England, the economic publishing and distributive dominance of London ensured that rivals could not compete. Nothing like the national dominance of London (or indeed Paris) existed in China and Japan until, with the development of mechanized printing, the unquestionable supremacy

17. Jan Pirożyński, “Royal Book Collections in Poland during the Renaissance,” Libraries and Culture 24 (1989): 21–32, esp. 21. 18. The earliest record of a printer-publisher trading at the Frankfurt fair is for 1478: Hase, Die Koberger: 318. There were also fairs at Paris, Vienna, and Nurernberg; see John L. Flood, “‘Omnium totius orbis emporiorum compendium’: The Frankfurt Fair in the Early Modern Period,” in Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote, eds., Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press and London: British Library, 2007). 19. Graham Pollard and Albert Ehrman, The Distribution of Books by Catalogue from the Invention of Printing to AD 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); and James W. Thompson, ed., Henri Estienne, The Frankfort Book Fair: Henricus Stephanus II: Francofordiense Emporium, 1574 (Amsterdam: G. Th. van Heusden, 1969). 20. See Brokaw in this volume.

Fig. 4.2 Catalogus universalis pro nundinis Francofurtensibus, 1622 (reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge).

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of, respectively, Shanghai and Tokyo.21 Edinburgh, Dublin (at least before 1800), and Glasgow developed important book export businesses, but London remained the main publishing source for the books, magazines, and other print sent out to the British provinces and then to the colonies in North America, the Caribbean, India, the United States, Africa, Australasia, and East Asia.

Shipments Seas and rivers remained dominant arteries for book distribution in East Asia and Europe, if only because transport by water was much cheaper than by land until the arrival of the railway.22 Significant European routes included that used by the Kobergers through Strasbourg and along the Rhine, but in Europe and Japan (more so than in China) there was also much important coastal trade, including between Antwerp and Spain and North Africa, between Flanders and Brittany, between northern Italy and eastern and southern Spain, between the Netherlands and Danzig (both crucial to the Hebrew book trade) and between Osaka and Tokyo. Until the railways were built in the 1850s, Swedish book cargoes went almost entirely by coastal trading, and that restricted to the open-water season of the Baltic summer (in China north– south shipments went by the Grand Canal, at least when it was not frozen over in the winter months).23 Overseas distribution, like the transoceanic trade from Europe to the Americas and the Chinese export of considerable cargoes of Chinese books to Tokugawa Japan, remains the outstanding challenge for study of the history of books from at least the eighteenth century onwards. Comparative studies of the different locales, peoples, and initiatives linked by the Atlantic reveal the intimidating scale of the enterprise. Despite Isabel Hofmeyr’s pioneering interpretation of a “Protestant Atlantic” in which “the space of empire” is “intellectually integrated,” transatlantic comparative book history is at an early stage.24 Studies of French America such as those by Gilles  Havard and Cécile Vidal that incorporate sections on “échanges, transports

21. Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2004). 22. See Brokaw in this volume. 23. Sten G. Lindberg, “The Scandinavian Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” in Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian, eds., Buch und Buchhandel in Europa im achtezehen Jarhundert (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1981): 225–48; and Harald L. Tveterås, Geschichte des Buchhandels in Norwegen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992). 24. Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); cf. Michael Winship, “The Transatlantic Book Trade and Anglo-American Literary Culture in the Nineteenth Century,” in Steven Fink and Susan S. Williams, eds., Reciprocal Influences: Literary Production, Distribution, and Consumption in America (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999): 98–122.

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et commerce,” are valuable yet relatively lonely relations to equivalent histories for British North America and the British Caribbean.25 Histories of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Swedish, and other transatlantic book communities, with a few notable exceptions, are little known beyond their country of publication.26 The most direct evidence of the shipments and of the origins of the books conveyed remains in booksellers’ and customers’ invoices, orders, and memoranda, ships’ dockets and customs records, sales advertisements and the correspondence, diaries, and wills of book collectors. Together with the surviving imported and exported publications, these diverse sources can contribute to a reassessment of transatlantic book, pamphlet, and newspaper destruction that clearly reveals, for example, the dependence of North American communities on importation of European print well into the nineteenth century.27 Details of distribution techniques also suggest the long-distance credit and financing obstacles that had to be overcome and the complex arrangements for shipping and identifying new publications (as well as the availability of antiquarian books) from a distance. Recovery of original demands offers striking insight into the practices associated with long-distance and time-consuming transport of print and correspondence, such as the placement of periodicals and newspapers in the captain’s cabin to expedite dockside unloading in the port of destination.28 The surviving accessions registers of numerous libraries attest also to the ordering, dispatch, and accounting procedures involved in the shipping of books and then the onward inland travel required. Humphrey Chetham’s Library in remote England, for example, largely acquired books through two London booksellers, Samuel Smith and Robert Littlebury, a secondhand dealer and major importer from Continental Europe. Fig. 4.3 reproduces a page from Chetham’s Accession Register 1655–1700, when consignments totaling some 3,000 books arrived in Manchester, most orders again packed for travel in barrels or in specially constructed boxes known as “fatts.”

25. Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française, new edition (Paris: Flammarion, 2008). 26. Irving Leonard, Books of the Brave (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949); Claudia Schnurmann, “Kommunikation und soziale Netzwerke: Beziehungen zwischen Bewohnern englischer und niederländischer Kolonien in der amerikanisch-atlantischen Welt, 1648–1713” (unpublished Habilitationsschrift, Göttingen University, 1995); Gregg Roeber, “German and Dutch Books,” in Hugh Amory and David. Hall, eds., The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World: The History of the Book in North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 298–313; and Hendrik Edelman, The Dutch Language Press in America (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf Publishers, 1986). 27. James Raven, “The Importation of Books in the Eighteenth Century,” in Amory and Hall, eds., Colonial Book in the Atlantic World: 183–98. 28. For further examples, see James Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002).

Fig. 4.3 Accessions register and invoices book, Chetham’s Library, Manchester, England, 1655–1700 (reproduced by kind permission of the Fellows and Librarian of Chetham’s Library).

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Obstacles Here, then, were “livres sans frontières,” and yet for four centuries after Gutenberg the rate and manner of selling books continued to be curtailed by two different types of obstacle: by regulation imposed by church, state, and town government and guilds, and by the constraints of transport infrastructures. Emphasis on book-trade development must be counterpointed with reminders about “1imits-to-growth.”29 First, and most obviously, imposed regulation was introduced by ecclesiastical and national authorities and by trade and guild regulation from within the industry. Censorship and policing, and to some extent guild authority, followed not an economic but a political time frame, with varying effectiveness at different periods and locations. France, Spain, and the Italian states, including Venice, variously adopted direct control over censorship and the policing of the press and were subject to the constant attentions of the church. Contraband books and literary undergrounds have been the subject of many distinguished studies, and their circuits have in fact been described much more fully than the broader effects of legal and religious constraints.30 There has, for example, been relatively little interest in checks and obstacles in individual and institutional collection patterns. Censorship in Europe, as it curtailed distribution and forced underground transmission, is dominated, in reputation at least by the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (from 1559). The force of the Index is an unavoidable part of any study of bookselling in the Catholic realms, and its influence contributed largely to the demise of the Frankfurt book fair. The Bücherkommissar (book commissioner) sent by the emperor and the following Book Commission rejecting Protestant publications also undermined the Frankfurt fair. In the sixteenth century, Frankfurt handled about twice the volume of books traded at Leipzig; by 1700, the figures were reversed. Significantly, however, Leipzig was never to be as international in character as Frankfurt, its most successful years being during the consolidation of the German book-trading regions.31 29. David Cressy similarly warns of adjacent research that “low literacy rates in the early modern period should not be taken as indicators of retardation or deprivation, awaiting rectification by progress,” “Literacy in Context: Meaning and Measurement in Early Modern England,” in Brewer and Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods: 305–19. 30. Notably, Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the ‘Encyclopédie’, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Nicole Herrmann-Mascard, La Censure des livres à Paris à la fin de l’ancien régime (1750–1789) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968); Michael Harris and Robin Myers, eds., Censorship and the Control of Print in Britain and France (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1992); and Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 31. Hans Widmann, Geschichte des Buchhandels vom Altertum bis zur Gegenwart (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1975); A. H. Laeven, “The Frankfurt and Leipzig Book Fairs and the History of the Dutch Book Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Berkvens-Stevelinck et al., Le  Magasin de l’Univers: 185–97; and Friedrich Kapp and Johann Goldfriedrich, Geschichte des Deutschen Buchhandels (Leipzig: Börsenverein der deutschen buchhändler, 1886–1913).

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Protestant realms also developed censorship and often brutal curbs to publication and the dissemination and transport of print—especially across borders. In England, the Low Countries, and northern Europe, press regulation was largely—though never entirely—devolved to guilds or trade company monopolies, also regulating employment conditions and entry to the trade. In this more corporatist model, different crafts adopted different regulative and trading functions. The supremacy of the Stationers’ Company in England in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be compared with the mighty guild of Binders in northern Scandinavia, where bookselling was largely the sale of imported books, unbound. The binding trade took responsibility for import and regulation of printing and publishing from 1620, during the high watermark of Swedish international power, until the second half of the eighteenth century. Similar authority was exercised by the powerful binders in Lithuania and the Ukraine, who also specialized in the crucial foreign book trade.32 Another European but not East Asian limitation to distribution resulted from the obstruction to trade imposed by many early modern town governments. The distinction between wholesale and retail was often reinforced by civic laws which forbade those who were not freemen of a town from selling by retail. Strangers were usually able to wholesale goods to freemen, and certain merchants enjoyed trading rights by tradition or grant at a national level. A marked unevenness in development overwhelmed many regions. From the 1620s onwards, for example, there were various Dutch initiatives to open up the market for Jewish books in Eastern Europe. The Jewish-Polish and Lithuanian market was completely dominated by Amsterdam until the late eighteenth century. The first Hebrew-language press in western Ukraine was not established until 1697.33 The ascendancy of Amsterdam in the East could be compared to the ascendancy of London in England, or the power of Antwerp in the Spanish northern lands to the power of French importers in Italy and Spain in the late eighteenth century. For many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century merchants, native and alien, the rounds of the fairs and markets held outside the jurisdictions of the towns were the only, if increasingly successful, sources of business. In Central and Eastern Europe, such constraints endured with many changes and interruptions during an often volatile political history for a further century or more.34 Tellingly, in premodern China and Japan, such constraints would have more often been the

32. Iaroslav Isaievych, “The Book Trade in Eastern Europe in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” in Brewer and Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods: 381–92. 33. Ibid.: 389; and R. G. Fuks-Mansfeld, “The Hebrew Book Trade in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century,” in Berkvens-Stevelinck, et al., Le Magasin de l’Univers: 155–68. 34. Renata Żurkowa, “Stosunki zawodowe ksiçgarzy Krakowskich w pierwszej polowie XVII wieku,” Roczniki Biblioteczne Polskiej Akademii Nauk w. Krakowie, Vol. 31: 1 (1987): 49–92; and Iaroslav lsaievych, Bratstva ta ikh rol’v rozvyktu Ukraïns’koï kul’tury XVI–XVII st (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1966).

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arrangements of book merchant groups rather than the laws of the central or local government. The second general limits-to-growth point is constraint from within—from transport limitations, market bottlenecks, and structural complications. While distribution enabled the development of printing in its first hundred years, it also remained the crucial check to many setting up as printers and publishers. This is the precursor to Robert Darnton’s picture of eighteenth-century diffusion, where the customs declarations, the bills of exchange, and other waves of paper surging across Europe threatened at times to overwhelm the entrepreneurs, who tried to contain them in the channels of commerce.35 In the first age of print, it was the narrowness and geographical range of the market which constrained the selling of books. Precisely because distribution was so difficult, expensive, and risky, leading merchant stationers rather than printers gained effective control of publication within a century of the introduction of printing. Moreover, the technological base of the hand-operated printing press was still in place by the early nineteenth century. For those publishing, the technical printing processes had changed little. In an increasingly competitive and unpredictable market, capital continued to be tied up over a long period. Distribution, the workings of supply, remained the crucial component in the expansion of publishing. Only developments in the means to meet market demand allowed an increase in the number of firms operating under continuing technological constraints, heavy capital requirements, and paper and labor overheads. Means of transport was quite obviously a crucial variable. Carriage and accommodation costs were a crippling burden to the trade conducted at the international fairs, and encouraged, despite the protectionism of certain states, the sale of unbound sheets to retailers, as well as far-flung catalog circulation. Distribution problems not only gave the stationers and the major financiers their supremacy but also held back development in certain other book trades. We  can draw useful parallels with the advance of printing in eighteenth-century Russia, where enthusiastic accounts of the volume of publication have recently been modified by emphasis on crude distribution networks which limited the impact of print and the growth of the book trades.36 35. Darnton, Business of Enlightenment: 246. It is, perhaps, the major weakness of Graham Pollard’s Sandars Lectures, reprinted as “The English Market for Printed Books,” Publishing History 4 (1978): 7–48. An authoritative revision is offered by Giles Barber, “Book Imports and Exports in the Eighteenth Century,” in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., Sale and Distribution of Books from 1700 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1982): 77–105; see also Elizabeth Armstrong, “English Purchases of Printed Books from the Continent,” English Historical Review, 94 (1979): 268–90; and the maps by D. Hume, especially “The Extent of Publishing within the European States [1701–1751 and 1751–1800],” in F. J. G. and J. M. Robinson and C. Wadham, comps., Eighteenth-Century British Books: An Index to the Foreign and Provincial Imprints in the Author Union Catalogue (Newcastle upon Tyne: Avero [Eighteenth-Century] Publications, 1982). 36. Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985): 18, 152; Iosif E. Barenbaum, Geschichte des Buchhandels in

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As a result of these impediments, transport costs were consistently high across early modern and eighteenth-century Europe, and the transformation in the economics of distribution over this period very obviously eased textual production, just as the interference of church, state, and guild restrictions impeded it. The development of discount systems depended upon distribution possibilities, depending in turn upon advances in transportation. In setting prices, wholesale booksellers had to anticipate the markup at retail necessary to allow retailers a worthwhile profit. The publishing booksellers paid carriage costs, and these contributed significantly to production costings. Publishers attended so closely to distribution because of the recurrent need in the commercial market to sell much of their output quickly. Although publishers did not always aspire to sell the whole edition as they used their backlists (stored in depots at international fairs) to fund purchases through the practice known as Tauschhandel, a large volume of unsold and expensive printed materials represented a long-term and major capital tie-up. In many cases, it was often necessary to sell great quantities of books in which so much was invested. When an especially urgent sale was required, discounting also proved critical. With many regional variations, very significant markups passed as acceptable at different stages of onward selling. In other cases, however, Tauschhandel (and its variants) ensured that business and credit were transacted by exchange of wares between booksellers. In mainland Europe, the greatest of the international booksellers maintained permanent warehouses at the fair cities of Leipzig and Frankfurt and swapped, page for page, printed materials of the same format with other publishing booksellers.37 Established trading circuits in southern Germany extended their reach, much in the same way as the printers and publishers of Venice, dominant in Europe by 1500, developed far-reaching trading alliances and networks. As we know from his letters to Thomas Bodley, the London bookseller John Bill not only issued his copies of Frankfurt catalogs but also traveled to the fair, then at the height of its fame as the central book mart in Europe. There is every reason to think that similar exchange practices, if on a more modest scale, operated between other leading booksellers.

Russland und der Sowjetunion (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991); Sergei P. Luppov, Kniga v Rossii v XVII veke (Leningrad: “Nauka,” Leningr. otd-nie, 1970); and Sergei P. Luppov, ed., Kniga i ee Rasprostranenie v Rossii v XVI–XVlII vv: Sbornik Nauchnykh Trudov (Leningrad: BAN, 1985). 37. Ian Maclean, “Melanchthon at the Book Fairs, 1560–1601: Editors, Markets and Religious Strife,” in Günter Frank and Kees Meerhoff, eds., Melanchthon und Europa 2 vols. [part of Günter Frank and Martin Treu, general eds., Melanchthon-Schriften der Stadt Bretten, no. 6] (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2002), 2: 211–32, esp. 214); Clair, “Christopher Plantin’s Trade-Connexions”: 41–42; and Ian Maclean, “The Market for Scholarly Books and Conceptions of Genre in Northern Europe, 1570–1630,” reprinted in Ian Maclean, Learning and the Market Place: Essays in the History of the Early Modern Book (Leiden: Brill, 2009): 9–24.

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Distribution Networks Beyond the central source of distribution were the local feeder networks sending on centrally produced goods but also adding their own locally printed, usually smalljob publications. In addition, secondhand and antiquarian book distribution greatly increased in volume and complexity. Peddlers, hawkers, colporteurs, and chapmen comprised a small army of low-cost traveling salespeople in mainland Europe, selling everyday household goods like buttons, gloves, napkins, cloth, small books, and pamphlets (see Plate 4.1). As systems of distribution steered trade development, the most far-reaching retail networks were those worked by ballad sellers, country chapmen and minstrels, and the many colorful peddler-families in France and Italy described by Laurence Fontaine.38 Early modern Europe shared with early modern China a dependence on family dynasties and kinship alliances for the distribution of popular tracts through the generations and across the mountains and valleys. Many of their practices, and indeed circuits endured for centuries, as demonstrated in studies such as those by Jean-François Botrel chronicling book peddling in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain.39 Fig. 4.4 features a nineteenth-century Spanish drawing of one of the hundreds of blind sellers (and singers) of ballads and other cheap print familiar to both village and city life. In many respects, the rounds of nineteenth-century chapmen and peddlers matched the activities of their forebears in the sixteenth century.40 Some circuits were intricate and regional but others were spectacularly long-distance. One surviving account records eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italian farm workers in Friuli buying printed stock from the Remondini firm of Bassano in the winter months and then taking these cheap publications into Eastern Europe, even as far as Kiev.41 Here is the equivalent of the connections throughout the Chinese empire along the Yangzi valley and the Grand Canal—and yet also a difference in the social and economic underpinnings of long-distance book commerce. The support of private collectors and the sustained demand and producerclient relationship entailed by book collecting represented a very different type of 38. Laurence Fontaine, History of Pedlars in Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 1996). 39. Jean-François Botrel, Les aveugles colporteurs d’imprimés en Espagne (Paris: Mélanges de la Casa de Velàzquez, 1973). 40. Clive Griffin, “Itinerant booksellers, printers, and pedlars in sixteenth-century Spain and Portugal,” in Myers, Harris, and Mandelbrote, eds., Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade: 43–60; Betty Naggar, Jewish Pedlars and Hawkers, 1740–1940 (Camberley: Porphyrongenitus, 1992); Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 16–21, 323; and for enduring circuits in Ireland, see Niall O’Ciosáin, Print and Popular Culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), and Niall O’Ciosáin, chapter 15 of James H. Murphy, ed., The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume IV: The Irish Book in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 41. Aleksej Kalc, Alba Zanini, Alessandro Giacomello, and Alberto Milano, Guziranje dalla Schiavonia veneta all’Ongheria con le stampe dei Remondini z Beneškega na Ogrsko s tiskovinami Remondini (Stregna: Comune di Stregna, 2009).

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Fig. 4.4 A blind colporteur illustrated in Los Españoles pintados por si mismos (The Spaniards painted by themselves) (Madrid, Gaspar y Roig, 1851).

networking from that developed speculatively by traveling humble salespeople, humbly capitalized and bearing other humble goods (also collected from central repositories). Neither extreme benefited from assured, closed clientage, yet the market operated in very different ways according to type of commercial product and type of customer.

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Histories of European peddlers and chapmen divide between those suggesting growing cultural convergence between the elite and the people and those concluding that chapbooks contributed to increasing polarization between a high and a low culture in early modern Europe. The peddler is generally seen as a representative of popular culture and as the main supplier of cheap print for the lower classes in the period 1600–1850. In German, French, and English regions, this mode of print (and some manuscript) conveyance has been studied in a predominantly rural context. There, the role of the peddler traveling from town to countryside was indeed distinct from the role of the established booksellers in the towns, selling books to educated and propertied customers. As Jeroen Salman and others have shown, in the highly urbanized Netherlands the itinerant functioned as a crucial extension of established booksellers in the towns; the same observation holds true for certain Japanese and Chinese cities.42 The peddler contributed to a finely tentacled distribution network that effectively reduced the gap between the established bookseller and the more modest consumers instead of extending it. As a result, the “popular” is more definable as that provided by traveling chapmen rather than created by localized writers and publishers.43 In a way that parallels the earlier relationship between print and manuscript circulation in China,44 manuscript newsletter distribution further increased delivery contacts and connections. The turning point in international trading in books came with the lessening of structural constraints on distribution from the late seventeenth century, fundamental transport changes, and new financial organization interlinked with new social, urban, formations. By the mid-eighteenth century almost every part of Europe was affected. Printing was introduced to Poland, in Cracow, as early as 1473 (by an itinerant Bavarian printer), and the presses printed some 7,000 editions in Cracow and many other towns of Poland-Lithuania in the sixteenth century.45 Even though the Polish book industry was less developed compared to the printing houses and publishing booksellers of Italy, the Netherlands, and France, Polish presses played a vital part in supplying print to Central and Eastern Europe. The earliest books in Cyrillic type were printed in Cracow and then in the Balkans before the seventeenth-century

42. Jeroen Salman, Pedlars and the Popular Press: Itinerant Distribution Networks in England and the Netherlands 1600–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 43. “The Pedlar and the Dissemination of the Printed Word” project directed by Jeroen Salman, Karen  Bowen, and Roeland Harms 2006–2010, and divided into three closely connected projects: social and economic research of the distribution network, the process of representation, and the itinerant dissemination of printed news. 44. See McDermott’s chapter in this volume. 45. Alodia Kawecka-Gryczowa, “Miejsce książki w kulturze polskiej XVI wieku” in Andrzej Wyczański, ed., Polska w epoce Odrodzenia (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1986); and Alodia Kawecka-Gryczowa, ed., Drukarze dawnej Polski, vol. 1: Małopolska: Od XV do XVI wieku (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1983).

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ascendancy of the Moscow Printing House, founded in about 1568 and then reopened and more effectively productive from 1614. From the mid-sixteenth century, Poland further exemplified a production center that also constituted an important market for books. Similar interplay developed in Hungary, Bohemia, and Moravia a little later (and where most early Hungarian books were printed in Cracow and Vienna). The Polish market is graphically reflected in surviving inventories of booksellers and merchants (which include, among many examples of imported texts, thousands of Protestant books printed in Polish in Königsberg).46 Polish booksellers imported and distributed books that were produced in Europe’s leading printing domains.47 Demand that required similar importation advanced in Scandinavia, where, for example, the Danish printer Henrik Waldkirch (active 1598–1629) established important connections to the Frankfurt fair and to Basle.48 For all the attention to a golden age of English letters from Shakespeare to Milton, the English model was not dissimilar to the Scandinavian, being far from self-sufficient in printed and especially scholarly book production before the end of the seventeenth century.49 By 1750, much printing in Danish, German, and other languages in Denmark and Sweden was supported by a flourishing market for books printed in Danish and other languages in Hamburg, Paris, and London, a market that certainly encompassed many Norwegian towns.50 As the market deepened, many distribution networks embraced the sale and cataloging of cheap print together with secondhand books and pamphlets. During the first half of the eighteenth century the major book-trade centers, with their radial distribution networks, were Amsterdam, Paris, the Hague, Leipzig, Hamburg, Geneva, Frankfurt, Utrecht, and Venice. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the productivity of both London and Paris soared, and the two came to dominate Europe as centers of publishing. In the eighteenth century also, the activity of groups with post office franking privileges greatly reduced the cost of newspaper distribution. Labor was rarely a problem. Most of the ballad chapbook- and godliness-sellers were youths—cheap and energetic laborers in a sharply underemployed economy. The changing age structure of the population even helped shape distribution practices. During the sixteenth century, the embryonic postal services from Italy and

46. Justyna Kiliańczyk-Zięba, “In Platea Columbarum: The Printing House of Hieronim Wietor, Łazarz Andrysowic and Jan Januszowski in Renaissance Krakow,” Publishing History, 67 (2010): 5–37; and Monika Jaglarz, Księgarstwo krakowskie w XVI wieku (Krakow: Tow. Miłośników Historii i Zabytków Krakowa, 2004): 65–75. 47. For the continuing union catalog project see Maria Zychowiczowa, Centralny katalog starych druków w Bibliotece Narodowej w Warszawie (Warsaw: Biblioteka Narodowa, 1995). 48. Frøland, Dansk boghandels historie 1482 til 1945. 49. James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), chs. 2 and 3. 50. Gina Dahl, Books in Early Modern Norway (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

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Central Europe led, among others, by Milanese and Venetian courier businesses, enabled wide dissemination of materials along main highways. In 1534, periodical post riders traveled between Antwerp and Venice and three years later between Venice and Rome. The postal systems in Italy, Germany, France, England, and Spain extended with the use of taverns and coaching inns as post houses and information offices, and, in some ways more progressively, in the Holy Roman Empire use of the postal system involved the payment of a fee (the porto), rather than obtaining an exclusive privilege. Increasingly across Europe by 1700, post offices served, at a relatively high price, increased public custom and the distribution needs of letter writers and newsprint producers.51 Fig. 4.5 reproduces a typical contemporary map of

Fig. 4.5 Postal routes from Augsburg, Strassburg, etc., from Johann Christoph Weigel the Elder (1654–1725), Nuremburg, early eighteenth century (reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg).

51. Howard Robinson, The British Post Office: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948): 23–46.

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Central European postal routes. Many booksellers adopted the public postal service to assist with newsprint distribution or sent stock to provincial retailers and customers by common carriers (Plate 4.2). The provincial dispatch of printed instruction and entertainment advanced erratically, however. In the early nineteenth century, steam-driven technologies required but also directly boosted new distribution methods and capacities. Steam applied to the printing press from 1814 came a year after the launch of the first steamboat and only five years before the first transatlantic crossing by steamship. Experiments with steam-driven land locomotives continued through the next decade. In the enlargement of the readership for print, the advancing railway system proved critical. The railway book edition, railway station bookstalls, and the railway circulating libraries effectively mapped the extension of the tracks. Although we can speak of a national market for cheap print from an early date, with various means of transport employed (including some coastal shipping), the railways transformed the market for massproduced books, newspapers, and print. The inaugural railway lines progressed steadily during the 1830s.The Liverpool–Manchester railway and the first section of the Saint-Étienne–Lyon railway opened in 1830, and the first railway in Ireland in 1834, in Belgium in 1835, and in Bavaria, the first steam-powered German railway line, in the same year. Railways first operated in Russia in 1837, in Hungary in 1846, and in Spain in 1848. Thereafter, the railway age boosted all levels of distribution, developing for books and journals what amounted to a new stage of opportunity in book and print production, marketing, distribution, and reception. Railways created new markets as well as supplying existing ones. In Britain, W. H. Smith’s bookstalls supplied long-distance passengers and those traveling regularly to work. The firm helped to popularize reading in trains, where it was much easier than in horse-drawn coaches.52 In France, Jean-Yves Mollier tells a very similar story in his history of Louis Hachette—fondateur d’un empire.53 As publishers sold more books but received less per volume, market building was sustained by a transformation in distribution systems and greater competitiveness in foreign markets. Supporting agencies notably included new commercial libraries,54 but demand was also boosted by subscription book clubs, private and town debating and literary societies, workingmen’s clubs (founded either by or for workingmen), and the solemn recommendations of the periodical reviews and magazines.55

52. Charles Wilson, First with the News: The History of W. H. Smith, 1792–1972 (London: Cape, 1985). 53. Jean-Yves Mollier, Louis Hachette (1800–1864): le fondateur d’un empire (Paris: Fayard, 1999). 54. See, for example, Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1970). 55. Simon Eliot, “Bookselling by the Backdoor: Circulating Libraries, Booksellers, and Book Clubs, 1876–1966,” in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., A Genius for Letters (Winchester and London: St. Paul’s Bibliographies, 1995).

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Business and Financial Organization The basic, long-term story of growth is, of course, indisputable. Paralleling the separation of crafts in other trades, book-trade organization in most European towns by the end of the seventeenth century included the separation of wholesaling and retailing businesses, the development of a tiered discount system, and protectionism at both state and trade association level. A large number of surviving contemporary prints and paintings graphically illustrate the selling and the sending out of books in all their different ways.56 By at least the mid-seventeenth century most traders found the provincial sale of books to be cheaper and more efficient by wholesale trade of unbound materials to fixed-site retailers in country towns rather than by trade of bound books at the fairs. Few of the country retailers were specialist dealers, and certainly not in books. Almost all were general shopkeepers (in China they were often stationery stores and even the publisher’s shop). By the end of the seventeenth century shopkeepers in provincial towns were conducting a considerable retail trade in books. The local bookbinder, finishing books to specific requirements, remained a staple of town trade until the mid-nineteenth century. The peddlers’ methods of sale and basic circuits, from wholesale suppliers of map books to far-flung individual customers, continued virtually unchanged through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Wider distribution of all other books, and the collection of libraries, was developed by new means to select and buy books. Most notable was the distribution of catalogs, including those for auctions.57 Capital requirements and the inflexibility brought about by technological and production constraints had continuing and particular consequences for the book trades, heightening the importance of marketing and distribution. This was one of several reasons why the fight to increase audiences and consumer interest was so important in the early modern period but even more so in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century book trades development, before technological revolution in printing (i.e., steam power) broke through former constraints. Even under the new technical regime of production, however, transport development—namely, the railways—proved critical across Europe. Although we can speak of an international market for print and of national markets for cheap print from an early date, with various means of transport employed, most all radiating from the metropoles, it is not until the age of steamships and railways that the mass-produced book, newspaper, and print market effectively permeated all social ranks. 56. The best-known published collection is Sigfred Taubert, Bibliopola: Bilder und Texte aus der Welt der Buchhandels (Hamburg: Hauswedel, 1966). 57. Bert van Selm, Een menighte treffelijcke boecken. Nederlandse boekhandelscatalogi in het begin van de zeventiende eeuw (Utrecht: HES, 1987); Reinhard Wittmann, ed., Bücherkataloge als buchgeschichtliche Quellen in der frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden: In Kommission bei Harrassowitz, 1984); and A. N. L. Munby and L. Coral, British Book Sale Catalogues: A Union List (London: Mansell, 1977).

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Most country booksellers acted as agents for central wholesalers (this practice seems to have been more important in Europe and Japan than in China). By the early eighteenth century, bookseller-publishers in Leipzig, Amsterdam, Paris, and London were including boasts of “available in every bookshop” in their imprints. In the final decades before the introduction of steam-driven printing in the early nineteenth century, retail outlets for stationery and books existed in almost every European town. By the end of the manual printing press period, the link was also clear, if unsurprising, between the production and distribution of books and the commercial history of their cities of origin. The asymmetry of the flows of books corresponding to the social and political status of vernacular languages has been given renewed attention.58 The archives of the Société de Neuchâtel, which have been so usefully mined in tracing this traffic in Enlightenment Europe, have also been revisited in order to offer greater distinction between what was ordered by booksellers across Europe and what was actually distributed (and the two were undoubtedly very different).59 Schemes for assured custom, notably subscription editions, flourished during the second third of the eighteenth century and have been the focus of several studies investigating the social and geographical profile of book subscribers. In France this largely developed as two-stage marketing, where individuals bought subscriptions from booksellers who had bought them from publishers. In Italy subscription editions proved extremely successful from the 1720s, responding in part to a crisis in market conditions and in enabling risks to be widely shared. Subscription editions were indeed one of the few forms of book publication by country booksellers in the eighteenth century. Even at their most popular, however, subscription editions were often special cases in a volatile market. Some subscription lists were no more than an exercise in aristocratic name-dropping. Like the inclusion of prefaces by famous men in Chinese books they were a commercial embellishment intended to give a work respectability and social cachet.60 At the same time, the secondhand market for books and for whole and disassembled libraries, soared, aided by both auctions and booksellers’ catalogs. The resale of printed and manuscript books and pamphlets accounts for a remarkable and ongoing redistribution of books across Europe and its 58. Jeffery Freedman, Books Without Borders in Enlightenment Europe: French Cosmopolitanism and German Literary Markets (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 59. Simon Burrows and Mark Curran, comps., The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, 1769– 1794: Mapping the Trade of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (FBTEE) project and database; and Mark Curran, Selling Enlightenment: Exploring the Eighteenth-Century Book Trade from Neuchâtel (forthcoming). 60. P. J. Wallis, “Book Subscription Lists,” The Library, 5th ser., 29 (1974): 255–86; F. J. G. Robinson and P. J. Wallis, Book Subscription Lists: A Revised Guide (Newcastle upon Tyne: H. Hill, 1975); W. Kirsop, “Pour une histoire bibliographique de la souscription en France au XVllIe siecle,” in G. Crapulli, ed., Trasmissione dei Testi a Stampa nel Periodo Moderno (Rome: Edizione dell’Ateneo, 1987), v. 2: 255–82; and Françoise Waquet, “Book Subscriptions in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy,” Publishing History 33 (1993): 77–88, noting further studies.

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colonies, also involving new business and advertising techniques. By the early nineteenth century, for example, many European booksellers reduced customers’ credit terms in return for the more assured exchange of monies at the time of sale. By this time also, a freer, more competitive, and expanding market, together with more efficient technologies and distributive systems, provided enterprising publishers with unprecedented opportunities.61 This was true all over Europe, and indeed in the extension of Europe overseas, but the revolution in the book trades was particularly marked in Britain which, from the eighteenth century, changed from an obscure to a leading European book mart, and where, according to the crude title counts offered by Peddie’s English Catalogue of Books during the nineteenth century, 25,000 book titles were published between 1800 and 1835 and 64,000 between 1835 and 1862.62 The use of cheaper raw materials and new industrial processes (notably in papermaking) lowered unit costs and hugely improved the return on invested capital. Between 1846 and 1916, the volume of publication was to quadruple while the average price of literature halved.63 Even so, as Samuel Smiles conceded, in the mid-nineteenth century, publishing, however much directed by strong-minded bookmen, remained in thrall to capital requirements, legal frameworks, technological constraints, and the efficiency of distribution networks.64 Further pricing decisions and the advance of the early and mid-nineteenth-century wholesaling discount system depended upon distribution and transport developments. Given the necessity of selling as quickly as possible the whole edition in which so much was invested, the efficiency and cost of distribution remained critical. In many ways, and especially at the dawning of the railway and steamship age, the 1840s marked a transition from one age of bookselling to the next. The industrial, mass production of books accelerated after the mid-nineteenth century, before which the older practices remained visible. In Britain, the struggles over copyright and taxation in the 1840s and the culmination of many decades of dispute and protest paraded, once again, passionate argument about the future of publishing 61. James Raven, “British Publishing and Bookselling: Constraints and Developments,” in Jean-Yves Mollier and Jean Michon, eds., Les mutations du livre et des l’éditions dans le monde du XVIIIe siècle à l’an 2000 (Quebec City, QC: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001). 62. Robert Alexander Peddie, The English Catalogue of Books (London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, 1836–1901), 7 vols. 63. Alexis Weedon, Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003): 158. 64. John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Croom Helm, 1988): 129–79; Aled Jones, Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996): 1–28; John Sutherland, “The Institutionalisation of the British Book Trade to the 1890s,” in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., Development of the English Book Trade 1700–1899 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1981): 95–105; and David McKitterick, ed., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 6, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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and bookselling. Regional booksellers as well as major international dealers were, however, restricted by limited financial structures. Given the modest scale of regional economies and the absence of major technological advances, capital accumulation in the book trade and the expansion of bookselling were held back less by shortages of savings than by difficulties in transferring economic surpluses to those sectors and individuals requiring start-up or tie-over credit. Almost all credit requirements were short-term and bound not to servicing fixed assets but to supplying the purchase of materials and to discounting bills of exchange to cash. The country bookseller remained the prisoner of limited arrangements for longdistance credit. It was usually practical only for the bookseller to negotiate terms with a single wholesaler, who then acted as an intermediary in dealings with other suppliers and thereby limited competition that might have been helpful to the retailer. This arrangement was a comfortable one for the major publishers. Trade discounts offered to the country retailer only came after the wholesale agent’s own cut from the original publisher’s bulk discount. Across frontiers, risk could be lessened by the barter principle, with perhaps half payment in books and half in real money. Immense difficulties were caused, however, by payments in foreign currency, negotiations over bills of exchange, and disputes over exchange rates. This is apparent even in correspondence between booksellers and royal and state libraries begun in earlier centuries and often conducted, like many commercial transactions, in fragile French.65 The essential point in any short summary of this aspect of print history is the distinction between the functions of printing and of publication. Publishers, financing publication and wholesaling the products, were sometimes also printers and stationers but sometimes not (and were sometimes authors self-publishing). Retail or corresponding booksellers were usually separate again. From the eighteenth century especially, many publishing booksellers financed publication and sold the books but commissioned printers to undertake the manufacture of the volumes (sometimes using several printers for an extensive or complex edition). Restrictions affected these trades in different ways. Imposed regulation curtailed publication and the selling of print, but the other checks, notably transport and financial organization, changed as part of the development of other trading sectors. Similarly, while the printing industry was not directly affected by relocational factors such as raw materials or the new sources of power transforming other industries, the knock-on effects for distributional systems was great. These, however, were not allowed to develop uniformly, when some states and some towns were restricted by imposed regulation of one sort or another.

65. P. G. Hoftijzer, “The Leiden Bookseller Pieter van der Aa (1659–1733) and the International Book Trade,” in C. Berkvens-Stevelinck et al., Le Magasin de l’Univers: The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the International Book Trade (Leiden: Brill, 1992): 169–84, esp. 176.

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It is possible, therefore, to argue that in certain regions book-trades development was retarded because of the success of distribution. State and guild regulations were breached almost everywhere from the mid-eighteenth century. The imposed regulations had withstood the chaos of the mid-seventeenth-century wars but not the upheavals caused by the volume of increased publication, itself responding to new possibilities of distribution. When, in many countries, marketing risks fell significantly from the end of the seventeenth century, with improved credit arrangements and lowered costs of advertising, the effects of earlier printing and publishing regulation continued. The continuation of old practices could be true even in regions where newspapers offered both new advertising opportunities and new delivery networks to ease book delivery. The concentration of book trades in one particular center, for example, constrained development as well as promoted it. In centralized states there followed a boom in publication but not in the number of new publication centers, where imposed regulation had weakened or even suppressed provincial printing. One of the most remarkable examples was also the area of fastest growth, eighteenth-century England. After the nonrenewal of the licensing laws in 1695, the expansion in the English provincial trade was, in effect (and with the important exception of newspaper and jobbing printing), increased distribution of a hugely increased London product. London imprints still accounted for 95 percent of all English publications in 1800.

Concluding Observations In broad summary, distribution remained a crucial variable in the development of publishing in Europe and in its colonies. Transport costs remained consistently high in the first centuries after Gutenberg, and the transformation in the economics of book distribution, and later, newspaper and journal distribution very obviously affected marketing strategies and calculations for text and edition production. Improvements in transport routes and distance times encouraged the development of discount systems to promote greater retail distribution in the country. Distribution costs were always a significant add-on. With most booksellers’ commercial calculations (even when swopping stock) allowing little scope for major tie-ups of capital in printed and warehoused volumes, the efficiency of transportation remained critical (and even though carriage costs were usually a further expense underwritten by publishers and book merchants). Transport underpinned the urgency of selling editions in which so much was usually invested. Nor was cheap print excluded from this assessment. Recognition of the importance of noncommercial publishing in East Asia, as argued by Joseph McDermott, also offers suggestive reassessment of the circulation of private and noncommercial texts in Europe The production of printed books and pamphlets paid for by authors or institutions and designed for private or closed

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institutional circulation can be obscured by attention to the remarkable surge in commercial publication in early modern Europe. There is overlap with the small jobs, whose neglect has already been noted as a significant caution to existing book histories. The development of transport routes and postal services assisted the growth of correspondence but also private networks of private printing—less “publication” (where making things “public” was not the intention) than privileged contact and discussion through the medium of print (but also by enduring manuscript and texts of mixed print and script). The restricted distribution of books, such as genealogies solely to lineage family members, reminds us that both printed and scribal production traveled along private, even surreptitious, channels to retain and most effectively exercise power and influence. Such development, in Europe, China and Japan, also suggests the usefulness of regarding carting, delivery, and postal services as the hiring of services to ensure distribution: functions that might be quantified and given economic value where sources allow. These interpretations lead to wider considerations for the writing of book history in Europe and especially in comparison to other parts of the world. Focus upon changing distribution systems offers an opportunity for further consideration of the categorization of publication. As revision to Chinese book history has shown, conventional categories of publications, even of the definition of genre, can be unhelpful in charting the publication history and the social and political impact of texts. The more advanced research on distributive systems in Europe and China highlights further the overlaps and fusions of forms, of the use, for example, of newspapers for written news as copies were sent along the distribution network and between specific and identifiable producers and clients. Conversely, increasing attention to the hybridity of the form of early modern Chinese publications encourages a reassessment of Western categorization and might suggest new associations and crossovers: contents of the traveling peddlers’ trays, for example, might reveal similarity of material form that derived as much from requirements of conveyance as from originating production. Another observation concerns business history. Printing offered greater productivity, but the structural inflexibility in the book trades put new emphasis on the problem of sale in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. A fifteenth-century trade of stationers, capable of sending out a few manuscript copies and then up to 500 printed copies, was also the basis for a modern industry handling hundreds of thousands of copies of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary tracts published in the final decades of the eighteenth century. This situation would seem to differ from that in China, where the predominant type of publisher and type of operations would vary more over time.66 In particular, the principal type of private publishing in the second century of Ming rule, as McDermott’s chapter suggests, was arguably the largely noncommercial variety of family publishing. Nonetheless, a concurrent shift toward commercial 66. See Brokaw’s chapter in this volume.

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publishing continued unabated, to the extent that it has been estimated to account for more than three-quarters of all publications by the 1630s and thus to have deepened the publishing industry’s reliance upon the commercial distribution of texts. The turning point in mass international and national trading of books in Europe came with the breakdown of structural constraints on distribution from the late seventeenth century and by new financial organization interlinked with new social, urban, formations. By the second half of the eighteenth century almost every part of Europe was affected. Booksellers’ catalogs, issued and used by both wholesalers and retailers, were originally the sole vehicles for notification and promotion of booksellers’ wares. Now they were more widely available but were also only part of a broader commerce in print where distributional success limited as well as promoted new printing and publishing initiatives. Thousands of book auction and sales catalogs were sent to individuals even in frontier parts of Europe. In the eighteenth century, booksellers sent out some 10,000 catalogs from the Netherlands alone. A continuing analysis should show how in different local networks the length of time between publication and end-sale was reduced during the eighteenth century, and how minimum and maximum delivery times were also converging. The diversity of networks and the existence of different forms of distribution—and political and economic impediments—remain fundamental to book-trades history in this period. In a way that is perhaps salutary to recent studies, it also gives more importance to supply factors than to demand even though the question of market identification was always inherent to the evaluation of risk in distribution. This leads, therefore, to a second general issue. Print enlarged but also created many different trading circuits, each with its own mechanics, extent, and rate, and changing at different times. Further research should construct a cultural map identifying not only early printing sites but also distribution points and routes, and the relationship between them. As the Frankfurt fair contracted, for example, and the Leipzig fair became less international, competing centers with more vernacular printing created something which looked more like national publishing areas—and yet this was at a time of wider penetration of an increased number of book-trading circuits. Leipzig, after all, remained the place of publication of the Acta eruditorum, self-evidently international in character, and Leipzig booksellers continued to advertise books belonging to the “Latin trade” in law, medicine, and theology. Of many other examples of differently and importantly influential circuits, Jan Pirożyński has demonstrated how the Iter Italicum book route limited the much vaunted influence of England, the Netherlands, and France in the Polish Renaissance.67 There is 67. Pirożyński, “Royal Book Collections”: 21–24; Lienke Paulina Leuven, De boekhandel te Amsterdam door katholieken gedreven tijdens de Republiek. (Epe: Hooiberg, 1951); I. H. van Eeghen, De Amsterdamse Bochhondel, 1680–1725 (Amsterdam, 1960–78); and Th. Clemens, “The Trade in Catholic Books from the Northern to the Southern Netherlands, 1650–1795,” in Berkvens-Stevelinck et al., Le Magasin de l’Univers: 85–94.

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similar evidence of specific supply routes by booksellers in the Low Countries for the increased demand for print from the Counter-Reformation Church. Not only did important Antwerp printers like the Moretuses and Verdussens print Roman liturgical books and vernacular devotional Catholic literature, but so too did printers in the Protestant North such as the Elzeviers, Blaeu, Schipper, de Lonne, and the Huguetan brothers. The comparison with early modern China is fascinating. Cynthia Brokaw and others emphasize that the portability and simplicity of woodblock printing, together with the ready availability of cheap paper, enabled the expansion of publishing sites, many outside established and major cities, even though Brokaw also stresses the continuing importance of centralized sites and main distribution centers and areas frequented by producers and distributors alike. In such ways the commercial history of book distribution offers important refinements and cautions to cultural histories of religious and linguistic boundaries, institutional and pedagogical histories, and of intellectual history in its social context. It further supplies empirical evidence in the continuing debate about the envisaging by state, trade, or consumer of a “public,” and about the development of a marketplace of readers. The mapping of book circuits offers a new “nonnational” perspective on “home” markets in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As guild and state regulation eased, international trading expanded, while new national market development was even more pronounced. If one then views the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Western Europe as a period of unblocking of identified constraints to book circulation and production, rather than as crude linear development, it gives much greater sense to contemporary perceptions of change. Many, such as Leibniz, had feared the consequences of a great deluge of books. It explains the obsession with order in the architectural statements, both internal and external, in library design, and the contradictory tensions in Enlightenment Europe, seen at quite humble levels as well as grand ones, between the worship of literature and the desire to set up boundaries to reading, to offer countless reference works of the sort described below by Peter Burke and Joseph McDermott, and to exclude those persons who could not be trusted to read properly. In turn, close analysis of distribution suggests differences between the appearance and reality of the eighteenth-century reading revolution by highlighting the distinction between publication profiles and the number of readers. Much of the increased demand for new books from the late seventeenth century can be explained by greater purchasing and borrowing by those members of those social classes already buying books, and by demand from churches and libraries, rather than by a markedly “widening circle” of readership. Overall estimates might be given of about 3 million titles to approximately 1.5 billion copies of books published in Europe in the eighteenth century, but the undoubted extension of reading almost certainly failed to keep pace with population growth. In the second half of the eighteenth century there

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was probably no increase at all in the numbers reading as a percentage of the total population.68 Such profiles of book distribution are complex and multidimensional. Literary consumption is determined not so much by social stratification as by membership of particular libraries or reading or scientific societies. Much historical attention has been given to literacy skills but far less to the economic constraints to access to print. Here, it can be argued, a comparison of book pricing to real wage levels suggests that most new European books became more and not less of a luxury item relative to average purchasing power during the eighteenth century.69 This in turn raises the question of the secondhand market and access to reading institutions. New profiles of distribution patterns can complement book-ownership studies, where many inventories list numbers of “books” but not titles or even categories. Such cautions lead to one final consideration. It is salutary in a history of book distribution to consider demand for print not as demand for reading but as demand for objects viewed as worthy of possession. In East and West, printing did introduce the luxury book edition that was not to be read. As pointed out by Eugenio Garin long ago, we have to give attention to the number of books shelved and not read; displayed and talked about but not read; fought over and sent round Europe and Asia as booty but not read.70 The history of the book must encompass all aspects of possession and exchange. Such commerce is not always edifying, but it is fundamental, and its study does offer chastening review.

68. Early revisionists were Joost J. Kloek and Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, “The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Reading: A Myth?” Trans. 7th International Congress on the Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1989): 645–51. 69. Raven, Business of Books: 301–3. 70. Eugenio Garin, L’Educazione in Europa, 1400–1600: Problemi e Progammi (Bari: Laterza, 1957): 15–16.

5 Empire of Texts Book Production, Book Distribution, and Book Culture in Late Imperial China Cynthia Brokaw Knowledge of the geographical span and social depth of the distribution of Chinese imprints in the late imperial period, roughly the mid-sixteenth century through the early twentieth century, is naturally fundamental to any evaluation of the impact of print on Chinese society. Since print served as a major vehicle for the transmission of new ideas and scholarly advances, study of intellectual history requires some knowledge of the pattern of textual distribution. It is necessary to know, for example, how widely imprints that explained the new teachings of the Wang Yangming (1472–1528) school of the late Ming or the new methods of the evidential research movement of the high Qing circulated, if historians are to develop an accurate picture of the intellectual geography of the late imperial period. But this information is important not just to intellectual historians; social historians interested in the dissemination of ritual models (such as those described in household encyclopedias), literary historians interested in the transmission and reinvention of fictional plots in novels and songbooks, political historians interested in the role that the spread of textual culture played in imperial (and modern Republican) national integration—all these scholars must be attentive to patterns of print distribution. Yet historians of the Chinese book are only just beginning to sketch a map of book distribution across the empire or to explore the transmission of texts both down and up the socioeconomic hierarchy. In part this tardiness is due to the newness of the field of Chinese book history, at least relative to its Western counterpart. There is, to be sure, a vast literature in Chinese and Japanese on Chinese books, but little of this scholarship, largely the work of scholars of editions (banbenxuejia) and bibliographers (muluxuejia), addresses questions of the social, cultural, economic, and political impact of books in Chinese society. It is really only in the last twenty years that China scholars have begun to consider the broader issues raised by the originators of book history in the West; there is still a great deal of work to do before we can hope to present as comprehensive and as detailed a picture of book history for China as there is now for Western Europe. Unfortunately, the nature of the sources and the paucity of certain types of sources for Chinese book history necessarily limit what kind of information can be collected

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and the degree to which detailed comparisons with the West can be made. The business records and correspondence of Chinese publisher-booksellers from before the mid-nineteenth century rarely survive. Although we can no doubt learn more than we know now, it is unlikely that we will ever have the detailed knowledge of the production costs, prices, and sales networks so striking in the work of some Western European historians of the book—and so clearly behind the broad conclusions that James Raven is able to draw in the preceding chapter. Records of the print runs of publications were rarely kept, so even such basic information as the number of copies of a certain title or the volume of output of a particular publisher is very difficult to come by; we will probably never have a reliable notion of the number of texts in circulation at any given time.1 Largely for these reasons, a detailed map of book production and distribution in late imperial China is not yet (and may never be) available. It is nonetheless possible, even with the limited information available, to suggest some of the general contours of this map and to reflect on how they may have shaped the nature of Chinese print culture and the impact it had on Chinese society. In attempting this task, I focus on the period that covers only roughly the last third of China’s long woodblock publishing history, the late Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties, from the mid-sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries, during which the Chinese enjoyed their last great woodblock publishing boom. Although xylography was practiced in China as early as the eighth century, information about early publishing operations is scanty;2 the later period offers the more numerous and richer sources—and even opportunities for field work in the history of the book—that make possible the creation of some sort of map of book production and distribution as well as the reconstruction of the major texts of Chinese book culture. 1.

2.

For a fuller discussion of the difference between the history of the book and Chinese banbenxue and muluxue and of the source limitations in the study of the history of the Chinese book, see Cynthia J. Brokaw, “On the History of the Book in China,” in Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005): 3–4, 25. This is not to suggest that nothing is known of the earlier periods of Chinese book history. In particular, publishing and book culture in the Song dynasty (960–1279), when woodblock printing made books significantly more accessible to the literate population, are subjects that have received focused attention. See, for example, Susan Cherniack’s analysis of how print transformed the practice of reading and textual criticism (“Book Culture and Textual Transmission in Sung China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54.1 [June 1994]: 5–125); Lucille Chia’s study of one of the major publishing industries of the day, the publishing houses of Jianyang, Fujian (Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian [11th–17th Centuries] [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002]; Sören Edgren’s study of printing in the Southern Song capital, Hangzhou (“Southern Song Printing at Hangzhou,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 61 [1989]: 1–212); and the essay collection on Song (and Yuan dynasty, 1279–1368) printing, Lucille Chia and Hilde de Weerdt, eds., Knowledge and Text Production in an Age of Print, 900–1400 (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

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I am most interested here in one type of Chinese book culture: the “popular” book culture purveyed by commercial publisher-booksellers.3 This interest, generally dismissed as eccentric by most Chinese book historians (who tend to concern themselves with elite texts—either works of sophisticated scholarship or beautifully produced works that most likely circulated only among the highly educated and wealthy), is the natural product of the questions I want to ask about the social impact of woodblock print: did the spread of a flourishing book culture help unite or integrate different regional and socioeconomic groups within Chinese (and Qing) society? To what extent did the spread of book culture and the resulting increases in literacy stimulate social mobility and help to forge, in the nineteenth century, a coherent, culturally based national identity? I thus focus here not so much on the circulation of specialized elite texts in the most culturally advanced and book-rich part of the empire, the Jiangnan or lower Yangzi delta region, as, rather, on the degree to which the best sellers of Chinese book culture—commercial texts designed for the sake of profitability to appeal to as large a population as possible—made their way, first, to interior provinces and border areas, and second, to classes of the population below the very small portion of highly literate elite readers. In sum, I emphasize factors that influenced the geographical extension outward and the social penetration downward of publishing and distribution networks. In the absence of extensive surviving business records, I have relied on a range of other sources, both written and oral. Genealogies (including biographies of prominent publisher-booksellers), local gazetteers, property-division documents, and, of  course, imprints—the products of publishing—supply some historical depth to this study; when available, as in the case of the Sibao publishing industry (discussed below), they allow me to reconstruct the history of an industry over several centuries. Fieldwork and oral histories supplement these written sources, enriching our understanding of the more recent, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, history of woodblock publishing and bookselling. When written sources are not available or very scarce (as in the case of the Yuechi block-cutting handicraft, discussed below), I have relied heavily on fieldwork; naturally, in these cases I can only speculate about their earlier, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century, histories.4 3.

4.

As a result of this focus on commercial publications, I do not treat or treat only cursorily several other important categories of book production and circulation: (a) circulation to different government offices and academies of officially printed or sponsored texts; (b) publication by Buddhist and Daoist monasteries and temples and by charitable societies of scriptures and morality books which might be donated to other religious institutions, sold in temples, or, in the case of morality books, distributed free of charge; (c) the continued production and transmission of manuscript texts; (d) the exchange and circulation of privately or family-published texts among book collectors and members of the social, political, and cultural elite; (e) the access that some readers had to texts through shops that rented out books, usually at rather cheap rates; and (f ) the publication and circulation of popular printed images. For a discussion of the ways in which imprints can be used to study publishing history, see Edgren, “Southern Sung Printers at Hangzhou”: 7–15. For a description of the range of sources available to

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Finally, I am concerned here with the circulation of texts within China Proper, the primary area of Han settlement and Han culture, bounded by the Manchurian plain to the north, Mongolia and Xinjiang to the northwest, and the Tibetan plateau to the west. And within China Proper—more or less equivalent to the Ming but only a portion of the much larger Qing empire—most of my information about production and distribution comes from south China. This is the region that probably had the largest publishing centers and enjoyed the greatest access to books, in part because of the very easy availability of paper in south China and in part because of the more efficient water transport networks—the Yangzi river and its tributaries—that made distribution easier and faster in the south.5 We know much less about publishing and the circulation of texts in north China, and clearly this is one large segment of my tentative map of book production and distribution that requires future research. I treat here, with varying degrees of specificity and thoroughness, the following topics: (1) the role that the woodblock-publishing craft—both in terms of technology and labor and labor relations—played in shaping late imperial book culture; (2) the changing geography of publishing in late imperial China Proper, first, as woodblock publishing industries spread outward from the eastern seaboard to interior provinces and hinterland regions over the course of the Qing and, second, as their products were sold at progressively lower settlement levels, thus reaching broader—and often poorer and less well-educated—audiences; (3) the development of more extensive and more interconnected book distribution routes in the Qing; (4) the content of the commercial book culture that these new sites, with their more tightly integrated sales networks, were disseminating; and, finally, (5) the possible cultural and political repercussions of the patterns of book publication and distribution that I have described. Along the way I will attempt some comparisons with Europe.

The Craft and Business of Publishing-Bookselling in Imperial China Woodblock print technology The simplicity and portability of the dominant Chinese printing technology, xylography or woodblock printing, very significantly shaped book culture by facilitating the widespread transmission of printed texts that begins, at the latest, in the late sixteenth century. The cutting of the characters in relief on woodblocks, as described

5.

the fieldworker in Chinese book history, see Cynthia Brokaw, “Fieldwork on the Social and Economic History of Chinese Print Culture,” East Asian Library Journal 10.2 (Autumn 2001): 6–59. Once more work is done on publishing in north China we may have to adjust this claim for the greater concentration of printing centers in the south. But it is probably no coincidence that the now known publishing sites in the north usually had access to the Grand Canal, one of the major transport arteries of the north. See Lucille Chia, “Mapping the Book Trade in Late Imperial and Republican China,” Report to the Luce Foundation for Year 2 (1999–2000) (unpublished): 1–9.

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in the Introduction, was a craft that required only three to four years of training as an apprentice.6 According to former block-cutters interviewed in Sichuan and Guangdong, young girls or boys would typically begin learning the skill in their early to mid-teens; some informants even suggested that children as young as ten could be taught block-cutting.7 Literacy, although preferred, was not a requirement; since the characters of the text were already inked on the block, the cutter did not have to be able to read to cut them.8 Block preparation,9 although it had to be started well in advance of the commencement of the cutting, was easy and did not demand any special materials or skills. Block-cutting tools were very simple and easily portable— a few blades, a wooden handle into which the blades fit, and a few chisels of various sizes to scoop out the wood for the blank spaces on a page (see Fig. 1.1).10 Printing and binding, too, were processes requiring little skill; as many informants told me, “even women and children could do it.”11

6.

Interviews 8, July 13, 1997 (Yuechi); 9, July 14, 1997 (Shiya); 13, July 17, 1997 (Yuechi); 19, July 23, 1997 (Dashi); 23, July 24, 1997 (Zhenlong); 31 and 32, July 16 and July 18, 2008 (Yuechi); 34, July 22, 2008 (Yuechi); and 38, July 24, 2008 (Yuechi). Block-cutters interviewed in Yuechi, Sichuan, invariably stated that their apprenticeship was three years; this, they said, was the term stipulated in the agreements, either verbal or written, that their parents had made with their master. I suspect, however, that this is a stock response that does not necessarily reflect what were likely variations, depending on a student’s aptitude and industry, in the term of study. It might be best to think of the agreed term of study as at least three years; informants did emphasize that, even if a student had mastered the skill before the three years had passed, he still had to serve out his apprenticeship. If he had not completed his study to the teacher’s satisfaction after three years, then he might be required to study longer. Corroboration of this conjecture comes from Liao T’ai-ch’u’s study of Chengdu apprentices in the late 1930s and 1940s; although his informants also claimed that three years was the fixed term of study, he found that the average term of apprenticeships in crafts that required a high degree of skill was in fact four years and two months. See Liao T’ai-ch’u, “The Apprentices in Chengtu During and After the War,” The Yenching Journal of Social Studies IV.1 (August 1948): 96. 7. Interviews 6 and 11, July 13 and 17, 1997 (Yuechi); 17, July 23, 1997 (Dashi); and 19 and 21, July 24, 1997 (Zhenlongxiang [Yixingxiang]). 8. Interview 39, July 26, 2008 (Yuechi); and Fu Chongju, Chengdu tonglan (Chengdu: Ba Shu shushe, 1987), v. 1: 503. See also Edgren, “Southern Song Printing at Hangzhou”: 50; William Milne, Retrospect of the First Ten Years of the Protestant Mission in China (Malacca: Anglo-Chinese Press, 1820): 259–60; and Cynthia J. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007): 14–15. 9. On the preparation of woodblocks, see Tsien Tsuen-hsiun, Paper and Printing, Volume V, Part 1 of Joseph Needham, ed., Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985): 196–97; Chia, Printing for Profit: 30; and Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: 102–3. 10. Interviews 13, July 17, 1997 (Yuechi); 21 and 23, July 24, 1997 (Zhenlong); 32 and 34, July 18 and 22, 2008 (Yuechi); 35, July 23, 2008 (Wanshou); 37, July 24, 2008 (Zhenlong); and 38, July 24, 2008 (Yuechi). Of course, highly skilled block-cutters might use a larger number of different cutting and chiseling tools. See, for example, the illustration of cutters’ tools in Tsien Tsuen-hsiun, Paper and Printing: 199. But even this set of eight tools was highly portable. 11. In most cases, in fact, women and children did the work of printing; and women did the binding. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: 109–10.

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Woodblock printing was thus a relatively simple and an easily transferable technology; it did not demand investment in or transport of heavy machinery (like the Western letterpress) or the employment of literate craftspeople (who in European printshops would train as apprentices for as long as seven years) to work and repair the printing machinery. It was also perhaps the best technology for printing a nonalphabetical language like Chinese, with well over 50,000 characters. It is not surprising, then, that, although the Chinese invented earthenware moveable type in the eleventh century, were using wooden moveable type by the end of the thirteenth century, and had developed bronze and other metal moveable type by the late fifteenth century,12 they never fully embraced moveable-type technology until mechanized movabletype printing was introduced in the modern period. Requiring fonts of at least 200,000 types—and thus an enormous initial capital outlay—movable-type printing was simply not cost-effective for commercial publishers.13 Wooden movable type might be used popularly and somewhat inexpensively for the printing of works like genealogies, which used a limited number of often-repeated characters,14 or for largescale printing projects sponsored by the government or very wealthy entrepreneurs who had the resources to pay for the creation of a very large fount.15 But xylography remained the dominant technology. Woodblock printing also had certain economic advantages over European-style letter-press printing. It required no capital investment in heavy and expensive machinery, for no machinery was necessary. Payment for the cutting of the woodblocks generally constituted the largest outlay by the publisher. Cutting costs varied so widely that it is impossible to make any generalizations except for the rather feeble one that, if a publisher was not too concerned with quality, it was easy enough to find cutters who could be hired cheaply.16 Scattered sources from the sixteenth century record wages ranging from 2.5 to 3.5 fen of copper cash per day or per hundred characters, very low pay even when room and board (two meals) was added.17 Ye Dehui 12. Tsien Tsuen-hsiun, Paper and Printing: 201–20. The Koreans, however, were the first to develop metal movable type, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 13. Ibid.: 220. The total number of types (including several identical types for commonly used characters) might be much greater. The Qing imperial printworks worked with fonts of 200,000 to 250,000 types, but a private publisher produced a font of roughly 400,000 types in the early nineteenth century. 14. Xu Xiaoman, “‘Preserving the Bonds of Kin’: Genealogy Masters and Genealogy Production in the Jiangsu–Zhejiang Area in the Qing and Republican Periods,” in Brokaw and Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture: 350. 15. Tsien Tsuen-hsiun, Paper and Printing: 208–20. 16. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: 100; see also Evelyn Rawski, Literacy and Popular Education in Ch’ing China (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1979): 117, 119–23; and Joseph McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006): 36–37. 17. Inoue Susumu, Chūgoku shuppan bunka shi: shomotsu sekai to chi no fūkei (Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 2002): 222–26; and McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book: 26–31. See also

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(1864–1928), the great bibliophile and scholar of the book, notes an increase in cutting costs in the Qing, from about 20 qian (copper cash) per hundred characters to 50 to 60 qian per hundred characters in the late 1870s. But these sums, most likely paid for the cutting of literati texts and thus on the high end, reflect inflation; Evelyn Rawski suggests that the real cost of cutting probably rose only slightly. In any event, those looking for cheaper labor could hire female cutters, who worked for 16 to 23 percent of the “normal wages.”18 In south China, the materials required for printing were easy to come by. Bamboo paper seems to have been widely available (and at much lower cost than paper in Europe), as was the pear, jujube, catalpa, and camphor wood needed to make the blocks. Pine soot or lampblack to make ink could be purchased either at the market or through local handicraft operations. Woodblock printing had another advantage, also crucial for publishers with limited funds to invest: woodblocks could be used over and over again, for the printing of up to several thousand (some say as many as 25,000) impressions of a single text.19 Former lower-end publishers in western Fujian province explained that their normal practice was, once the blocks for a text were cut, to have about 100 copies printed up. If the texts sold quickly, they could simply bring the blocks out of storage and print up another hundred or few hundred copies.20 Thus they were spared a problem that, as Raven points out, troubled many European printers: the necessity of estimating fairly accurately how many copies of a text would sell at any given time, to recoup the expense of setting the type, yet to avoid having to pay for resetting the type if the work turned out to be a best seller.

Publishing-bookselling: Organization and the labor force In Europe, as Raven notes, there were many different possible relationships between the functions of publishing, printing, and wholesaling in the book trade. Publishers might—or might not—work as printers and stationers as well as wholesalers, at least until the eighteenth century (from that time on publisher-booksellers began more consistently only to finance publication and sell books, while commissioning printers to manufacture their products). Throughout the late imperial period in China, Kai-wing Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004): 33–38, for an estimate of total book production costs in the late Ming. 18. Ye Dehui, Shulin qinghua (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1957), juan 7: 186, cited in Rawski, Literacy and Popular Education in Ch’ing China: 121. 19. Tsien Tsuen-hsiun states that 15,000 impressions could be made from a block; after “slight touching up,” then another 10,000 could be taken. Paper and Printing: 201. Of course, the number of impressions that could be taken from any block depended on the quality of the block and the care taken to preserve it (by allowing it to “rest” for several hours between printings of 200 to 300 sheets, by storing it in a place free of damp and insects, etc.). Only the hardest and most carefully stored blocks would produce 25,000 prints. See Chia, Printing for Profit: 30–31, on the proper treatment of woodblocks. 20. Interview 44, November 23, 1995 (Mawu).

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the major functional relationships were also somewhat flexible. As in Europe, commercial publishers were usually publisher-booksellers, both financing publication and selling books wholesale (and often retail as well—in contrast to Europe, where wholesale and retail operations were usually separate). Many commercial publishers also managed the major steps of manufacture, from the preparation and cutting of the blocks to the printing and binding of the finished product, although they might also commission laborers working outside, for a character-cutting shop (kezidian), to cut the blocks. Private publishers and smaller commercial shops would commonly rely on kezidian and separate printing shops for book production. But the larger Chinese commercial publishers typically coordinated all the steps in the processes of both manufacture and sale. The structure of Chinese publishing-bookselling made this oversight and coordination possible. Firms were often household businesses embedded in lineages, with access to a large and varied enough labor force to complete all the tasks of manufacture: family and lineage members could work as editors, scribes, cutters, printers, binders, and booksellers. The work of printing and binding was considered so easy that, as noted, “even women and children could do it,”21 and these tasks were indeed usually handed over to the women of the household. Bookselling, which required extensive travel and contact with strangers, was a male preserve; very often the sons, brothers, or uncles of the publishing-house manager were sent out to market the books and run branch shops. More highly educated members of the household or lineage might be employed to collate, edit, and even write texts, although local literati might also be invited to perform this intellectual labor.22 Block-cutting, the work requiring the longest training and the greatest skill, was most commonly the labor that had to be done outside the household. Block-cutting also required by far the heaviest capital investment on the part of the publisherbookseller; paper was relatively cheap and, as noted, the other tasks of production required little skill and could be handled by household members. Thus the relationship between the block-cutters and the publisher-bookseller was crucial to the success of any publishing venture. The ease and portability of woodblock printing technology, combined with the existence of a sizeable and elastic labor pool (consisting largely, at the lower and larger end of the pool, of poor peasants practicing subsidiary crafts in order to supplement their inadequate incomes from land), helped create a flexibility and variety in labor relations that was of considerable benefit to publishers. There were publishing units stable and well-funded enough to hire a permanent staff of block-cutters. 21. Interview 44, November 23, 1995 (Mawu). 22. For descriptions of publishing-bookselling operations as household or lineage businesses, see Chia, Printing for Profit: 75–99, 154–92; and Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: 126–88. It is possible that publisher-booksellers in cities were more likely to form businesses with non-kin.

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The Imperial Printing Office at the Wuying Palace (Wuying dian), one of the major publishing units of the Qing imperial court, regularly employed expert cutters and printers.23 And large-scale printshops like the Jigu ge (“Drawing from the Well of the Ancients’ Hall”) of the great book collector/publisher Mao Jin (1599–1659) also had a regular staff of cutters; in the early stages of his operation, Mao employed twenty cutters and printers, and his shop produced over 100,000 blocks for the printing of fine editions of the Classics, histories, literary collections, and collecteana.24 It is possible that other large-scale commercial printshops in the cities of the lower Yangzi delta also regularly supported a stable staff of cutters and printers, whom they were able to employ steadily in cutting and printing. Even in the much more isolated book-production center of Xuwan, Jiangxi, at least one publishing household ensured a regular local supply of talent by drawing on the labor of its tenants for seasonal block-cutting as well as printing and binding work.25 And the largest and most prosperous of the Sichuan commercial publishing houses, the Shancheng tang, headquartered in Chongqing, but with a branch in Chengdu and seven other major cities, eventually established five print “factories” (four in Chongqing and one in nearby Guang’an county seat), offering steady employment to cutters, printers, and binders. The Guang’an factory, the largest and most important because of its proximity to a community of peasant block-cutters (see the discussion below on the Yuechi cutters), employed twenty to thirty cutters and 120 to 130 printers and binders.26 Details about this unit are very hard to come by—it seems to have been established rather late in the history of the Shancheng tang, in the early twentieth century—but it represents a rare effort to establish a factory-style publishing operation, the publisher regularly employing a staff of permanent or professional cutters working exclusively for his business. Much more common, particularly outside the lower Yangzi delta and Beijing, was a variety of much looser and more temporary relationships, ones that offered publishers considerable flexibility in the employment of block-cutting and printing labor. These relationships took many different, often overlapping, forms. Communities of block-cutters grew up in certain regions of the empire, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and notably in areas of rural poverty, where peasants were always looking for ways of adding to their meager income. For example, in  Yuechi, an impoverished county in eastern Sichuan province, there developed, 23. Tsien Tsuen-hsuin, Paper and Printing: 184–85, 269. 24. Ibid.: 180–81. 25. Interviews 2, December 23, 1995 (Xuwan); and 7, July 6, 1996 (Jinxi). Perhaps as a result of the success of the publishing industry, block-cutting became a common handicraft in Xuwan, rather as it did in Yuechi (see below). The Republican-era Jiangxi provincial gazetteer reports that “both men and women from Xuwanzhen were good at cutting woodblocks” (cited in Zhao Shuiquan, “Xuwan yu muke yinshu,” Jiangxi difangzhi tongxun 9.2 (1986): 54). 26. Interviews 2, December 23, 1995 (Xuwan); and 7, July 6, 1995 (Jinxi).

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probably in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, clusters of peasants who practiced block-cutting as a subsidiary occupation, that is, as a supplement to their income from the land. Yuechi itself did not have much of a publishing industry at the time, but the Yuechi cutters easily found employment with publishers in Chengdu and Chongqing, the two major cities of Sichuan province. The peasant cutters might be attached to a local kezidian in the county seat, a shop often managed by a cutter. This kind of arrangement—a group of block-cutters managed by a “head” cutter—may have been a development of the thirteenth century,27 but we have little evidence of the operation of such units until several centuries later. In the case of Yuechi, publishers from the major cities of Sichuan would visit the local shops and negotiate with a kezidian manager for the cutting of a certain text. The kezidian manager—very often a former block-cutter—would then take the responsibility for having the blocks prepared and the transcript of the text written out. The blocks, once ready for cutting, would be divided up among the shop’s cutters, who carried them home to their respective villages to cut the blocks in the time they could spare from farming. Sometimes the arrangements were more informal; the publisher would simply make contact with a local bookstore owner or a local scribe—“a man of some learning”—who would act as middleman for the deal. Cutters were hired on a job-by-job basis, and wages were renegotiated with each new job.28 The cut blocks were then transported the long distance, almost 300 kilometers, back to Chengdu, or the much shorter distance, roughly 100 kilometers, to Chongqing. It seems that the wages that could be paid peasant cutters in the countryside were so low—in 1909, 30 to 40 percent that of wages for urban cutters29—that it was worth paying the costs of transporting the blocks over the rough road from Yuechi to Chengdu or the (much smoother) land-and-river route to Chongqing. Commercial publishers at any rate consistently chose to commission the rural Yuechi cutters to produce blocks for their major longer works, their dabutoushu. 27. Scholars have suggested that these groups rose in the Yuan largely because of changes in the practice of recording cutters’ names on blocks. In the Song, cutters often worked in groups (each cutter given responsibility for a certain number of blocks for each text), and each artisan would cut his name into the blocks he had cut. But in the Yuan dynasty far fewer of these “signatures” appear, a fact that suggests that “the carver whose name was cut into the woodblock had actually become the head of a group of carvers.” By the late fifteenth century, there is often just a single name cut at the end of the final block of a juan. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book: 34. 28. Interviews 8, July 13, 1997 (Yuechi); 10, July 15, 1997 (Baimiao); 15, July 18, 1997 (Qiaojia); 234, July 24, 1997 (Zhenlongxiang); 28 and 31, July 27, 1997, and July 16, 2008 (Yuechi); 35, July 23, 2008 (Wanshou); and 39, July 26, 2008 (Yuechi). One informant suggested that news of new jobs circulated quickly to the relevant villages. Other informants suggested, rather, that the middleman—the kezidian or bookstore manager—would seek out cutters in the villages. Two sources mention that merchants from outside Sichuan (from “xiajiang” or Jiangzhe—that is, Jiangsu and Zhejiang) visited Yuechi to hire cutters. Interviews 5, July 31, 1996, and 29, July 28, 1997 (Yuechi); and Yuechixian erqinggongye zhi (undated stenciled text): 136. 29. Fu Chongju, Chengdu tonglan, 1: 503.

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But peasant block-cutters with too little land to support themselves and their families might leave the countryside and work for kezidian in the cities, in Chengdu and Chongqing, sending their earnings home. Fu Chongju (1875–1917), in his guide to early twentieth-century Chengdu, suggests that some even worked independently, as freelance cutters, setting up stalls (baitan) in one particular market in the city, Kejia xiang.30 Commercial publishers might hire these men to cut smaller, miscellaneous works, zashu. Some of the more ambitious cutters made the move from artisan to entrepreneur, establishing their own kezidian. The Yadong kezidian, for example, was established in Chongqing in the late 1930s at the initiative of a Yuechi blockcutter who engaged other cutters (some of them his relatives) in a simple partnership (hehuo); each cutter contributed some funds to set up the shop, and each profited in proportion to the amount he had put up. More often, however—at least according to the reports of former block-cutters still living in the Yuechi area—the cutters who became kezidian owners exploited the labor of their employees, paying them very low wages.31 Cutters, whether freelance or workers at a kezidian, might earn a living by picking up jobs from government offices, literati, or religious institutions. Provincial, prefectural, and county government offices in particular regularly provided opportunities for employment. For, although central printing operations like the Wuying Palace Imperial Printing Office employed a permanent staff of cutters (and printers and binders), regional and local governments rarely enjoyed such a luxury, yet they routinely had to produce gazetteers, school texts, and official forms. Research by Joseph  Dennis on the publication of gazetteers or local histories in the Ming suggests that pools of cutters could be found fairly easily in prefectural or provincial capitals, if not in county seats; these were for the most part operating privately—that is, they were not employed as official staff.32 At least one government unit in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, hired Yuechi cutters: in 1879 Wang Kaiyun (1833– 1916), director of the prestigious government-sponsored Zunjing Academy (Zunjing shuyuan), records in his diary that “block-cutters from Yuechi” had come to complete the cutting of blocks for the publication of one of his works for the Academy, Shangshu jinguwen zhu (Commentary on the New Text and Old Text versions of the Book of Documents).33 Individual literati or family publishers might also either work through a kezidian to hire cutters or “invite” particularly skilled cutters to come to their home and, in return for room and board and a small wage, cut blocks for texts they wished to 30. Ibid. 31. Interview 44, July 29, 2008 (Pijiagoucun). 32. Joseph R. Dennis, Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100–1700 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015): 179–80. 33. Wang Kaiyun, Xiangqi lou riji (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1997), v. 2: 799.

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publish.34 Once the blocks were cut, the family publisher would hire another set of workers to print the text or commission the kezidian to see to the finishing of the text. Thus, the distinguished Chengdu book collector Yan Yanfeng (1855–1918) and his adopted son, Gusun (1889–after 1976), regularly employed one highly skilled Yuechi craftsman, Lu Jiesan as their “in-house” block-cutter; he and his cutters produced the blocks for the Yans’ collecteana of works on phonology. The private hire of blockcutters was still practiced as late as the early twentieth century; in his diary Wu Yu (1872–1949), the Sichuanese poet and New Culture activist, describes at considerable length his negotiations (and his frequent dissatisfaction) with the cutters he hired to cut the blocks for a publication of his literary writings in the early twentieth century.35 As the two examples given above indicate, these private literati or family publishers cut, for the most part, two kinds of texts: works written by family members, often the family head or his father or grandfather (much more rarely his mother or sister); and works of some significant cultural importance, either reprints of rare texts or collections of scholarly or literary works. The former corresponds roughly to vanity publishing in the West; the latter could, arguably, like some of the government publications mentioned earlier, be considered a kind of public-service publishing. But the uses of both these publishing products—the vanity and the “public-service” works—as gifts and articles of literati exchange suggest (as McDermott indicates in his chapter) that they were means of accumulating local, regional, and empire-wide cultural and social capital. Religious or charitable institutions—monasteries, temples (both Buddhist and Daoist), and societies devoted to the publication of morality books—might also employ cutters. Here, as with the private or family publishers, the magnitude of the project might vary quite widely, from a simple work of just a few chapters ( juan) to the Buddhist Tripitaka, a massive work in over 6,300 chapters. A Sichuanese cutter from Yuechi county spent over a year at a Buddhist Huayan monastery in Chongqing working, with a group of roughly ten other cutters, on the blocks for an early twentieth-century edition of the sect’s scriptures.36 Some religious institutions had blockcutters within their own fold; in many cases monks trained as cutters so that they could publish the sutras essential to the teachings of their monastery, the records of their teacher, or simply the history of their monastery. Cheaper texts and prints, like morality books or images of popular deities, might be given away at temples and monasteries; one of the best ways of earning merit was to have copies of morality

34. Wu Xiaofeng, “Yuechi Chen Shutang Puyuan tushuzang xiaokao,” Sichuan tushuguan xuebao (2001) 5: 78–80; and “Chen Shutang de ‘Puyuan shuzang,’” Yuechi wenshi ziliao 3 (1987): 66–68. For detailed discussion of private noncommercial printing of this sort, see the essay by Joseph McDermott in this volume. 35. Wu Yu, Wu Yu riji (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin, 1984–86), v. 1, passim. 36. Interview 43, July 28, 2008 (Dashi).

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books printed and distributed free of charge, providing an incentive for laypeople to publish. But most of the business of block-cutting came from commercial publishers. And in places like Yuechi—that is, a hinterland area far distant from the major cultural and economic centers of the empire—it is clear that the rather elastic structure of the labor force lent a certain flexibility to the book trade, at least from the publisher’s point of view. Since cutters were hired on a job-by-job basis, and, since there always seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of cutters, publishers were not required to support a regular staff of workers; they could simply hire them as the need for blocks arose. (And, of course the fact that texts could easily be reprinted from woodblocks meant that there was little need to hire workers to recut blocks.) Should one cutter or group of cutters prove unsatisfactory, the publisher could simply shift his business to another kezidian or another group within a kezidian. In short, for the publisher the workforce would expand or contract to meet his needs; and the range in wages and levels of skill (and peasant desperation) gave him a broad choice in the hiring of cutters. For most of the history of woodblock printing in China, there seems to have been no organization that had the authority both to regulate the block-cutting craft and represent it in negotiations with publishers. It is not until quite late, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—in fact, at a time when block-cutting was no longer in great demand—that there is any evidence of block-cutters forming guilds that might earn them greater control over their labor and more effective bargaining power with publishers.37 In one other way the nature of the labor force shaped the spread of publishing and thus of texts. The high rates of migration and itinerant or sojourning labor in the Qing ensured the transmission of the block-cutting craft. Indeed, itinerant labor had much earlier presented employment opportunities for block-cutters; gazetteers were often cut by itinerant craftspeople (although, as noted above, they might also be sent to prefectural or provincial capitals for cutting).38 The Yuechi peasants originally learned

37. A guild of sorts was established in the lower Yangzi delta city of Suzhou in the early 1660s: the Chongde gongsuo. But this organization apparently did not play any role in regulating relations between publishers and block-cutters or printers; rather, it provided a meeting ground for publishers and cooperated with the imperial state in identifying illicit publications (see below for more information). In Shanghai, two block-cutters’ guilds were established in the late 1890s: the Ziye gongsuo and the Kezi gongsuo. But, as Christopher Reed points out, these were largely defensive moves, belated efforts to define a craft that was soon to be replaced by lithography and letterpress technologies. Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2004): 172. The Woodblock Text Industry Guild (Mushu ye tongye gonghui) established in Chengdu in 1936 seems to have had a similar purpose. Zhang Zhong, Minguo shiqi Chengdu chubanye yanjiu (Chengdu: Sichuan chuban jituan, Ba Shu shushe, 2011): 184–85. 38. For a fuller discussion of the production of gazetteers, see Dennis, Writing, Publishing, and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China: 181–97.

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block-cutting from immigrants from Jiangxi and Fujian provinces, in the southeast.39 Then, Yuechi peasant cutters, pressed by poverty to seek work outside Sichuan, in turn often migrated to neighboring borderland provinces where there was a high demand for cutters. I know of two block-cutters, originally from Yuechi, who established their own kezidian outside the province, one in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, and the other in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu; both men then “invited” block-cutting members of their extended families back in Yuechi to join them.40 Many cutters traveled, either within Sichuan or within the larger region, encompassing the provinces of Yunnan and Guizhou to the south and Gansu, Shaanxi, and Ningxia to the north, as sojourning or itinerant cutters.41 And since cutters might work as teachers as well as cutters, their sojourning and itinerancy helped to transfer the technology of cutting permanently to new sites. The situation that I have described in Sichuan is by no means unique. The pattern here is similar to that of Magang, Guangdong, where a community of poor peasant women practiced block-cutting as a subsidiary craft, supplying blocks to publishers in the market town of Foshan; the major city Guangzhou, also in Guangdong province; Sibao, a cluster of peasant villages in the Fujian outback; and even in distant Suzhou (Jiangsu province), one of the major publishing centers of the lower Yangzi delta area. These cutters had, if anything, even less control over their labor and even less access to knowledge of the market than the Yuechi cutters for, as women, they could only work from home; all negotiations over labor and wages were handled by local (male) kezidian managers. Magang cutters could not take to the road to find higher-paying work in the cities or other provinces.42 But other regions were served by itinerant cutters. In the southeast, for example, where large lineage organizations were common, the cutting of blocks or wooden moveable type for the publication of genealogies was often done by groups of itinerant cutters who specialized in just this kind of cutting; they traveled from one village to another, hiring themselves out to lineages interested in publishing their genealogies.43

39. Wang Gang, “Qingdai Sichuan de yinshuye,” Zhongguo shehui jingjishi yanjiu 4 (1991): 63. 40. “Yuechi keshu shi” (unpublished manuscript). Interviews 5 and 6, July 31 and August 1, 1996 (Yuechi); 9, July 14, 1997 (Shiya); 21 and 23, July 24, 1997 (Zhenlong); 29, July 28, 1997 (Yuechi); and 45, July 29, 2008 (Shiya). 41. Interviews 5 and 6, July 31 and August 1, 1996 (Yuechi); 9, July 14, 1997 (Shiya); 21 and 23, July 24, 1997 (Zhenlong); and 29, July 28, 1997 (Yuechi). 42. Huang Guosheng, “Guangdong Magang nüzi keshu kaosuo,” Wenxian 76.2 (1998): 266–70. Interviews 1, October 28, 1996 (Guangzhou); 3, October 31, 1996 (Mabei); and 4 and 5, November 5, 1996 (Mabei). 43. Xu Xiaoman, “Preserving the Bonds of Kin”: 337–38; see also Zhang Xiumin, Zhongguo yinshua shi (Shanghai: Renmin, 1989): 712.

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The Proliferation of Publishing Sites: Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries Thus the technology of woodblock printing and the flexibility and elasticity of the labor force made the expansion of publishing and the diffusion of text production— and thus the diffusion of texts—relatively easy, so that when the demand for texts expanded and spread, so too did the Chinese woodblock publishing industry. The absence of any systematic—or systematically enforced—law of copyright also made reproduction of identical titles by different publishers easy; despite the efforts of some publishers to limit the practice, what we today would call the pirating of texts was the dominant business practice.

The geography of publishing in imperial China Although far more research needs to be done before we can claim to have a full picture of the major centers of publishing and the networks of book distribution in the late imperial period, certain patterns have emerged from studies of Song-(960–1279), Yuan-(1279–1368), Ming-, and Qing-dynasty publishing. From the very little that we know of the Song publishing industry and book trade, it appears that the major centers were located in the imperial capitals (Kaifeng and later Hangzhou), Chengdu (and Meishan) in the far southwest, Jianyang in the southeast, and the Huizhou area (spanning modern-day southern Anhui and northeastern Jiangxi provinces). Clearly, printing reached all corners of the Song empire—the distance to Chengdu from any of the other sites is quite considerable (1,500 kilometers from Hangzhou), yet Chengdu was one of the liveliest publishing centers of the Song. In the next dynasty, publishing continued in Jianyang, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, and Jiangxi; Beijing (or Dadu, the capital) and Pingyang, Shanxi, also became important centers (see map 1.1).44 There is a rather mysterious decline in publishing activity in the late fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries; it has been attributed to such various causes as the disorder attendant on the fall of the Yuan and the establishment of the Ming, the harsh censorship of the founding Ming emperor, a movement within Confucianism that denigrated wide reading, economic decline, and deforestation (which made the hardwood required for woodblocks very expensive).45 But by the mid-sixteenth century, the commercialization (and monetization) of the economy and the growth of the urban population spurred a publishing boom, dominated by commercial publishers, which produced thousands of editions of the Classics, school texts, dictionaries,

44. Tsien Tsuen-hsuin, Paper and Printing: 159–72. Many of these sites were primarily centers of official and some private (literati) publishing; Jianyang and Chengdu seem to have been the major commercial publishing centers. 45. See Inoue, Chūgoku shuppan bunka shi: 191–226; and, on the decline of the Jianyang industry in the late Yuan and early Ming, Chia, Printing for Profit: 149–53.

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encyclopedias, literary collections, ritual and etiquette guides, medical works, divination manuals, novels, short stories, dramas, songbooks, and so forth. The new map of publishing was quite different from that of the Song and Yuan, however; instead of widely scattered sites, important commercial publishing centers were concentrated in just two areas, both on the eastern seaboard: the lower Yangzi delta region or Jiangnan, the wealthiest and culturally most advanced part of the empire, and northern Fujian. The great cities of Nanjing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou (and some smaller urban centers, like the prefectural seat Huzhou, Zhejiang, and the county seat Changshu, Jiangsu) as well as Jianyang, a county in Fujian, and the Huizhou area in Anhui and Jiangxi, were the most prolific producers of books in the late Ming.46 Hu Yinglin (1551–1602), a late Ming literatus and book collector, lists Suzhou, Jianyang, and Hangzhou as the major centers of book production but goes on to make the following observations about the complexities of the book market: In general, there nowadays are four places in the empire where books are gathered [for sale in great numbers]—Beijing, Nanjing . . . Suzhou, and Hangzhou. I have sometimes acquired imprints from Fujian, Hunan, Yunnan, and Guizhou, while in Shaanxi, Shanxi, Sichuan, and Henan I have made extensive inquiries and read through [books I was shown]. But they were generally not comparable to these four places.

He goes on to note that, although Beijing published few books, it was an active center in the book trade, as many merchants congregated there to sell family collections and works from the lower Yangzi delta area. Because paper was expensive in Beijing, “each text published in the capital costs three times what it would in Zhejiang.” The other great book market, according to Hu, was Zhejiang: Zhejiang also publishes few books. Yet it functions as a hub for the southeast and a center of writing. Books from the Suzhou area and Fujian are all gathered [for sale] there . . . As for Hunan, Sichuan, Vietnam, and Guangdong, merchants sometimes acquire new and unusual books on their travels there. Officials who have served in Shanxi, Henan, Beijing, and Shaanxi often send books they have brought back with them to the market for sale. During the years of the provincial examinations these books are very much in evidence.

Although books were available from all over the empire, and even from Vietnam, the point here is that the major book markets of the empire were supported overwhelmingly by books produced in just three sites: “Merchants throughout the empire rely on Suzhou and Nanjing for seventy percent of their books and on Fujian [that is, Jianyang] for the other thirty percent.  .  .  .  Putting aside the books these places 46. Zhang Xiumin, Zhongguo yinshua shi: 340–402, provides the most comprehensive overview of publishing sites in the Ming. Although some publishing activity can be found in all the provinces of the empire, commercial publishing was overwhelmingly concentrated in the lower Yangzi delta area and Jianyang; most of the imprints produced in the interior were private or official publications.

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print, what reaches them from other provinces is extremely little. . . . not two or three percent [of all available titles].”47 Most of these latter texts, the two to three percent from the provinces, seem to have been official or literati publications transported by officials as well as book merchants to the lower Yangzi delta markets; such texts, even from such faraway areas as Guangxi and Vietnam, made their way more or less accidentally to the major markets and seem to have been regarded as curiosities. Hu’s description, then, suggests the existence, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of a few areas—two cities of the lower Yangzi delta region (Nanjing and Suzhou) and one region in northern Fujian (Jianyang)—that were overwhelmingly the centers of text production.48 The book market was also heavily concentrated in just a few sites: Beijing, the capital, and Hangzhou, in Zhejiang (and I would add here Nanjing and Suzhou in Jiangsu province). The lower Yangzi delta area clearly dominated both book production and book sales (see map 1.2). To be sure, Hu was probably exaggerating a little here: we know, for example, that Jianyang, although it was noted primarily as a producer of texts, did also sell texts wholesale: there was a sizeable book market in Jianyang, held on the first six days of each month; and book and other merchants would travel there to buy texts.49 Indeed, Lucille Chia has suggested that Jianyang market was integrated into the lower Yangzi delta network (particularly the city of Nanjing) as early as the mid-sixteenth century.50 But it is fairly clear that the lower Yangzi delta was the most important book clearinghouse in the empire: with Jianyang it produced by far the greatest number of texts and sent them off to Beijing and markets throughout the empire; at the same time, it attracted the small number of texts produced elsewhere to its markets for sale. Certainly it seems that books were fairly easily available in the lower Yangzi delta. Distribution networks were relatively dense: books were sold at regular bookstores but also at restaurants, temple fairs, religious celebrations, and major festivals. In county and prefectural seats, bookstores and booksellers working from temporary stalls would cluster around the Confucian temple and the civil service examination hall; they might organize special exhibits of their examinations aids and scholarly works whenever examinations were held. “Book boats” (shuchuan) traveled the waterways and canals of the lower Yangzi region, docking at both remote villages and larger ports to sell or rent new and old books.51 47. Hu Yinglin, “Jingji huitong,” juan 4, in Shaoshi shanfang bicong (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1958), v. 1: 55–56. 48. Huizhou, not mentioned here by Hu Yinglin, is also often identified as a book-production center in the late Ming, as I have indicated above. But Huizhou was noted more for its production of highly skilled block-cutters, many of whom ended up working in printshops in Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Suzhou. See Michela Bussotti, Gravures de Hui: Étude du livre illustré de la fin du XVIe siècle à la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1998). 49. Chia, Printing for Profit: 153, 189. 50. Ibid.: 168, 171, 173–74, 233. 51. Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China: 79.

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The picture for much of the rest of the Ming empire seems to have been quite different. To be sure, there were at this time long-distance dealers who transported certain works—sure sellers like examination aids—to periodic markets in provincial capitals in the interior. Xu Xiake (1586–1641) noted in his travel diary that textbooks—primers and examination aids like model essay collections—published in his home, Jiangyin, Jiangsu (in the lower Yangzi delta region) were for sale in distant Yucheng, Yunnan.52 And common sense suggests that, given the simplicity of woodblock printing, there was probably already by the seventeenth century, in sites quite distant from the lower Yangzi delta, some local commercial production and sale of reading primers, almanacs, prescription recipe collections, and so forth. But outside the lower Yangzi delta the distribution of texts appears to have been both limited and uneven. Except for the capital, north China was not well integrated into the market; in the sixteenth century, literati there had to resort to private printing of examination aids, just the kinds of texts that would appear first in commercial book markets in the south.53 In the seventeenth century, Gu Yanwu (1613–82) relied on friends in the south to send him books (although Gu was probably interested in works far more sophisticated than examination aids).54 Southern provinces beyond the lower Yangzi delta also suffered from limited access to imprints in the late Ming. Long-distance book merchants might have been able to profit from the transport of ever-in-demand examination aids from the lower Yangzi delta to Yunnan, but even basic works of scholarship did not necessarily travel commercially to Guangdong, Jiangxi, Hunan, or Hubei, not to mention more distant provinces—Guizhou, Yunnan, and Sichuan—on the southwestern borders of the empire. Zhu Yunming (1461–1527), for example, while serving as magistrate of Xingning county, Guangdong, had difficulty finding a copy of the Annotated Thirteen Classics (Shisan jing zhushu).55 The major sites of both production and sale were on the eastern seaboard and tightly concentrated in the lower Yangzi delta area. By the mid-Qing, production sites had multiplied and there was a more complex set of market networks linking upper-level markets in metropolitan centers, intermediate-level administrative centers and market towns, and even lower-level hinterland communities. Beijing emerged not only as the major book market—Liulichang became the largest site of book exchange through the Republican period—but perhaps also as the premier publishing center—not surprising, given the determination of the 52. Xu Hongzu, Xu Xiake youji (Taibei: Shijie shuju, 1970): 932; cited in Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China: 79. 53. Gu Yanwu, Tinglin yiwen jibu, in Gu Tinglin shiwenji (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1983; reprint of 1959 ed.): 221; cited in Joseph McDermott, “The Ascendance of the Imprint in China,” in Brokaw and Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture: 76. 54. Wei Su, Wei Taipu ji (Taipei: Xin wenfeng, 1985), 10.16a–b; cited in Inoue Susumu, “Shoshi – shoko – bunjin,” in Araki Ken, ed., Chūka bunjin no seikatsu (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1994): 317. 55. Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power: 78–79.

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Manchu emperors to assert control over not only Chinese or Han but also Manchu, Tibetan, Mongol, and Uighur textual publication.56 The lower Yangzi delta cities certainly remained important: Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Huzhou, and Yangzhou were still notable centers of book production, both private and commercial.57 But what is most striking about the geography of publishing in the Qing is the appearance of new hinterland or interior sites not up to that time associated with cultural production (and reproduction); we might say that several new Jianyangs emerged to complicate the map of book production and distribution in the Qing. Jin Wuxiang, a native of the lower Yangzi delta area, claimed that Xuwan, an otherwise not particularly notable market town in eastern Jiangxi province, was the most prolific publishing site of his day (the 1880s). He mentions, in  second place, Magang, the peasant village in Guangdong that was home to the group of female block-cutters mentioned above. He emphasizes the quantity, not the quality of the cutting, however: For the production of text blocks, the provinces of Jiangxi and Guangdong are first; the cutters of Jiangxi are in Xuwan, Jinxi county, those of Guangdong in Magang, Shunde county. In both places the accumulation of many blocks is a sign of wealth. When daughters are given in marriage, blocks are often part of their dowries. But the blocks are full of errors, for each character is carelessly cut, because half the work of cutting the blocks is done by female workers.58

More recently, in the mid-twentieth century, the book scholar Zheng Zhenduo (1898–1958) identified Xuwan—along with an even more obscure site, Sibao, a cluster of peasant villages isolated from major cultural and economic centers in the hinterland of Fujian province—as among the “four major sites of commercial publishing” in the Qing.59 Zhang Xiumin, in his magisterial history of Chinese printing, adds considerably to this number of sites in an impressive list of Qing centers outside the lower Yangzi delta area, in both north and south China: Dongchang (now Liaocheng) and Jinan in Shandong; Ankang in Shaanxi; Kaifeng, Zhangde, Zhengzhou, Zhoujiakou (now Zhoukou) in Henan; Shengjing (now Shenyang) and Liaoyang in Fengtian (now Liaoning); Chengdu and Chongqing in Sichuan; Nanchang in Jiangxi; Changsha 56. Evelyn Rawski, “Qing Publishing in Non-Han Languages,” in Brokaw and Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture: 304–10. 57. There is, nonetheless, a considerable decline in publishing in the lower Yangzi delta during the MingQing transition, and Nanjing, and especially Hangzhou never recovered their earlier, late Ming, strength. See Zhang Xiumin, Zhongguo yinshua shi: 343–48, 365–72, 550–51, 553–54, 558. 58. Jin Wuxiang, Suxiang sanbi (pref. 1884; Saoye shanfang), 4.10b; cited in Nagasawa Kikuya, Wa Kan sho no insatsu to sono rekishi, reprinted as Nagasawa Kikuya chosakushū (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 1982), v. 2: 84. 59. Zou Risheng, “Zhongguo sida diaoban yinshua jidi zhi yi—Sibao: qiantan Sibao diaoban yinshuaye de shengshuai,” Liancheng wenshi ziliao 5 (1985): 102. The other two sites are not at all surprising: Beijing and Hankou.

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and Changde in Hunan; Shashi in Hubei; Xiamen, Quanzhou, and Fuzhou in Fujian; Foshan and Guangzhou in Guangdong; Kunming and Jilin in Yunnan, and so forth (see map 1.3). Citing the Republican era book-scholar Sun Yuxiu (1871–1922), he notes, Block-cutting, paper and ink were all reasonably priced in the three provinces of Hunan, Jiangxi, and Fujian, and printshops and bookstores proliferated there. The imprints produced were of the lowest quality and not as numerous as those of Masha [Jianyang] in the Song and Yuan. All these printshops took profit as their goal and were always looking for ways to reduce production costs and increase profits, and so the quality of the paper, ink, and craftsmanship of their imprints naturally never matched the refinement of palace editions or literati publications. But they made a contribution to the development of culture and the spread of education.60

If the late imperial publishing boom began in the late sixteenth century in the cities of the lower Yangzi delta and in Jianyang, elsewhere it unfolded gradually over the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, as commercial publishing operations spread outward—that is, westward, to the interior—to areas far distant from the eastern seaboard and downward to smaller and simpler units of settlement: some provincial capitals and interior metropolitan centers (like Chongqing) but also prefectural and county seats, market towns of varying importance, and even peasant villages. What spurred the spread of publishing sites, outward and downward, over the course of the Qing dynasty? Clearly, the growing population created a greater demand for texts; a moderate estimate of growth suggests that the population increased from 155 million in 1500 (just before the beginning of the publishing boom), to 268 million in 1650, and then to roughly 400 million by the 1840s.61 The civil service examination system, in theory open to all males not of criminal background, created a predictable market for primers, editions of the Four Books and Five Classics, and a whole panoply of examination aids, until the system was abolished in 1905. Since this system not only offered the most lucrative channels of advancement but also heavily shaped the nature of education even for those not interested in climbing the “examination ladder,” its influence on Chinese book culture is incalculable. In addition, the spread of elementary schools in the Qing probably helped to increase literacy,62 thereby 60. Zhang Xiumin, Zhongguo yinshua shi: 558–59. Of course, new commercial publishing sites were also established in the lower Yangzi delta area. Zhang Xiumin lists Zhenjiang and Changzhou in Jiangsu; Shaoxing, Ningbo, Yuyao, Jiaxing, and Cixi in Zhejiang; and Anqing in Anhui. 61. Martin Heijdra, “The Socio-economic Development of Rural China During the Ming,” in Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote, eds., The Cambridge History of China: Volume 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Part 2: 417–578. 62. Angela Leung, “Elementary Education in the Lower Yangtze Region in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Benjamin A. Elman and Alexander Woodside, eds., Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600–1900 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994): 385–87.

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stimulating the demand for other types of texts as well: fiction, drama, songbooks, medical manuals, fortune-telling guides, geomancy handbooks, and so forth. If the population boom increased the demand for texts, the migrations of the early and high Qing served to spread this demand around, as it were: ambitious students from families newly settled in Sichuan, on the southwestern frontier of China Proper, needed access to the texts of examination study as much as, if not more than, students in the lower Yangzi delta or Beijing. The peasants and merchants who flocked to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered by newly opened lands on the edges of China Proper—Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, etc.—created markets for both practical manuals of daily life and works of light entertainment. And, as indicated earlier, the technology of woodblock printing made the diffusion of publishing operations to regions far distant from the old print centers relatively easy. By the late Ming, the wages paid block-cutters had declined to the point that, given demand, profits could clearly be made from commercial publishing;63 it became an attractive investment, particularly in regions where paper and hardwoods were easy to obtain. And finally, there were no systematically enforced legal impediments to the expansion of publishing. Commercial publishers routinely printed “fanke bijiu” (“reprinting forbidden”) on the cover pages of their works, but this in practice was a toothless prohibition, as there was no routinely enforced law against the violation of what today we call copyright (banquan). To be sure, a similar concept was certainly not unknown in imperial China.64 There are cases of indignant authors successfully bringing lawsuits against publishers who pirated their work,65 and the government at times attempted to regulate the reproduction of editions of the Classics.66 And of course the ubiquity of the “fanke bijiu” admonition on the cover pages of commercial and official imprints indicates that publishers were interested in protecting the profitability and/or quality of their productions by limiting their unauthorized reproduction. But most commercial publishers were able to ignore these warnings with impunity. Best-selling works—study editions of the Four Books and Five Classics, popular novels, prescription guides, and so forth—were commonly pirated—that is, recut and reprinted by different publishers, each of whom claimed to “own the 63. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book: 26. 64. William Alford overstates the case when he claims that there was no copyright regulation in premodern China; see his To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). For a corrective (perhaps overcorrective) to this view, see Li Mingshan, Zhongguo gudai banquan shi (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian, 2012). 65. The great Song Confucian Zhu Xi (1130–1200) successfully petitioned a local subprefect to order the destruction of the blocks of an inferior pirated edition of his Sishu huowen (Questions and answers on the Four Books). “Ming-sun Poon, Books and Printing in Sung China (960–1279)” (PhD diss., University of Chicago Library School, 1979): 64. 66. The Song state, for example, was concerned to ensure the use of standardized editions in examination preparation. See Chia, Printing for Profit: 119–25.

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blocks” (cang ban). Here the situation was quite different in Europe, where, well before the development of modern copyright laws, organizations like the English Stationers’ Company attempted to protect publishers’ property rights in books through the registration of titles and oversight of the book trade.67

Publishing sites in the Qing Thus the spread and growth of publishing operations in the late imperial period was spurred by population increase, a larger demand for school texts, and the migrations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The simplicity of the dominant print technology and the absence of effective restrictions on property rights in books, while not causes, certainly facilitated the expansion of the publishing business and the establishment of sites in almost all parts of China Proper. To illustrate what the proliferation of publishing centers meant for Chinese book culture in the late imperial period, I present here brief case studies of three new sites of commercial woodblock publishing in the Qing, each with its own distinctive business form. The cases I have chosen all, in different ways, represent the kind of center described by Sun Yuxiu and Zhang Xiumin: located in sites low in the hierarchy of settlement and usually distant from any significant cultural centers, they produced popular works, the best sellers of their day, to ensure profits; and the production qualities of their imprints were for the most part not high. They were, however, for these very reasons, spreading mainstream Chinese culture and education to populations who earlier had little access to book culture.

Xuwanzhen, Jiangxi (see map 1.3) The first case is Xuwan, a market town on the Xu River, about 30 kilometers from the prefectural seat of Fuzhou in Jiangxi province. The origins of the publishing industry there are somewhat murky. Well before publishing became the primary industry of the town, Xuwan sojourning merchants traded in paper and books, as well as textiles, timber, and bamboo. Sometime in the late seventeenth century, a Xuwan merchant purchased “several titles” worth of woodblocks from a once-famous Jianyang publishing lineage, the Xiong.68 It is likely that he saw the decline of Jianyang as an

67. A somewhat similar function was performed by booksellers-publishers guilds in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japan; they recognized and protected a publisher’s sole right to publish from blocks that he had paid for (hankabu). Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1998): 182–83; see also 242–51. 68. Fang Yanshou, Jianyang keshu shi (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui, 2003): 457. Fang also argues that the physical arrangement of the printshop-bookshops in Xuwan, as well as the types of texts published, was copied from Shulin (Jianyang).

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opportunity for the creation of a Xuwan publishing industry supported at first by still usable Jianyang woodblocks. By the eighteenth century, the business was solidly established, dominating the market town; certain households within the Yu, Wang, Zhao, Xie, and Zhang lineages led the industry. Most of the shops (which were also the residences of the publishing households) were clustered along two parallel east– west streets, Qian shupu jie and Hou shupu jie; a stone archway at the opening of the former was inscribed “The book canon illuminates the empire” ( ji zhao zhonghua); one at the latter, “Heaven’s resplendent book treasury” (zaoli langhuan). The town square, the primary meeting place, spanned the ends of the two streets and was bounded on one side by a large pool of black water—black, it is said, because the printers routinely washed woodblocks in the pool.69 By the nineteenth century, Xuwan was reportedly one of the two largest bookproduction centers in China Proper. It was clearly an operation large and important enough to attract the attention of the government. In 1872, the local magistrate had erected, in the open space at the head of the two streets, a stone stele cut with the heading “Prohibited licentious novels” (“Yanjin yinci xiaoshuo”) and listing all the fictional works—about 200 of them—that the publishers were not to print (although there is little evidence that these prohibitions had much effect).70 Even as late as the Republican period, the town was noted for the production of blocks (and thus books); a gazetteer notes that “In Xuwan men and women are skilled at cutting blocks.”71 At the height of the industry Xuwan could boast over sixty workshops, some employing hundreds of laborers (cutters, printers, binders, warehouse workers, etc.); one scholar has estimated that about a thousand people worked in the publishing trade. Xuwan publishers were for the most part local scholars or failed examination candidates; Yu Zhongxiang, for example, founder of the Dawen tang in the Jiaqing era (1796–1820), had earned tribute student (gongsheng) status but had not progressed any further on the examination ladder.72 Xuwan sold its books locally and in other markets. But Xuwan publisher-booksellers also developed an ambitious program of expansion, to the north, specifically to the lower Yangzi delta and Beijing. They did establish an outlet to the west, in Changsha (Hunan), but otherwise took advantage of their access to the great river system of the south, the Yangzi, to set up a chain of shops in the provincial capital, Nanchang, on the Gan River (which flows northward from southern Jiangxi into Poyang Lake and ultimately the Yangzi), Jiujiang, Anqing, Wuhu, Yangzhou, and Nanjing. In the

69. Xu Zhengfu, “Jinxi shu,” Jiangxi chubanshi zhi 3 (February 1, 1993): 36–37. 70. Xu Zhengfu, “Jinxi shu”: 36–37; Jiangxi shengzhi – chuban zhi (Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1999): 4–5. 71. Jiangxi sheng (Republican era); cited in Zhao Shuiquan, “Xuwan yu muke yinshu,” Jiangxi difangzhi tongxun 9 (1986): 54. 72. Xu Zhengfu, “Jinxi shu”: 36–37; Jinxi xianzhi (Beijing: Xinhua, 1992): 387–88.

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Qianlong era (1736–95), Xuwan publisher-booksellers established shops in the capital’s great book market, Liulichang, the largest in the empire.73

Sibao, western Fujian province (Minxi) (see map 1.3) Whereas Xuwan was a fairly prosperous market town not too distant from a prefectural seat and a link to the Yangzi river, Sibao, my second case, was an isolated and impoverished mountain township (xiang), a cluster of Hakka villages in the mountains of western Fujian. Occupying the lowest position on the hierarchy of settlement, it seems a rather surprising site for a major publishing industry, one that could claim—rather grandly but not entirely inaccurately—that it was “spreading civilization” throughout the country.74 That it would become such a center was possible only because of the ease and portability of woodblock publishing technology, the local availability of paper and hardwood, and the contingencies of life during the disorders of the transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty. Woodblock publishing was introduced to the area by two natives who, driven by poverty, had sought a livelihood working as sojourning laborers or merchants—either block-cutters or book merchants—for a commercial publisher in Guangdong province. Returning home during the turmoil of the dynastic transition period, from the mid-1640s to the 1680s, they carried the technology they had learned in Guangdong with them back to Sibao, in the heart of a papermaking region. The shufang they established at first printed texts for local schools, but the market they established for their texts in the village of Wuge soon attracted book merchants from the surrounding area, indeed, from as far away as eastern Jiangxi. It is said that the Xuwan publishing industry was inspired by the Sibao book trade: merchants from Xuwan quickly realized that, given the simplicity of the block-cutting technology, and given that they had access to Jiangxi paper industries, it was far more cost-effective for them to establish their own publishing industry than to travel the rough, largely overland route from Xuwan to Sibao to buy books. This account of the origins of the Xuwan industry may or may not be true; even if not, however, it demonstrates contemporary awareness of the easiness of woodblock-technology transfer. The Sibao publishers soon found that their isolation limited sales and that, in order to survive, and certainly if they were to expand, they had to take their books to new markets outside western Fujian. The story of what was to become one of Sibao’s most prosperous shops illustrates how new markets might be founded: Ma Quanheng (1651–1710) was the elder son of a publisher. On his father’s death, all his father’s woodblocks went to his younger brother, who was too young to support himself. 73. Zhao Shuiquan, “Xuwan yu muke yinshu”: 52; see also Jinxi xianzhi (1992): 388. 74. Fanyang Zoushi zupu (1947), juan shou, 34.6a and 10b. The following discussion of the Sibao publishing industry is drawn from Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: 79–91, 161–77, 189–234.

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Ma Quanheng was left with only twenty ounces of silver as his inheritance. He used most of this sum to hire workers to cut blocks for the two reading primers and two editions of the most widely read Classics, the Four Books and the Classic of Songs— in other words, texts that were sure to sell—thereby establishing his own small printshop.75 In 1687, after these texts had been printed up and bound, he set off to sell them as a sojourning merchant in Guangdong, entrusting the management of the family to his son, Ma Dingbang (1672–1743), who, “though young [only 15 years old], was rich in talent.” Ma Quanheng left behind just two reels of paper with [his son] as capital to supply the daily needs of the family. This paper was worth three cash. [Ma Dingbang] used it to print texts. When these were all sold, he went into the mountains to buy more paper, which he carried back himself and again used to print up texts. He continued this cycle and the family never suffered hunger or cold, all on the strength of those two reels of paper. . . . Those two reels of paper were made into ten million [cash]. [Ma Quanheng], distant from home, began to feel no anxiety about his family.76

Enterprising men like Ma Quanheng and his son, then, could get a good start in the business, even in remote locations like Sibao, with relatively little in the way of capital investment. But they had to develop markets for their books beyond western Fujian, for this poor, mountainous area did not attract many outside book merchants. But Ma Quanheng’s situation was unusual. A printshop’s blocks were normally divided equally among the male heirs. This practice meant that printshops proliferated over time; each heir would typically set up his own shop, so that from one printshop two, three, or four might be created. The 1839 property division document of Ma Cuizhong, manager of the Zaizi tang, illustrates this process. Ma had six sons, and he left blocks to five of them. Three set up separate printshops with their inheritance, and the remaining two brothers united to form a single, fourth, shop. Although these “brother” shops usually enjoyed some degree of collaboration—according to written rules for shop cooperation, they might borrow blocks from one another at no cost (whereas other, nonrelated shops would have either to pay rent or to supply a set of blocks for a separate work)—they were still under pressure to develop new routes of sale and to found branch shops along these routes in order to avoid competition with their brother shops. Thus the nature of inheritance customs also encouraged— we could say forced—the development of networks of sale outside of the publishing headquarters. The result was a rather extensive network of Sibao outlets—bookstores selling Sibao imprints (and sometimes printing their own texts)—and routes of itinerant bookselling in four provinces of the south (Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, and Jiangxi) and then a considerably sparser series of markets in five other provinces 75. Mashi dazong zupu (1945), ji 7, 1.74b. 76. Ibid., ji 7, 1.43a.

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(Zhejiang, Hunan, Hubei, Yunnan, and Guizhou). For the most part the Sibao booksellers, in choosing and developing their markets, avoided major centers that already had flourishing publishing industries—they did not, for example, do much business in Guangzhou—but focused, rather, on hinterland prefectural and county seats and even on isolated villages. Of course, the booksellers relied, whenever possible, on commercial river routes, like the Ting-Han route from western Fujian to eastern Guangdong, the Gan River network linking Jiangxi and Guangdong, and the West River-Gong River-Yu River system that provided transport from Guangdong to far western Guangxi (and ultimately Yunnan). These merchants might travel impressive distances: Sibao is about 1,000 kilometers as the crow flies from Bose, Guangxi, where it had its most distant outlet.77 But what is striking about the Sibao sales networks is the degree to which they brought books into the remote countryside, to settlements not easily accessible on water or even land routes. Some of these booksellers resembled Raven’s “small army of low-cost travelling salesmen in mainland Europe,” working well-worn routes through a circuit of neighboring villages or, in some cases, traveling “spectacular” distances through several provinces. The Sibao outlets played a crucial role in these ventures, for they might be used as bases at which the booksellers could deposit their earnings and replenish their stock. An itinerant bookseller’s record book, surviving from the late nineteenth century, attests to this pattern: it lists as customers the students and teachers of a series of village bookstores and lineage schools deep in the countryside of Guangxi province. One aged informant recalled his work as a teenager in early twentieth-century China accompanying his father and his uncle on bookselling circuits in Fujian. Carrying two loads of books, in boxes weighing approximately seventy pounds each, the three men traveled from village to village, timing their arrival to the schedule of the local markets in the villages; they also sold their imprints in market towns.78 And one of my informants remembered hiking through the mountains of western Guangxi with his father, a Sibao bookseller working for a branch shop in the city of Bose, in far western Guangxi province, as he was in essence backpacking books to mountain villages in the area.79

Yuechi and Sichuan publishing (see map 1.3) I have already discussed, at some length, the role that the peasant block-cutters of Yuechi played in the development of woodblock publishing in eighteenth-century Sichuan, particularly as they supported commercial publishing in Chengdu and 77. For a fuller description of the Sibao bookselling routes, see Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: 189–234. 78. Interviews 36, November 14, 1995 (Wuge); and 91, April 25, 1995 (Wuge). 79. Interviews 59, December 2, 1995 (Wuge); 93, May 12, 1996 (Lingyun, Guangxi); and 67, December 5, 1995 (Wuge).

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Chongqing. Here I return briefly to this site to suggest how the presence of this community of craftspeople encouraged the development of a small publishing industry in the counties surrounding Yuechi in Shunqing prefecture, neighboring Baoning prefecture,80 and in Yuechi itself. Individuals might hire Yuechi cutters to produce merit-earning morality books like a rather fine edition of Yuli yinguo tushuo (Illustrated Jade record of cause and effect), which illustrated the operations of supernatural reward and punishment and was identified as the work of the cutter He  Mingyue of Yuechi county seat. But the presence of the Yuechi cutters made possible the founding, too, of small commercial shops like the Wensheng tang or the Xuewen tang. These shops produced cheap primers, textbooks, and practical manuals: for example, Shi Tianji’s Xun younü ge (Songs for the instruction of girls); Sishu pangyin (The Four Books with guides to pronunciation), which guided beginning students through the recitation of the basic texts of the examination system; Shangshu liju (The Book of Documents, sentence by sentence), which provided a line-by-line analysis of one of the Five Classics; Guwen guanzhi (Survey of ancient prose), a very popular textbook of ancient prose essays); Lianfeng keyi (Art of the eight-legged essay), a handbook of examination-essay writing; and Yuxia ji (Record of the jade casket), an almanac that explained how to choose propitious days for a wide range of activities, from washing one’s hair to getting married (see Fig. 5.1).81 These works were very much part of the standard repertoire of popular commercial publishers in the Qing. But some Yuechi cutters also set up small, back-alley workshops, where they cut and printed distinctively regional texts, the songbooks of Sichuan opera (Chuanju)—works like Guihua ting (Cassia pavilion), Liumu jian (Willow sword), or Suoyang cheng (Suoyang city)—or Sichuan chantefables (shuochang gushi). These texts were hawked in the county seat and the villages around it on a portable bamboo rack (shupai fang), a kind of movable bookshelf.82 In this way, the Yuechi cutters supported not only the orthodox book culture of the empire (in their work both for the Sichuan metropolitan publishers and for the local Yuechi printshops) but also a local culture of print, one that perpetuated distinctive regional performance forms. This very local culture of woodblock print persisted into the mid1950s (when it was reported that there were still between 400 and 500 cutters active in Yuechi, working for shops that sold songbooks and almanacs both in Chongqing and surrounding peasant villages), well after the major commercial woodblock publishers 80. Nanchong diqu Wenhuaju, ed., Nanchong diqu wenhua yishu zhi (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin, 1992): 578–86; and Hechuan xianzhi (1920), 23.15a–b, Sichuan fangzhi 25 (Taibei: Taiwan Xuesheng, 1968 facsimile reprint). 81. Interviews 1, July 29, 1996 (Yuechi); 5, July 31, 1996 (Yuechi); and 35, July 12, 2008 (Wanshou). 82. Interviews 36, July 23, 2008 (Wanshou); 39, July 26, 2008 (Yuechi); and 46, July 30, 2008 (Hongmiao). For a study and useful catalog of these songbooks and chantefables, see Liu Xiaomin, Sichuan fangke quben kaolüe (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 2005); Liu lists roughly 400 titles of Sichuan opera and about 70 chantefable titles (most of the latter are pingshu, but there are also some daoqin).

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Fig. 5.1 A page from an edition of a popular almanac and fortune-telling guide, Yuxia ji (Record of the jade casket) published by the Rongsen tang, a small printshop that served the population of Yuechi county in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. This claims to be an “expanded” (guang) version of the original.

had closed shop and modern mechanized printing had become the dominant print technology.83 The Yuechi cutters, in sum, provide an excellent example of the flexibility and potentially wide impact of the block-cutting labor pool. At home in the village, they provided the labor for both the large and well-established commercial publishers in Chengdu and Chongqing and small local printshops producing cheap textbooks and 83. “Yuechixian mukeye qingkuang diaocha baogao,” Jianchuan 054: Sichuansheng xinwen chubanchu, juan 34 (1954), 42b–43a (in the Sichuan Provincial Archives). An undated report on the cutting craft in Yuechi gives a figure of 800 cutters in 1915, over 300 in the villages of Wanshou, Tumen, Yixing, and Dashi. This same source then states that, by 1937, there was a significant increase in cutters, to 1,500; this might be the result of the growth in private or family schools (sishu and jiashu) that took place during the Japanese invasion, or it might be that that figure reflects the growing number of cutters who cut seals. See Yuechi xian erqing gongye zhi: 136–37; and Keai de Yuechi (Chengdu: Sichuan daxue, 1992): 145.

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regional performance literature. In the cities of Sichuan, they worked for publishing factories, kezidian, or freelance, serving official units (like the Zunjing shuyuan) and literati publishers. Outside the province they brought the block-cutting craft to other provinces on the edges of China Proper—Gansu, Yunnan, and Guizhou. Even as late as the 1950s they were providing both Chongqing urbanites and peasants in the villages around the city with almanacs and songbooks, the last vestiges of the popular book culture of the imperial period, now vilified by the Chinese Communist Party as “superstitious” and “licentious.”84 I could give numerous other examples of new block-cutting or publishing sites that arose in the Qing. I have already referred to Magang, home to a settlement of female block-cutters who worked through a male middleman to provide blocks to publishers in Guangzhou, Foshan, Sibao, and Suzhou. This, indeed, is the second large publishing site mentioned by Jin Wuxiang, although, as noted above, he complained that the blocks cut in Magang were full of errors because they were cut by women.85 Foshan, a major market town near Guangzhou, came to be known for the production of popular fiction and popular medical texts; Foshan texts sold not only within the Manchu empire, but also to Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. Or, there is Baoqing prefectural city (now Shaoyang, Hunan), another commercial publishing center that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Baoqing booksellers, taking advantage of the location of the prefectural capital at the convergence of two rivers, established networks of sales and branch stores throughout Hunan province, but also in Henan, Guizhou, and Yunnan; migrant publisher-booksellers from Baoqing are in fact credited with establishing the Guizhou woodblock publishing industry in the mid-nineteenth century.86 Further research will most likely yield other similar sites. The simplicity and portability of the print technology, the low capital requirements of the craft, and the widespread availability of surplus male and female labor made possible the proliferation of commercial publishing industries not only in the lower Yangzi delta but also in the interior and on the peripheries of China Proper, at all levels of settlement. Ambitious entrepreneurs could establish new businesses—and create new publishing centers—in well-located market towns like Xuwan (and, as we will see, advance from that site into the hinterland, to establish branch shops in distant provinces like Sichuan)—or even in out-of-the-way places like Sibao. From the pools of block-cutters formed to support these larger businesses emerged cutters who capitalized on their fellows’ labor by establishing kezidian (which met the labor requirements of the larger publishing houses as well as literati and official customers) 84. “Yuechixian mukeye qingkuang diaocha baogao”: 42b–43a. 85. Jin Wuxiang, Suxiang sanbi, 4.10b. 86. Interviews 1, August 25, 2000 (Shaoyang shi); 2 and 3, August 26, 2000 (Shaoyang shi); 4, August 26, 2000 (Daqiao lüshe); 6, August 27, 2000 (Shaoyang shi); and Hou Zhenping, “Hunan diaocha lu” (unpublished manuscript, 2001).

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or small local printshops of their own that provided their county with textbooks and popular literature (like the Yuechi Wensheng tang). Cutters eager for work in the nineteenth century transmitted their craft to frontier areas without established industries, thereby setting the foundation for the building of new publishing enterprises.

China and Europe The geography of publishing in China looks very different from that of Europe in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. In China, the general trend is decentralization: that is, the rise of important publishing sites in rural or hinterland areas distant from the older book centers of the lower Yangzi delta and Beijing (although these centers remained very important). As Raven explains, the British publishing trade was more or less centralized in London from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries; and, in continental Europe as well, it was the great cities—Paris, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Frankfurt, and so forth—that emerged as centers of book production and as the major book markets. This is not to say that there was no publishing elsewhere, in smaller cities or towns. But in China, quite important centers developed in out-of-the way places like Sibao or even Xuwan. Undoubtedly, several factors interacted to drive Chinese entrepreneurs to establish publishing operations either in rural areas or in cities quite distant from the cultural and political centers on the eastern seaboard; I have already mentioned the impact of the population explosion and long-distance migration. But a comparison with Europe suggests that high transportation costs and the nature of Chinese financial institutions might also have made the establishment of new sites in the interior—rather than the shipment of books long distance from a publishing industry centered in two regions (the lower Yangzi delta and Jianyang), as was the practice in the sixteenth century, at the beginning of the late imperial publishing boom—a sound business strategy. Distances within China Proper were, of course, much greater than those within any of the European states,87 making the costs of transportation much higher. Until the introduction of railroads and steamboats in the late nineteenth century, there were few improvements in either land or water transportation in the late imperial period. Western missionaries and merchants complained bitterly of the state of even major roads.88 Although itinerant booksellers and sojourning merchants did not suffer the restrictions imposed by many European towns on retail sales89—they enjoyed, 87. The distance from Beijing to Chengdu is around 1,500 kilometers, that from London to Edinburgh roughly 500 kilometers. 88. T. W. Kingsmill, “Inland Communications in China,” Journal of the China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, n.s. 28 (Shanghai, 1898), passim. 89. See, in this volume, Raven, “The Transmission of Books in Europe and Its Colonies: Contours, Cautions, and Global Comparisons.” Nor, in contrast to the situation in Europe, is there evidence for extensive guild control of the book trade in China before the late nineteenth century.

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apparently, freedom to sell their products more or less wherever they liked—they faced considerable hardships and high expenses on the road. Booksellers like those working out of Sibao labored hard to transport their products; they carried their stock on shoulder poles (or hired coolies to do so) to the nearest navigable waterway, where they often had to wait until water levels were suitable and safe enough for travel. Even one of the major north–south trade routes, from Jiangxi into northern Guangdong on the Gan River—the conduit for much of the porcelain produced in Jingdezhen to the port city of Guangzhou—was difficult and treacherous, involving the careful navigation of dangerous rapids and at least one day of arduous portage over the Meiling Pass.90 The Xuwan booksellers most likely looked to Chongqing, roughly 900 kilometers distant, as a viable market for their texts because they could reach it fairly easily on the Yangzi River. Yet, once they recognized a demand for their products in Sichuan, it probably made more sense for them to establish publishing houses there to satisfy the provincial market, rather than continuing to pay the transport costs that might well price their texts out of that relatively low-level market.91 These costs became even higher in the late nineteenth century, once the lijin, a tax on commercial goods in transit, was instituted by the Qing state to help pay for the costs of its defeat of the Taiping rebels. The contrast with Europe is clear. As Raven explains, increasingly efficient transportation networks and lowered transport costs—given the relatively short distances involved—made it economical for publishers in London to ship texts to the farthest reaches of Great Britain rather than establish new operations there. The development of more sophisticated financial institutions, as he also points out, undoubtedly played a role in the centralization of British publishing; modern banking made long-distance trade more secure and more efficient. Chinese publisher-booksellers relied, rather, on a patchwork of financial institutions of deposit and remittance: currency exchange shops (qianpu) and local banks (qianzhuang or yinhao), pawnshops and other establishments that ran remittance businesses on the side, and informal “banking” arrangements with relatives or trusted business contacts.92 To some extent, the reliance on this variety of different institutions and personal relationships limited the ability of entrepreneurs to establish centralized publishing concerns. Within this context, the nature of the dominant technology of Chinese publishing proved to be an asset. Xylography, in its simplicity and portability, made feasible 90. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: 247. 91. William Skinner, explaining that it “cost as much to transport grain 200 miles on the back of a pack animal as it did to produce it in the first place,” concludes, “Transport costs of this order of magnitude effectively eliminated low-priced bulky goods from interregional trade.” Of course, these were just the sorts of products that Xuwan (and Sibao) was trading. “Regional Urbanization in NineteenthCentury China,” in G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977): 217. 92. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: 240–42.

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the establishment of new publishing shops in rural or interior regions distant from the major urban centers. In areas where paper was widely available, it presented a solution to the challenges posed by high transport costs and the inefficiency of local financial institutions. The nature of the block-cutting labor force allowed for considerable flexibility or elasticity in employment relations. It made possible the development of major publishing concerns requiring a large, stable—but not necessarily close-to-hand—pool of skilled cutters who could be hired on a job-by-job basis. But it could also support much smaller concerns or even literati or family publishers who might only occasionally take advantage of a local workforce or a group of itinerant cutters to publish a genealogy, a work of scholarship, or a vanity edition of a literary collection. It seems that block-cutters could always find work. The relatively low investment required of woodblock publishers made the establishment of publishing shops—albeit rather humble ones—feasible and attractive even in quite poor peasant villages. As we have seen, the costs of block-cutting, the most expensive part of the publishing process, were quite low by the late Ming and Qing; and publishers (like the Zou and Ma of Sibao) might rely on family members for the work of printing and binding, further reducing their labor costs. Paper was cheaper than in Europe. And woodblock publishers did not have to tie up their capital in stock—in “unsold expensive printed materials,” as Raven puts it—as they might reprint a title from blocks at any point that the market demanded more copies; unlike European publishers, they were not subject to the “necessity of selling as quickly as possible the whole edition in which so much was invested.” It was possible, then, to profit (modestly, to be sure) from block-cutting and/or publishing, and that level of profit might be quite attractive if agriculture constituted the only other source of income in impoverished regions. In the absence of an empire-wide mechanized transport system and effective financial network, then, the easy portability and relative cheapness of woodblock print technology facilitated the multiplication of publishing sites scattered throughout China Proper—and thus the broader distribution of texts. Clearly a certain class of consumer—the poor reader in the countryside eager for entertainment or instruction—benefited from this pattern of growth. Nineteenthcentury foreign observers of Chinese society commonly noted the ubiquity of books, particularly inexpensive texts within reach of the poor. In the 1830s, the English missionary W. H. Medhurst (1796–1857) noted, “Books are multiplied, at a cheap rate, to an almost indefinite extent; and every peasant and pedlar [sic] has the common depositories of knowledge within his reach. It would not be hazarding too much to say, that, in China, there are more books, and more people to read them, than in any other country of the world.”93 S. Wells Williams, a decade later, also commented on

93. W. H. Medhurst, China: Its State and Prospects (London: John Snow, 1838): 106.

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the cheapness of books like Sanguo yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), Kangxi zidian (Kangxi dictionary), and the Classics as well as on the easy accessibility of texts: “Books are hawked about the streets, circulating libraries are carried from house to house upon movable stands, and booksellers’ shops are frequent in large towns.”94 It is tempting to imagine (in the absence of hard statistics of numbers of texts produced) that the widespread availability of cheap texts was the result of the proliferation of publishing industries in rural and interior regions. What is less clear is the impact this proliferation had on the overall production of books and the evolution of Chinese book culture. Economic historians of Europe have identified the shift from primarily urban to rural production as a sign of market decline, as the village or market-town publisher, selling his texts at cut-rate prices, drives the larger and higher-level urban producers out of business.95 The fact that, as sites like Xuwan and Sibao grew in the Qing, the great centers of the Ming either ceased publishing almost completely (as was the case for Jianyang) or declined in importance (in the cases of Nanjing and Hangzhou) might support this interpretation.96 And the apparent widespread accessibility of inexpensive books could also be seen as a result of a downward shift in booklists, as publishers scrambled to compete by churning out tried-and-true popular titles for the broadest possible reading audience rather than embrace the risks of publishing new works or the expense of producing high-quality texts. In sum, market stagnation would help perpetuate a stable and itself quite stagnant—albeit broadly popular—book culture. But we are not yet in a position to draw such conclusions, as we lack precise information on the changes in the configuration of the publishing industry in the late Ming and Qing that would either support or refute them. And there are other ways of interpreting what we do know now. First, as R. B. Wong points out, the predominance of rural over urban sites of craft production is not necessarily a sign of decline; in fact, in the early modern period, he argues, “this contrast of more rural sites of craft production in China compared to urban ones in Europe favored China over

94. Samuel Wells Williams, The Middle Kingdom: A Survey of the Geography, Government, Literature, Social Life, Arts, and History of the Chinese Empire and Its Inhabitants (New York and London: Wiley and Putnam, 1848), v. 1: 479. 95. Luciano Pezzolo, “The via italiana to capitalism,” in Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson, eds., The Cambridge History of Capitalism, Volume I: The Rise of Capitalism: From Ancient Origins to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): 288. 96. Zhang Xiumin calculates that the number of publishing houses in Nanjing fell from thirty-eight in the Ming to seven in the early Qing; in Hangzhou, from twenty-five to five. Zhongguo yinshua shi: 343–48, 365–72, 550–51, 553–54, 558. But the precipitous decline in the early Qing can in both cases be attributed to the destruction of the Manchu conquest and Chinese resistance to it; both sites recovered somewhat over the course of the Qing although neither regained its late Ming status. Publishing in Suzhou flourished in the Qing: the number of printshops rose from thirty-seven in the late Ming to fifty-three in the Qing.

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Europe.”97 When industries required only modest capital investment, as was the case with woodblock publishing, urban craft sites might not have enjoyed much of an advantage. Second, it is possible that the Qing decline of the late Ming publishing centers in the lower Yangzi delta is the consequence not of the rise of rural sites like Xuwan or Sibao but of the ascent of Beijing, home to Liulichang, the largest book market in the empire, to publishing dominance. Third, Qing book culture was far from stagnant. Elite publishers and official publishing offices produced works that clearly distinguished the book culture of the Qing from that of the Ming, at least at its upper reaches: the writings of evidential research (kaozheng) scholars, large collectanea of scholarly and literary works, catalogs, reference works, literati novels, and publications in non-Han languages. At the same time, the “scholar-beauty” (caizi jiaren) stories, historical-military romances, supernatural tales, chapbook fiction, and prosimetric narratives that flooded commercial book markets in the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries enlivened and expanded popular book culture. Two topics require much further study before any conclusions can be drawn about the vitality of the early and mid-Qing publishing industry and Chinese book culture: the relationship between this central market in the capital and the hinterland commercial operations that are the focus of this chapter; and the full range of texts produced—commercially, privately, and officially—in that period.

Distribution Networks: Toward an Integrated Market in Books The development of networks of book production and sale within China Proper I have described three apparently isolated examples of important sites of text production, largely commercial, in the Qing: Xuwan, a market town in Jiangxi; Sibao, a cluster of poor peasant villages in the mountains of western Fujian; and Yuechi, a settlement of block-cutters whose labor supported commercial and other forms of publishing in Sichuan province. These sites, however, were in fact not isolated and separate but intimately connected through networks of sojourning commerce and migration. Xuwan merchants bought woodblocks from Jianyang—and purchased books wholesale from Sibao publishers before they began investing in their own publishing houses; Sibao residents to this day complain that Xuwan merchants “stole” the idea of publishing from them 97. R. B. Wong, “China before capitalism,” in The Cambridge History of Capitalism, 1: 154. But he goes on to argue that, in the long term, certainly by the nineteenth century, Europe had the advantage because, although labor was cheaper in the countryside, capital was cheaper in cities. “Since the use of technologies typically involved additional capital expenditure, the likelihood of [technological] changes being made was higher in Europe than in China.” Thus the demand for technological change was ultimately higher in Europe than in China.

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in the late seventeenth century.98 Xuwan booksellers traveled to Sichuan in the early eighteenth century to sell cheap songbooks and fiction in the markets of Chongqing and Chengdu to the growing population of the province, a target of migration in the early Qing. Eventually several settled permanently in Sichuan, establishing printshops that became the mainstays of commercial publishing in the province. Fu Jinduo, creator of the Shancheng tang, was one such migrant; the shop he founded in Qianlong-era Chongqing developed, as we will see, one of the most extensive series of branch shops and distribution networks in the empire.99 Zhou Shuteng, another Jiangxi native, also established a publishing dynasty in Qianlong-era Chengdu; his grandson Zhou Dasan (1854–1922) became the manager of the Zhigu tang, Sichuan’s major scholarly commercial publishing house in the late Qing.100 It seems that blockcutters from Jiangxi (and Fujian) came with these publishers, settling in Yuechi and establishing a community of skilled craftsmen and women there. Sojourning commerce and migration also drove the development of regional networks of book distribution, some crossing many provincial boundaries and some confined just to two contiguous provinces. These networks ensured that texts were transported now to the far reaches of China Proper and to hinterland areas formerly not connected to any book markets. We have seen that the Sibao publisherbooksellers crisscrossed much of south China, establishing branches as far away as Bose, in far western Guangxi. The Baoqing publishers established outlets and itinerant sale networks in the neighboring province of Guizhou; Baoqing booksellers were selling their texts not only in Guiyang but also in Anshun, an important depot in the opium trade in western Guizhou, 600 kilometers from their home, by the end of the nineteenth century.101 Yuechi cutters, in addition to serving Chengdu and Chongqing publishers, supported local printshops and, more to the point, traveled to Gansu and Yunnan as itinerant cutters, transmitting the skills necessary to the production of books on the frontiers of China Proper. But there was traffic from west to east as well. The Xuwan publishers ambitiously created a chain of outlets in cities on the Yangzi that led to the largest book markets in the empire—to Beijing via Nanjing and the Lower Yangzi delta area; at least two Xuwan shops, the Dawen tang and Wenkui tang, had outlets in Liulichang.102 This case could be taken as a sign of developing market 98. Interviews 50, November 25, 1995 (Mawu); and 51, November 27, 1995 (Mawu). See Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: 191, for a fuller account. 99. Sichuan shengzhi – chuban zhi (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin, 2001), 1: 19. 100. Huayang xianzhi (1934), 17.15b–17a; Sun Xiaofen, Ming Qing de Jiangxi Huguang ren yu Sichuan (Chengdu: Sichuan daxue, 2005): 311; and Cui Gu, “Zhou Dasan,” in Ren Yimin, ed., Sichuan jinxiandai renwu zhuan (Chengdu: Sichuan daxue, 1990): 499–503. 101. “Guizhou: Guiyang and Anshun,” in “Mapping the Book Trade: The Expansion of Print Culture in Late Imperial China,” unpublished report, by Cynthia Brokaw and Hou Zhenping, for Luce Foundation (Summer–Fall 2004). 102. Jiangxi shengzhi—chuban zhi: 4; and Sun Dianqi, Liulichang xiaozhi (Beijing: Beijing guji chubanshe, 1982): 115.

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integration as well: that is, the beginnings of a two-way trade in books that created opportunities for some shift in the balance of the book trade. In this trade, Liulichang functioned as the great clearinghouse for books, as publisher-booksellers from within China Proper set up shops there, both bringing texts produced in their native places to Beijing and returning the newest works from Beijing to their home shops. Books were now moving west to east as well as east to west. Perhaps the best example of the growing complexity of sale networks is the development of another shop that had its origins in Xuwan: the Shancheng tang. After its founding in Chongqing by the Jinxi native Fu Jinduo in the mid-eighteenth century, this shop steadily expanded, establishing branches in Chengdu, Hankou, Botouzhen (Zhili),103 Jinan, and Liaocheng (or Dongchang, Shandong, where a community of male and female block-cutters provided the shop with cheap labor),104 and eventually Liulichang, Beijing.105 The Shancheng tang thus created a chain of shops, some for production, some for sale, and some for both, in major metropolitan centers like Beijing, Hankou, and Chongqing; provincial capitals like Jinan and Chengdu; and other smaller cities and towns like Botouzhen, extending from the southwest to the northeast. Often the original site of publication would be noted on the cover page of the text. For example, Fu Jinquan’s (act. 1800–1842) Jiyizi zhengdao mishu shiqizhong (Seventeen secret texts in verification of the way by Master Jiyi), a collection of works on inner alchemy (neidan), was published in Chongqing (“Shudong,” “eastern Sichuan,” according to the cover page; see Fig. 5.2), and then transported the roughly 1,500 kilometers to Beijing, just as texts published at the Shancheng tang in Liulichang or in Liaocheng (for example, Shiji jinghua [Splendors of the Records of the Grand Historian], published in Dongchang in 1892) might travel to Sichuan. And of course commercial book-trading networks were reinforced and supplemented by official networks of text distribution—a subject that I have not touched on here. Texts produced at court, by the Wuying Palace and other publishing offices, were often sent to provincial and county administrative units; or new scholarly works published in Beijing or the lower Yangzi delta were ordered by academy directors in distant provinces (as indeed was the case for the aforementioned Zunjing shuyuan, whose directors routinely commissioned merchants to bring back books from surrounding provinces and even the lower Yangzi delta area).106 Provincial publications— gazetteers in particular—were routinely sent to the imperial capital. The networks for 103. On the Shancheng tang operation in Botouzhen, see Guo Shufang and Jin Congjie, Botou diaoyin kaolüe (Tianjin: Tianjin guji, 2007): 48. 104. On Shancheng tang publishing in Liaocheng, see Wu Yuntao, “Liaocheng keshu yu chubanye de xingshuai gaikuang,” Shandong wenshi ziliao xuanji, v. 4 (1982): 109–28, esp. 112, 114, and 120–21. 105. Sichuan shengzhi – chuban zhi, v. 1: 19; Sun Dianqi, Liulichang xiaozhi: 115. 106. Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909), one of the major sponsors of the Zunjing shuyuan, tried to build up its library by commissioning merchants to purchase books in Hunan and the Lower Yangzi delta area. Hu Jun, Zhang Wenxiang gong nianpu (Beijing Tianhua yinshuguan, 1939), 1.18b.

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Fig. 5.2 The cover page of a collectanea of Daoist inner alchemy, Jiyizi zhengdao mishu shiqizhong (Seventeen secret works of the corrected way, [collected by] Master Jiyi) compiled by Fu Jinquan (also known as Master Jiyi; act. 1800–1842). The phrase at the lower left of the cover page indicates that the text was published by the Shancheng tang in Chongqing (“Shudong Shancheng tang cang ban”) (courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library).

the distribution of official publications supplemented (and often overlapped with) the commercial networks. I do not want to press the argument for a late imperial integrated book market too vigorously, if only because at this point we lack the detailed information we would need about the publishing sites of the Qing and the networks that did—or did not—connect them. By the nineteenth century, on the verge of the great modern transformation of Chinese publishing, we are still a way from a fully integrated book market and a distribution system that served all parts of the empire efficiently. Even if the multidirectional networks that I am positing did exist, they by no means leveled the field of book circulation: texts may have been traveling from Sichuan to Beijing, but there is no doubt that Liulichang and the lower Yangzi delta were the dominant book centers of the nineteenth century; the emerging empire-wide book distribution system by no means ensured all parts of the system equal access to the same texts.107 107. Unevenness in the distribution system would explain why books were still rather scarce in certain parts of China Proper even in the late nineteenth century. Arthur Smith, writing from eastern Shandong—not an area that would have been integrated into the networks I have described—noted that “ordinary” Chinese scholars owned few books. In one county, only one family possessed a copy of a dynastic history; and the Kangxi zidian, a standard reference work, was so expensive that it might have to be shared among eight to ten villages. It is quite possible that much of north China Proper, particularly the northwest, was excluded from these networks (Village Life in China [New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1899]: 97, 99).

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Nor is there evidence of any standardization of book prices, a development that we might expect to accompany market integration. But there is clear evidence of a considerable complexity in production patterns— in the development of publishing-bookselling sites at multiple levels of the urban hierarchy—and a related increased density of networks of distribution and greater interaction between hinterland and borderland publishing operations and the major book markets in the lower Yangzi delta and Beijing. By the very late nineteenth century, then, rural and hinterland publishing sites were being integrated into a China-wide book market, with books traded in all directions, from hinterland sites to urban centers and vice versa, and between east and west (and to some extent, north and south). This development—consistent with William Skinner’s claims for the increasing integration of China’s macroregions at the same time108—is possibly a consequence of improvements in transportation and banking that made the long-distance exchange much quicker and cheaper. It is, I think, no accident that, in the early twentieth century—by which time the mechanization of transportation and the creation of a banking system had advanced—the publishing industry was dramatically recentralized in Shanghai, in the heart of the lower Yangzi delta region. Of course, Shanghai became the center of modern printing because it was the port through which new machine-driven printing technologies entered and were developed in China.109 And the technical complexities and expense of the new technologies, standing in sharp contrast to xylography, naturally slowed their spread far outside of Shanghai. But the centralization itself was possible to some extent because transportation costs had been significantly reduced and long-distance transfer of funds facilitated. As in Europe, according to Raven, it was the advent of railways (and steamboat transport, which in China coincided roughly with the advent of mechanized printing) that eventually brought the mass-produced book to a range of social ranks and all regions of China Proper in the early twentieth century.110

108. Skinner, “Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century China”: 249. Skinner argues that as late as the 1840s, there was “no more than negligible integration of the various regional urban systems” and suggests that a unified urban system was not possible prior to the development of networks of mechanized transport. 109. See Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai. 110. The Shanghai publishers, however, also exploited existing woodblock bookselling routes and bookstores in developing their networks of distribution. See Brokaw, “Commercial Woodblock Publishing in the Qing (1644–1911) and the Transition to Modern Print Technology,” in Cynthia J. Brokaw and Christopher A. Reed, eds., From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, circa 1800 to 2008 (Leiden: Brill, 2011): 53–56.

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The Popular Book Culture of Late Imperial China What were the best sellers of late imperial China? Missing from the discussion thus far is an answer to a question essential to any study of the social impact of print: what sorts of texts did the Xuwan, Sibao, and Yuechi publisher-booksellers produce and readers consume? How might we characterize the commercial book culture that was formed through the new production centers and networks of distribution of the late Ming and Qing? What were the texts that made up this Chinese “empire of texts”? There seems to have been a striking similarity in the genres and even titles of texts produced and sold by these commercial publishers. For the sake of discussion, I divide these works into three large and rather general categories: educational texts, practical guides to daily life, and entertainment literature.111 The first category, educational texts, included the staples of the commercial book trade in interior and hinterland areas, in that publishers could count on a steady demand for these texts. The Four Books (see Fig. 5.3) and Five Classics, the essential textbooks of the civil service examination system—and emblems of culture and learning for people who never considered competing in the examinations—were churned out in great numbers and in a variety of different editions: reproductions of the basic text with notes on proper pronunciation for students learning simply how to vocalize the text; editions crammed with aids to examination study, including the orthodox commentary, explanation of the orthodox commentary in simple Chinese, guides to the identification of persons and place names; or works that compared commentaries of famous scholars of the past. Glossaries and primers—like the ubiquitous Sanzi jing (Three Character Classic)—both taught basic literacy in classical Chinese and promoted values like filial piety and the importance of study. As with the Classics, these works might appear in very different forms; Sibao publishers produced both a pamphlet-like Three Character Classic stripped down to the basic text and an elaborate, fully annotated edition (Zhushi San Bai Qian Zengguang heke [Annotated combined edition of the Three Character Classic, Myriad Family Names, Thousand Character Essay, and Expanded Words of the Sages]) that printed the work with two other popular primers and, on a top register, a series of guides to calligraphy, abacus use, and fortune-telling, and admonitions to virtue (see Figs. 5.4 and 5.5). For somewhat more advanced students, these publishers produced encyclopedias of classical allusions (like the universally popular Youxue gushi qionglin [Treasury of allusions for children]); collections of ancient prose essays (Guwen guanzhi being perhaps 111. These categories are explained much more fully in Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: 305–512. Although this work treats works produced in Sibao, I have been struck, as I study other sites, how well this categorization fits the booklists of other publishing industries and even how great the overlap in the publication of specific titles is.

Fig. 5.3 A page from a late nineteenth-century Sibao edition of the Four Books, the Wenhai lou jiaozheng jianyun fengzhang fenjie Sishu zhengwen (The Wenhai lou’s orthodox text of the Four Books, standardized, with correct pronunciations, and divided into chapters and sections). This version of the Four Books, first produced by the late Ming scholar Yan Maoyou (metropolitan degree 1634), does not explain the deep meaning of the text; rather, it seems to have been designed to aid students in the memorization of the work, a requirement for young schoolboys. The text of the Classics is in large characters in the bottom register; the smaller characters there and in the top register explain the pronunciation of the characters and provide simple glosses of names and difficult words in the text.

Fig. 5.4 A page from a collection of primers for elementary education, Zhushi San Bai Qian Zengguang heke (Annotated combined edition of the Three Character Classic, Myriad Family Names, Thousand Character Essay, and Expanded Words of the Sages), published by the Wenhai lou, Sibao, in the late nineteenth century. The main, bottom, register reproduces the popular primer Baijia xing (Myriad Family Names), the top, a crudely illustrated set of instructions on abacus use.

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Fig. 5.5 The cover page of an edition of one of the most commonly used primers of early modern China, Baijia xing (Myriad Family Names), compiled by Wang Jinsheng, corrected by Xu Shiye, and published by the Xuwan publishing house Dawen tang during the Daoguang era (1821–50). The full title of this edition, Baijia xing kaolüe (Capsule investigations of the Myriad Family Names), indicates that it is not simply a list of the names and their pronunciations (like the version included in the Sibao primer collection noted in Fig. 5.4) but a more serious work that includes extensive notes on the origins of the names (courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library).

the best-known); digests of Chinese history (e.g., Liaofan Yuan xiansheng bianzuan guben lishi Dafang gangjian [Master Yuan Liaofan’s edition of the Outline of the Mirror of History]); compilations of examination essays, with notes explaining the structure of the required “eight-legged essay” (baguwen) form; poetry collections (particularly after the mid-eighteenth century, when writing poetry became a requirement in the examinations); and so forth. Dictionaries and reference guides to the Classics— for example, works that identified all the people and place names mentioned in the Four Books—were also popular.

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Hinterland publishers often got their start producing such texts; Ma Quanheng of Sibao, mentioned above, established his printshop on the foundation of four educational texts: an edition of the Four Books, an edition of one of the Five Classics, the Classic of Songs, and two primers. But such works were published by all the operations described here, from the local Yuechi printshops (which put out simple, pamphletlike editions of the Four Books) to the Shancheng tang, perhaps the most sophisticated of these businesses (which, interestingly, published an edition of what had originally been a Sibao text, Wujing beizhi [Full purport of the Five Classics], clearly designed for examination study). In sum, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of the examination system in the promotion of commercial (and to some extent government) publishing in China. It created a sure and steady market for the Classics and stimulated the production of an enormous stock of study aids and encyclopedias, a small number of which might be sufficient to support a modest publishing house, as we saw from Ma Quanheng’s example above. Here Chinese publishers had the advantage of their European counterparts, as there was in Europe no single institution of comparable importance and reach that also required and encouraged the continuing production of relatively standardized texts. After these basic educational works, handbooks and guides—reference works for daily life—occupy the next largest category of texts (see Peter Burke’s chapter here for more information on these texts). Etiquette and ritual manuals—works that taught, with models, how to write letters and invitations, what terms of address to use within the large and complex Chinese family system, what polite phrases to employ in conversation in order to make oneself appear educated and cultivated, etc.—were quite popular (see Fig. 5.6). Both Xuwan and Sibao published one of the most widely used of these texts, a work titled Choushi jinnang (Treasury of instructions on social intercourse). Texts devoted entirely to the presentation of model letter forms were also apparently good sellers; most were encyclopedic in scope, but some specialized in business letters and forms. Collections of sample rhyming couplets (duilian), which one was often called upon to write to celebrate a birth, examination success, the opening of a new business, the New Year, etc., were also very popular. Within this how-to category we might also put medical manuals and prescription collections. Among the most frequently produced works, these texts seem to have been part of every publisher’s output. These might range from the reproduction of classic or orthodox texts, like the Huangdi neijing (Inner canon of the Yellow emperor) or the imperially commissioned encyclopedia of medical information, Yuzuan Yizong jinjian (Imperially sponsored Golden mirror of medical orthodoxy),112 to simple 112. As an imperially commissioned publication, this work was supposed to be published only by certain approved houses. There is no evidence that the Sibao publishers had the authority to publish the text; the fact that they did suggests that imperial oversight of such matters was rather light.

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Fig. 5.6 A page from a ritual-cum-etiquette manual, Huizuan jiali tieshi jiyao (Collected essential models for family rituals), compiled by Jiang Jianzi in the early nineteenth century and published by the Sibao publishing house Wanjuan lou. The chart informs a mourner of the appropriate clothing to wear to a funeral, according to the closeness of his or her kinship relationship to the deceased.

collections of rhyming prescriptions apparently intended for do-it-yourself treatment (or for use by village medical practitioners). The Sibao and Xuwan publishers seem to have favored the production of popular medical texts—that is, textbooks for students (like Yixue sanzi jing [Three character classic of medicine]), prescription collections, and veterinary manuals—while the Shancheng tang, which developed a reputation for the publication of medical works, included in its booklist more theoretical texts as well as casebooks of distinguished physicians and materia medica (see Fig. 5.7). But all the publishers produced the series of basic medical texts and rhyming prescription collections by Chen Nianzu (1753–1823), a physician-official devoted to the popularization of medical knowledge.113 For help in enlisting cosmic and supernatural aid to solve the problems of daily life, these publishers put out a wide range of guides to geomancy (in particular the 113. Liao Yuqun, Fu Fang, and Zheng Jinsheng, eds., Yixue juan: 409, in Lu Jiaxi, ed., Zhongguo kexue jishushi (Beijing: Kexue, 1998); Sun Wenqi, Zhongguo lidai mingyi jilu (Taiyuan: Shanxi kexue jishu, 1992): 213–14; and Ren’an, Zhongguo gudai yixuejia (Hong Kong: Shanghai shuju, 1963): 127–30.

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Fig. 5.7 A page from the guide to plants, animals, and minerals used to make medicines (Tuzhu) Bencao yuanshi (Sources of materia medica, illustrated and annotated), compiled by the Ming physician Li Zhongli and published by the Shancheng tang during the Guangxu era (1875–1908) (courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library).

siting of graves) and fortune-telling. Both Xuwan and Sibao published Luojing jie (Classic of the geomantic compass explained), the standard guide to use of the luopan or geomantic compass; the Shancheng tang, too, published at least one work on grave-siting. All sites produced the Yuxia ji, the very popular guide to the selection of propitious days (see Fig. 5.1). Finally, belles lettres—largely poetry, fiction, and performance literature— rounded out the stock of these commercial publishers. Most published editions of the

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great vernacular novels of the Ming: Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West, and The Plum in the Golden Vase.114 But there was apparently a great demand for the new genres of fiction, both vernacular and classical, that emerged in the Qing. The Sibao and Xuwan publishers churned out historical romances, martial-arts novels, and “scholar-beauty” stories, regularly updating their stock with new titles. The Shancheng tang was noted for its output of fiction; and it, too, produced the latest works (see Fig. 5.8) as well as old standards like Dongxi Han quanzhuan (Complete chronicle of the Eastern and Western Han), attributed to the late Ming literatus Feng Menglong (1574–1645). The more sophisticated of the publishers might also produce the literary collections of famous scholars (see Fig. 5.9).

Fig. 5.8 A page from the Shancheng tang edition of Jinshang hua (Flowers on brocade), a popular romance that was banned in 1868 as a “licentious” novel. It was common for publishers to cluster illustrations of the major characters, with brief poetic descriptions on the verso leaf, at the beginning of a novel (courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library).

114. The Plum in the Golden Vase and Water Margin were from time to time prohibited, the former because of its explicit sexual content and the latter because of its glorification of the bandit life. Yet it seems that publishers like those in Sibao—perhaps because they were far distant from major political and cultural centers—did not suffer any government interference in their publication of such texts. See the discussion of censorship below.

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Fig. 5.9 A page from Zhuanghui tang ji (Collection from the Zhuanghui Hall), a collection of essays by the prominent late Ming–early Qing man of letters Hou Fangyu (1618–54), published by the Xuwan publishing house Jiuxue shanfang in 1878 (courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library).

What emerges from a comparison of the output of the publishing industries I  have surveyed here is that they are all publishing very much the same kinds of texts, often the very same titles. This is not to say that there was nothing distinctive in their output. Some produced the work of local writers and editors. The Shancheng tang, for example, introduced the writings of Fu Jinquan, a member of the family that had founded the shop, to a broader audience by publishing his works on Daoist inner alchemy cultivation.115 Other publishers printed titles belonging to distinctive regional genres of performance literature or works in dialect. Sibao published songbooks of local tales, like Zhao Yulin and Che Long gongzi huadeng ji (Record of Master Che Long’s examination success), both stories of poor students abused by 115. On Fu Jinquan, his views on inner alchemy and his relationship to the Fu family Shancheng tang publishing house, see Elena Valussi, “Printing and Religion in the Life of Fu Jinquan: Alchemical Writer, Religious Leader, and Publisher in Sichuan,” Daoism: Religion, History and Society 4 (2012): 1–52.

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their in-laws (yet supported by their loyal wives) until they were successful in the examinations;116 and two glossaries, Renjia riyong (Everyone, everyday) and Yinian shiyong zazi (Glossary of yearly activities), that employ vocabulary from the Hakka dialect. The local printers supported by the Yuechi cutters produced hundreds of songbooks of Sichuan opera or chantefables, as mentioned above. But these were works that had a limited local or regional circulation and did not comprise a significant portion of the output of the major publishers. For the most part, these publishers were putting out the same types of texts and, in each of the categories that I have outlined above, often the same well-proven best-selling titles. The popular book culture that these publishing sites produced and circulated was a relatively uniform and relatively stable one, in the sense that it did not change dramatically over time, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. In making this point, I do not mean to evoke the old cliché of an “unchanging” China. Publishers did respond to changes in the examination curriculum, publishing (often pirating) new aids to study as they became available or adding texts to suit changes in examination policy. In the category of fiction, new genres arose at different times during the Qing; beauty-scholar romances enjoyed great popularity in the early Qing, while martialarts novels dominated the popular fiction market by the end of the dynasty. New methods of divination were incorporated into fortune-telling handbooks. And it is clear that newness was seen as positive value, as the frequent occurrence of “newly revised” (xinding), “newly published” (xinke), “new and expanded” (xinzeng), etc. in commercial book titles makes clear. But very generally speaking, we can, I think, argue for a relatively high degree of uniformity and stability in popular Chinese book culture up to the final decades of the Qing. Certainly the examination system played a role in this uniformity and stability: the importance of the system and the relative stability of its content over the course of the Qing ensured that commercial publishers would continue to profit from editions of the Four Books and Five Classics and the host of aids to their study and the writing of examination essays—and thus would be tempted to focus on the production of these works. It is possible that the nature of woodblock print technology also encouraged stability (if not uniformity). The fact that blocks, once cut, could be used to make many reprintings of a text may have discouraged publishers from seeking out genuinely new works to publish, as it made for easy profits for them to simply reproduce existing works. The numbers of works that, although advertised on their cover pages as “newly edited,” “newly revised and expanded,” or “new, illustrated” editions are,

116. Both of these narratives are revenge stories, as the successful candidate wreaks retribution on the family members who had scorned him before he passed the examinations. I am grateful to Wilt Idema for his explanation of the narratives and how they fit into other Hakka versions of the stories, as explained in Hu Xizhang, Kejia zhubange yanjiu (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin, 2010).

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in fact—except for a newly cut cover page—not at all new or revised or expanded or even illustrated, suggests that this was a common publishing strategy. But this is a difficult hypothesis to prove, and there is some evidence to suggest that the technology had little impact on choice of titles to cut. By the Qing, block-cutting labor was apparently quite cheap (particularly if a publisher was not interested in producing a beautiful text—and most of the commercial publishers discussed here were not), so the expense of cutting did not necessarily pose a barrier to the production of new works that might sell well. The wide availability of cheap cutting labor meant that it was possible to arrange to have new works cut quickly as well as inexpensively. It is interesting that, even after modern mechanized printing was available in Chengdu, the Zunjing shuyuan chose to publish its bimonthly periodical, the Shuxue bao (Journal of Sichuan learning), in woodblock form. It seems to have been economical to rely on woodblock labor for the rapid production of new works, even if it was unlikely that they would be reprinted.

Restrictions on publication and distribution If the technology did not pose a barrier to textual production, were there other constraints on what could be published and distributed in late imperial China? Raven has noted the heavy impact that censorship had on European book production in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum outlawed the publication of certain texts in Catholic countries, contributing to the decline of the Frankfurt book fair; Protestant states also censored certain texts and restricted the transportation of print across borders. And some countries—France, for example—established laws requiring the prepublication screening of manuscripts; official approval was required before a work could be published.117 The late imperial Chinese book world suffered, too, from censorship, albeit in a somewhat different form. Books were censored or completely prohibited for the most part after publication.118 The most notorious cases of censorship in the late imperial period were the “literary inquisitions” of the early Qing rulers, the Kangxi (r. 1662– 1722), Yongzheng (r.  1723–36), and Qianlong (r.  1736–96) emperors. As Manchu

117. Raymond Birn, Royal Censorship of Books in Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 118. The rulers of China did at times attempt to establish a system of prepublication censorship. Under the Song, the government expected local officials to vet manuscripts before publication and censor all or parts deemed subversive or otherwise inappropriate for publication; and in the Ming local officials were held responsible for regulating publications. The Qianlong emperor, as part of his literary inquisition, ordered in 1778 that all new manuscripts be preapproved for publication by the provincial directors of education. It is not clear, however, how consistently and thoroughly these rules were enforced. Hok-lam Chan, Control of Publishing in China: Past and Present (Canberra: Australian National University, 1983): 23–24.

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conquerors, they were suspicious of the loyalty of their Han subjects, particularly members of the Han elite. Any work perceived to be critical of the Manchus or expressive of loyalty to the Ming resistance to the conquest might be destroyed, its author (along with many of his family members and friends) and publisher executed, and anyone caught selling or owning the book severely punished. The inquisitions were fueled not just by the suspicions of the Manchu emperors but also by the intrigues within the Chinese population, as men and women used trumped-up accusations of subversive writing to destroy their enemies.119 It is estimated that, by the end of the most notorious of these campaigns of postpublication censorship, roughly 2,300 works had been suppressed. No genre was spared: commentaries on the Classics, essays, histories, biographies, geographical treatises, local gazetteers, collections of examination essays, short stories, romances, dramas, poetry, literary essays, encyclopedias, collections of memorials, military studies—all suffered in the campaigns.120 The Qing inquisitions are the most spectacular cases of censorship in the late imperial period. But other rulers, and sometimes provincial and local officials, did from time to time issue lists of prohibited texts, usually fictional works deemed either subversive of state authority (like Water Margin, a novel that criticizes officialdom while celebrating the bandit life) or pornographic (like The Plum in the Golden Vase, a novel centered on a corrupt merchant and his many wives). In the 1860s and 1870s in particular, in the course of a movement to revive Confucian values, several such efforts were launched. In 1868, the governor-general of Jiangsu province prohibited an impressive array of “licentious” novels, including military romances (which might depict Chinese fighting barbarians) and love stories.121 And we saw that in Xuwan, the local magistrate had erected a stele inscribed with the titles of 200 forbidden best sellers, all of them works of fiction, in 1872. What makes the impact of these efforts on Chinese book culture very difficult to assess is justifiable caution about their efficacy. Undoubtedly, many important works were lost (or altered) in the Qing literary inquisitions, particularly the inquisition of the Qianlong emperor; and there is no question that these losses impeded the development of scholarship.122 But, as Kent Guy and Timothy Brook have argued, the local and somewhat ad hoc management of the campaigns, the nature of woodblock 119. R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Late Ch’ien-lung Era (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987): 166–200. 120. L. Carrington Goodrich, The Literary Inquisition of Ch’ien-lung (Baltimore, MD: Waverly Press, 1935): 60–61. 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid.: 64–65. Presumably many authors also practiced self-censorship, fashioning works that were sure not to arouse the suspicions of the censors; as Goodrich remarks, “This too constitutes a serious loss.” For a much fuller treatment of the impact of inquisition, see Okamoto Sae, Shindai kinsho no kenkyū (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku Tōyō bunka kenkyūjo, 1996). Jonathan Spence, Treason by the Book (New York: Viking, 2001), is a study of how two different Qing emperors handled a single case of censorship.

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publishing, and the organization of publishing operations within China Proper made it difficult for the imperial government either to develop a single, consistent index of prohibited texts (like the Index Librorum Prohibitorum) or to enforce effectively its ban on certain books. Local censorship boards developed different lists and interpreted the criteria for suppression in different ways. Once a text had been targeted, destroying all copies of it was not enough; the blocks had to be burned as well—and that meant they had to be located, a difficult task if the blocks had changed hands or if a new set had been cut. And the decentralization of publishing operations (and the location of some of them in rather obscure sites) made the task of effecting the Qing prohibitions challenging.123 There were few companies or guilds that could be enlisted to aid the government in either preventing the publication or weeding-out of already published seditious works. One was the Chongde gongsuo of Suzhou, founded in the 1660s ostensibly as a mutual aid society for publishers and as a “place for publishers to edit proper texts and discuss collation.” It may have performed these functions in its early years, but, by the late 1830s at the latest, it was acting primarily as an inspection station for prohibited books. Booksellers from outside Suzhou had to have their wares checked, and any prohibited titles were to be destroyed.124 But this effort seems to have had only a limited impact, on an important book market to be sure, but one that did not control empire-wide distribution of texts. It did not enjoy the countrywide reach of the English Stationers’ Company, which was granted the authority to search out seditious and heretical texts by Queen Mary in 1557;125 or that of the Swedish Guild of Binders, which, as Raven notes in his chapter, regulated the import of books to Sweden from 1620 until the second half of the eighteenth century. Censorship in late imperial China seems, then, to have been less systematic and more sporadic than in Europe (although no less intense or brutal in execution), its impact on publishing more scattered and shorter-lived. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum, established in 1559, was not abolished until 1966; yet, within fifty years of Qianlong’s inquisition, the distinguished scholar-official Ruan Yuan (1764–1849, 123. R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: 200; and Timothy Brook, “Censorship in EighteenthCentury China: A View from the Book Trade,” Canadian Journal of History (Annales Canadienne d’Histoire) XXII (Aug. 1988): 177–96. 124. Suzhou was a major book center in the lower Yangzi delta. The Chongde gongsuo was founded in 1662 by the owners of the Saoye shanfang; six years later, the guild established the Chongde Academy, where publishers could meet to discuss their trade and research future publications. After the Taiping Rebellion, the guild (and the Saoye shanfang) moved to Shanghai, where it became the basis of the Shanghai Booksellers Guild. See Joseph McDermott, “Rare Book Collections in Qing Dynasty Suzhou: Owners, Dealers, and Uses”: 199–249, esp. 242–46, in Lu Miaw-fen, ed., Confucianism and Books in Late Imperial China: Familial, Religious, and Material Networks (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2013); and Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: 172–73. 125. Cyrian Blagden, The Stationers’ Company: A History, 1463–1959 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1960): 20–21: see also Brook, “Censorship in Eighteenth-Century China”: 193.

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metropolitan degree 1789) unwittingly included a prohibited title in his supplement to the great imperial catalogue, the Siku quanshu (Complete collection of the Four Treasuries).126 Apparently by that time—the early 1820s—even important government officials had forgotten or felt free to ignore prohibitions the violation of which half a century earlier might have cost them their lives. And the earnest provincial and local officials who wanted to ban licentious novels were fighting a losing battle, as the ineffectuality of the Xuwan stele of prohibited titles suggests. Raven raises another important possible constraint on the distribution and spread, if not the publication, of texts: prices. He notes that, in Europe, most new books “became more and not less of a luxury item relative to average purchasing power during the eighteenth century.” Unfortunately, lack of comprehensive and detailed information about book prices in China at that time makes trustworthy comparison impossible. And the fact that prices were not standardized makes it difficult to generalize for all of China from the scattered, locally specific information we do have. Books, like other commodities, rarely sold at the “fixed price” (dingjia) that may—or may not—have been stamped on their cover pages; a knowledgeable customer would certainly bargain the price down.127 But there are hints, here and there, largely from anecdotal evidence, that certain types of books—just the kinds of popular commercial “best sellers” discussed here— were widely affordable. The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci was impressed, in the early seventeenth century, by “the exceedingly large numbers of books in circulation here and the ridiculously low prices at which they are sold.”128 Two centuries later, other Western observers—W. H. Medhurst and S. Wells Williams, cited earlier—were struck, too, by the wide availability of cheap books.129 There are dissenting voices, to be sure: Arthur Smith, a missionary in north China in the late nineteenth century, after noting that very few scholars owned works like the Kangxi zidian (Kangxi dictionary) 126. Goodrich, The Literary Inquisition of Ch’ien-lung: 61. 127. Juliet Bredon explains this practice in her description of the great fair held at the New Year at Liulichang, the great Beijing book and antique market: “We notice that prices are absurdly high until the last day of the fair—in fact, prohibitive. But the merchants hardly expect to sell. Things are really placed here on exhibition to attract the attention of buyers who will later go to the shops to bargain in private for what they have seen and admired.” See Peking: A Historical and Intimate Description of Its Chief Places of Interest (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1982; reprint of 1931 ed. published in Shanghai by Kelly and Walsh, Limited): 502–3, 473–74. 128. Louis J. Gallagher, SJ, trans., China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journal of Mathew Ricci, 1595–1610 (New York: Random House, 1953): 21. 129. Yuan Yi has argued that book prices declined significantly during the Jiaqing reign (1796–1820), so it is quite possible that Medhurst and Williams are describing a relatively recent development (see his “Qingdai de shuji jiaoyi ji shujia kao,” Sichuan tushuguan xuebao 65 (January 1992): 71–80, 47. Yuan also claims that book prices continued to decline through the nineteenth century, so that by the end of the century, books were on average 75 percent cheaper than they had been a century earlier. Evelyn Rawski also presents evidence on the affordability of texts in the nineteenth century; see Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China: 118–23.

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or the dynastic histories, concluded, “books are the luxury of the rich.”130 For roughly the same period, however, I have calculated that a schoolteacher of modest means would have been able to purchase the major works of examination study in Sibao editions; it is clear from a surviving Sibao account book that students could afford to purchase novels as well as editions of the Four Books.131 These editions would not, of course, be very fine ones. And that distinction may be the solution to the puzzle presented by the contradictory accounts we have about the accessibility of print in late imperial China. A lower-end publishing enterprise like that of Sibao could churn out, on cheap paper, badly cut and poorly printed copies of basic educational texts and fiction and sell them, profitably, at such low prices that even peasants in the villages of the south could afford them. But well-edited and well-cut books, new texts, and long, multivolume works (like the Kangxi zidian and the dynastic histories) would be well beyond their reach, particularly in the north, where publishing operations seem to have been thinner on the ground. The simplicity of woodblock printing132 and the proliferation of interior publishing-bookselling operations in the south ensured that some texts—cheaply produced perennial best sellers—were widely available and economically accessible even to peasants in some areas of China Proper. But new works of elite literature and voluminous scholarship probably were “luxuries of the rich” in the major metropolitan centers of the empire.

Conclusion: The Impact of Popular Publishing in the Qing To conclude, I would like to reflect a little on some of the broader cultural and political repercussions of China as an “empire of texts” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What impact might the spread of publishing sites throughout China Proper, to interior, peripheral, rural, and hinterland areas, and the development of extensive intraregional and even interregional distribution networks have had on Chinese society and political identity? It sped the process of social and cultural integration, by making possible the widespread circulation of a core body of texts throughout the empire. Of course, two other factors were crucial to this process: first, the fact that Chinese in all parts of the empire shared a common written language—a Chinese text published in Sibao could be read by literate Chinese anywhere in the empire. And, as mentioned, the civil service examination system, perhaps the most powerful integrative institution of the imperial system, created a common core of “standard” texts that defined what education 130. Arthur Smith, Village Life in China: 97, 99. See note 107. 131. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: 513–18; see also 548–53 for more detailed discussion of this difficult issue. 132. Both Ricci and Medhurst identify woodblock print technology as the factor that made texts widely available. Gallagher, China in the Sixteenth Century: 21; and Medhurst, China: Its State and Prospects: 105–6.

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meant throughout the empire. Woodblock printing, in its simplicity and portability, provided the vehicle by which a central core of shared texts—and not just the Four Books, Five Classics, and examination study aids, but also ritual handbooks, medical manual, novels, and narrative songs—were diffused throughout the empire, linking all literates (and through oral transmission, many illiterates) to a shared book culture. This shared book culture created and supported a common store of cultural knowledge, thereby advancing cultural integration. When students all over China were reading the ubiquitous history primer Liaofan Yuan xiansheng bianzuan guben lishi dafang gangjian (Master Yuan Liaofan’s edition of the Outline of the Mirror of History) or studying the equally ubiquitous Youxue gushi qionglin (Treasury of allusions for children), then they were likely to develop a shared framework for understanding their history and a common bank of literary referents that drew them together—no matter where they lived in China Proper—as participants in a “Chinese culture.” To be sure, there were parallel local book cultures that set themselves apart from the common core; we have seen in the case of Yuechi how the presence of small publishing operations at the local—the very local—level created opportunities for the publication and dissemination of distinctive local and regional, perhaps dialect, literature. Yuechi cutters worked for shops that printed Sichuan opera songbooks and chantefables (and almanacs); until the government moved in the 1950s to stamp out this industry, it supported a popular literary/performance culture distinctive to eastern Sichuan. So, too, in Chaozhou, the tradition of narrative song performance (in dialect) for which the area is famous was sustained through the early twentieth century by small woodblock printshops dedicated exclusively to the printing of these often quite long song texts.133 The Canton delta area produced “wooden-fish books” (muyu shu), songbooks telling popular stories in Cantonese.134 Sibao, too, published glossaries and songbooks in the Hakka dialect. But, at the same time that these works might remind readers and listeners of their distinctive local cultures, that sense of difference could also serve to sharpen their awareness of and association with the larger shared book culture as it defined “Chineseness”—as attentiveness to the particularity of a locality and its customs rested to some extent on consciousness of participation in a larger cultural group. Successful participation in the examination system and official service had, many centuries earlier, created a common book culture for the highly educated elite. But it was not until the publishing boom of the late Ming and the rise of commercial publishing that a common popular book culture was forged; and in most parts of 133. Guangdong shengzhi – chuban zhi (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin, 1997): 71; and Chen Jingxi, “Qingmo Minguo ban Chaozhou quce shulu,” Chaoxue yanjiu 8 (2000): 228–56. 134. The Sibao songbook Record of Master Che Long’s Examination Success also existed in a wooden-fish book edition. Leung Pui-chee, Xianggang daxue suocang muyu shulu yu yanjiu (Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1978): 52, 213; and Ye Chunsheng, Lingnan suwenxue jianshi (Guangzhou: Guangdong gaodeng, 1996): 125–48, 207–43.

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the empire it was not, I would argue, until the Qing (and probably the last century of the Qing), with the spread of publishing industries to the interior and hinterland regions and the growth of denser (and to some extent multidirectional) distribution networks, that nonelites—literate ones at least—had access to this common popular book culture. This development might have had repercussions beyond the cultural realm as well. Mary Elizabeth Berry, in her excellent study of Japanese print culture, Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (2006), argues that, during the same period (roughly the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries) in Japan, the creation of a printed “library of public information” accessible to all literates forged a sense of a shared culture that provided—along, of course, with other factors—the foundation for the development of a nation in the late nineteenth century in the Meiji period. We might want to consider the political effect of a common popular book culture in nineteenth-century China. To what extent did this culture, in tandem of course with other factors (like increasing outrage at Western and Japanese imperialism), set the groundwork for the development of the incipient Chinese nationalism of the late nineteenth century and the much more full-bodied nationalism of the early twentieth? To turn back to culture, we might ask, too, what roles this popular book culture played in the development of a new common “Chinese culture” in the modern period. The abolition of the examination system in 1905 dethroned the Confucian canon from its privileged role in the elite book world, yet it lived on—albeit in shabby and error-ridden form—in the cheap commercial editions of the Four Books still selling well in the early twentieth century (and, more recently, in the huge bookstores or “book cities” [shucheng] common now to most major Chinese cities). At that time, too, popular book culture provided the Chinese with new sources of literary pride, as intellectuals like Hu Shi (1891–1962) elevated the vernacular novels of the late imperial period—previously marginalized among highly educated readers but avidly consumed by literate hoi polloi—to the status of national masterpieces worthy of elite attention and scholarly study. To what extent has the popular book culture of the late imperial period shaped what might be called the evolving “common Chinese culture” of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?

6 The Proliferation of Reference Books, 1450–1850 Peter Burke, with Joseph McDermott

Between 1450 and 1850, the book worlds of East Asia and Europe were profoundly shaped by a common series of social and economic changes: rapid urbanization, “the birth of a consumer society,” a general “commercialization of leisure,” and, not least, a growth in the number of readers. Not surprisingly, the demands of this increasing readership led to an expansion or even explosion in the number of titles available in both post-Gutenberg Europe and late imperial China. As these books accumulated, as new imprints joined and then replaced manuscripts on the overcrowded shelves of personal and institutional collectors, the problem of information surfeit came to the fore. Readers grew anxious about how to reclassify and rearrange not just the books on their library shelves but, more significantly, the information in these books. To an unprecedented degree, readers in both of these book cultures drew on systematic guides to help them navigate the ocean of book knowledge that survived and indeed fed off changing fashions in book preferences. These guides to different bodies of knowledge constitute an important, if often neglected, genre of early modern publication. Known to us as reference works, these books are distinguished from other kinds of books in Europe and East Asia by their reorganization of certain bodies of knowledge into often readily digestible portions of information. Even if they did not always explain the reasons for their adoption of a certain organizational framework, these books are characterized by common methods and structural features: the adoption of implicit “organizational principles” for the arrangement of their contents (such as the alphabetical order for entries in European reference books and the heaven-human-earth tripartite division found in some Chinese reference works), the use of “finding devices” (such as chapter headings and indices in Europe and different size characters for entry topics in East Asia), and often a page layout intended to help the reader navigate from one entry to another and comprehend their information (the use of blank spaces and capital letters to demarcate different entries in European books and the division of pages into upper and lower sections in some East Asian books).1 1.

Quoted by Hilde De Weerdt, “The Encyclopaedia as a Textbook: Selling Private Chinese Encyclopaedias in the 12th and 13th Centuries,” in Florence Bretelle-Establet and Karine Chemla,

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While it is impossible to generalize on how every reader used these reference works—Aldous Huxley was famously said to have read through the Encyclopaedia Britannica from cover to cover—these books were usually designed not to be read from start to finish. However odd such a judgment may sit in a book concerned in part with the history of reading, a defining feature of reference works is that they were usually put together for short spurts of reading and actually read in this manner. They were “consulted” (a seventeenth-century term), “skimmed” like cream (an eighteenthcentury metaphor), “browsed” like a cow (Charles Lamb’s term, from 1823), “gutted” or, as we say in the digital age, “scanned” in the pursuit of information. Or, to use terms popular with some historians of the book, reference books were designed to be read “extensively” rather than “intensively.”2 While we unfortunately cannot determine how long it has taken a majority of European and East Asian readers to learn the skills of “consultation literacy” (including the art of reading tables and graphs), even the briefest perusal of the book catalogs of our older libraries makes clear that there was a dramatic proliferation in the number and variety of European and East Asian reference works from the age of Gutenberg up to 1850 (and indeed beyond). In exploring how this genre changed in Europe and East Asian over these four centuries, this study will build on previous analyses by Roger Chartier, Ann Blair, and Endymion Wilkinson. But, it will differ from the first two of these by consistently adopting a novel perspective already evident in our comments, that of looking at the phenomenon of European reference works through East Asian—specifically, Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Japanese—lenses. For a Europeanist, this approach has the benefit of highlighting key features of this book genre that might otherwise escape our attention, namely, how distinct fields of knowledge were associated with different institutions and professions in particular cultures. For instance, whereas European reference works often reflect schemes of knowledge nurtured by the different professional faculties of learning at early modern European universities, the contents and arrangement of many Chinese reference works have been shaped by the expectations imposed by the Chinese examination system and official life. These findings will reveal the importance of placing a book (or many books) within a specific knowledge order rather than treating each book and its contents as separate entities or as linked merely to other similar books as if in a genealogical line of descent or influence. We need to take a more comprehensive and structured view of book learning in both of these book cultures, before we can discern underlying shifts in the makeup of their knowledge orders.

2.

eds., Qu’était-ce qu’écrire une encyclopédie en Chine? (Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2007): 77–102, at 87. Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500–1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974).

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Such an effort, it must be said, needs to acknowledge and sidestep the pitfalls that have so often tripped up earlier Western efforts to compare Europe and East Asia. All too often, European scholars have concentrated on the absence in the East of something familiar to them in the West (we are thinking of numerous works comparing these regions’ economic and social history, in particular those written in the vein of Max Weber). To ask, as some have done, “Why was there nothing in East Asia like the Encyclopédie?” is like asking, “Why was there in China nothing like Western capitalism?”, “Why was there no Scientific Revolution?”, and so on. This type of question, however provocative, inevitably misleads by overstressing what was not there at the expense of what in fact was there. In overlooking the actual history of East Asia (as, for example, in book production), it assumes something is missing when something else of interest might well have taken place or—to probe the issue—might have existed under another name or category and indeed have played multiple roles different from those of its apparent counterparts in Europe. To guard against falling into this common Eurocentric trap of viewing East Asian cultures as deficient, this chapter’s comparison of European and East Asian book worlds will privilege function over form, action over discourse, and a book’s contents over its prefaces. It will embed its discussion of the genre of reference books and especially encyclopedias within the multiple types of books printed in the East and/or the West. Of course, reference books such as encyclopedias acquire different functions and forms over time within a single culture. The early modern European concept of “a reference book” does not fit easily into East Asian notions and practices, and vice versa. It is not simply that the preferred contemporary Chinese term for reference work (gongju shu) was a mid-twentieth century creation (its Japanese equivalent sankōsho was coined in the late nineteenth century and its Chinese characters widely used in Republican China). Nor is it that some genres have no precise equivalent in the other tradition (e.g., whereas legal reference books are far less common in China than in Europe, the Chinese had a far greater number of books advising magistrates and other government officials how to rule: they were to focus less on understanding the legal code and legal precedents than on establishing harmonious relations with their office staff and the local elite). Rather, the key problem for this comparative effort lies in the reference-like nature of many East Asian and especially Chinese books seldom categorized then or now as reference works. Many conventional Chinese books were organized to be consulted like a reference work rather than to be read through from start to finish. The common Chinese genres of anthology, miscellany, gazetteers, commentaries on the Classics, collections of biographies, legal codes, genealogies, collections of writing by an individual, and even the straight day-to-day chronicles of a dynasty’s rule read like a string of unconnected data that a reader can pick up and use as he or she sees fit. Lists of places, objects, people, medical prescriptions, medical cases, and

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all sorts of excerpts fill many Chinese books published under names and cataloged under categories that suggest nothing of their readers’ actual use of the book as a reference work to be consulted rather than read. Consequently, the place of reference works—that is, books used more for reference than for full reading—in the history of East Asian book production can easily be underestimated. In order to explore the different knowledge orders of these two cultures and thereby identify key differences and similarities in the types of knowledge they both produced and preserved, it is thus necessary to consider a wider range of East Asian books than would conventionally be the concern of a bibliographical survey of Western reference books. Such an effort is doubly necessary if the overall findings of our introduction to this book hold true about the existence of some parallel but nonintersecting developments of certain Western and Chinese fields of learning, especially scientific learning, before 1850. Having seen the wider social dimensions of these regions’ distinct knowledge orders in a variety of reference publication genres, we can then begin to take full and accurate measure of both cultures’ understandings, organization, and uses of knowledge from 1500 to 1850.

Initial Observations What first strikes a European historian when introduced to the variety of Chinese reference works is their frequent similarity to Western reference works in their descriptive vocabulary, their editorial rationale, their topics, and at times their treatment of these topics. Not only do Chinese and European compilers and commentators adopt common phrases to describe a surplus of books or surfeit of information—such as forests and oceans—and to entitle their reference works—such as flowers, mirror, or  pearls. But also, and more instructively, they often justify their compilation or writing of reference books on similar grounds of textual retrieval or a guide through the information jungle. Admittedly, as Glen Dudbridge has stressed, early Chinese compilers of texts repeatedly despaired over the prospects for textual preservation in the face of time and its string of misfortunes: “With each new disaster [they felt that] a  certain part of the legacy of past writings was irreplaceably gone. As time passed, more writings of early ages slipped beyond the horizon.”3 Yet, from the twelfth century and especially from the sixteenth century, compilers, authors, and readers in China grew aware of an expansion of the textual knowledge at their disposal, thanks to greater use of printing. Works previously rare were suddenly made available, a host of new books on important subjects were produced and attracted attention, and over time readers, writers, and publishers found ample justification for producing reference works in the fields of learning, where knowledge was expanding beyond the scale that a reader could reasonably expect to master on his or her own. These parties all 3.

Glen Dudbridge, Lost Books of Medieval China (London: British Library, 1999): 7.

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saw the sense of reorganizing a huge body of knowledge into discrete blocks of information that could be conveniently bound within the covers of one or more volumes. In other words, the long-term proliferation of books, however appreciated it may have been for preserving rare texts and spreading useful knowledge, was increasingly understood as creating problems of its own. Once the number of titles exceeded a certain level, proliferation was perceived by its supposed beneficiaries as impeding their culling and comprehension of information. Already in the eighth century Chinese readers complained of such a problem (indeed, the holdings of the imperial library in the sixth century appear to have far surpassed those in any later century), and by the sixteenth century literati were writing of the need to burn most of the new publications for being unworthy exercises in vanity). In Europe in the thirteenth century, two centuries before Gutenberg, the encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais had likewise expressed frustration about the “multitude of books” (multitudo librorum).4 After Gutenberg’s press was rapidly set up in cities throughout Europe, this plaint grew into a chorus. In 1550, the Italian writer Anton Francesco Doni sighed that there were “so many books that we do not even have time to read the titles” (as a professional writer, Doni spent his life adding to the pile). Books were a “forest” in which readers could lose themselves, according to Jean Calvin, writing at about the same time. They were an “ocean” through which readers had to swim, or a “flood” of printed matter which threatened drowning.5 The practical responses to this dilemma were numerous. Publishers in Europe and East Asia printed more anthologies, abridgements, and commentaries. However, some authors, particularly in Europe, attempted more systematic and radical solutions. The eighteenth-century English bibliographer William Oldys, on recognizing the demand for reporting “what has been written in the several Sciences to which they have appropriated their studies,”6 began a special journal to meet these needs. He edited a monthly journal, The British Librarian (1738), which sought to compile a bibliography of a given subject and then provide a summary of each item. This journal ceased after just six issues, but the problem it addressed did not. And so, readers persisted in demanding the kinds of shortcuts to knowledge that had driven Jonathan Swift to despair. With characteristic wit he had lampooned their relentless resort to abridgements and guides: “To enter the palace of learning at the great gate, requires an expense of time and forms; men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door.”7

4. 5. 6. 7.

Quoted in Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010): 42. For Chinese resort to similar metaphors, see Yves Hervouet, A Sung Bibliography (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1978): 328–29 for “forest” and “sea.” William Oldys, The British Librarian (London: Printed for T. Osborne, 1738), Introduction: i. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (London: Penguin, 2004).

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By 1819 another English man of letters, Francis Jeffrey, was even wondering if reading itself needed to be drastically changed: “If we continue to write and rhyme at the present rate for 200 years longer, there must be some new art of short-hand reading invented—or all reading will be given up in despair.”8 The emergence of the reference book may have required a prolonged gestation in the millennial history of the European book. But once its utility was recognized, its critics’ harping could not prevent it from winning the well-thumbed appreciation of readers and a permanent place on their overcrowded bookshelves. The coverage of certain types of specialized reference works in East Asia and Europe was often similar. Specific titles were devoted to plants (herbals), laws, words (dictionaries), places (gazetteers), dates (chronologies), book catalogs, people (biographical dictionaries), and things (usually their origins but also often parts of their history). As the number of these popular works grew, the competition among publishers and compilers led to ever more specialized or comprehensive versions. For example, the Lexicon Technicum of 1704 described itself as “a dictionary not only of bare words but things”). And, to help summarize this plethora of information, publishers in Europe and East Asia placed illustrations in both technical treatises and general encyclopedias (e.g., Chambers’ Cyclopedia and Wang Qi’s Sancai tuhui; see Fig. 6.1 and Fig. 6.2).

East Asian Reference Books: 1500 and 1850 So far, despite the publication of some excellent modern bibliographical guides to reference works in Chinese and Japanese and recent republications of a certain type of Chinese and Japanese encyclopedia (leishu), no long-term historical survey has yet been attempted of reference works published in any East Asian country.9 For China, this obstacle can be circumvented in part by adopting a two-pronged approach. We will first compare the reference books listed in the celebrated book catalogs of two private collectors, the mid-thirteenth-century Chen Zhensun and the seventeenthcentury Huang Yuji (1629–91). Both men concentrated on collecting books of their own dynasty, and so their book catalogs have rightly come to be viewed as compilations reflective of, respectively, Song- and Ming-dynasty scholarly book publications as whole. By assessing and comparing their holdings of reference works we shall have a sense of how that genre we now call “reference works” grew over four and a half 8. 9.

Quoted in M. Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000): 294. Teng Ssu-yü and Knight Biggerstaff, An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Chinese Reference Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971, 3rd edition). Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012): 955–64, is presently the best survey in a Western language. But Wilkinson’s entire book can be fruitfully read on its own as an encyclopedia of the Chinese historical record.

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Fig. 6.1 A ship of war, in Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia (1728), vol. 2 (Creative Commons).

critical centuries in the history of the Chinese book. Then, to provide a more nuanced and qualitative interpretation of these changes and to extend our analysis of reference works into the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), we will focus on the kinds of reference works found in a common type of Chinese encyclopedia, essentially composed of distinct reference works devoted to specific topics (a wider treatment of Chinese encyclopedia will follow below). The aim is to let changes in the contents of such encyclopedias suggest broader trends in the concerns of Chinese reference works and in a Chinese knowledge order as a whole. In Chen Zhensun’s catalog of ca.  1250, fifty-three titles are listed in the encyclopedia (leishu) section alone.10 Elsewhere we find a large number of other reference works. For instance, thirty-three catalogs are listed for book, antiquarian, and 10. Chen Zhensun, Zhizhai shulu jieti (Shanghai: Guji, 1987): 422–32.

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Fig. 6.2 Chinese fighting ships, ca. 1609 (Wang Qi, Sancai tuhui, Ming edition) (courtesy of the Naikaku Bunko Library, Tokyo).

painting catalogs alone, along with a guide to the birds, beasts, plants, trees, insects, and fish mentioned in the Book of Poetry and historical information in the Analects by Confucius.11 Nonetheless, most of these references works, numbering in the hundreds, draw upon a relatively narrow range of information, mainly literary, historical, and to a lesser extent the Confucian classics. Thus, we have a Tang reference work on imperial family marriages, two Song works on helping a student learn how to write letters, on the selection of four-character phrases in letters, and a Song list of past reign eras and imperial names.12 Law books are included, but they are mainly lists of laws and edicts. They have no explicit function as reference works; a magistrate handbook’s

11. Ibid.: 230–37, 36, 76. 12. Ibid.: 424, 180, 427, 164.

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interest in laws over moral instruction is enough to have its author judged “a vulgar clerk.”13 Medical reference works as well as those on astronomy are only slightly more numerous, but in virtually all cases the stress is on listing historical information rather than reorganizing it for easier location of suitable diagnoses and prescriptions. Compiled four centuries later, Huang Yuji’s Qianqing tang shumu (A catalog of books in the Hall of Ten Thousand Acres) demonstrates an undeniable expansion of knowledge in many old and new directions. Not simply are there more books and more reference books than in Chen Zhensun’s catalog (e.g., twice the number of book catalogs), but also they cover a much wider range of knowledge and greater number of specialized fields of learning. For instance, in addition to over seventy catalogs of private and government book collections, Huang’s catalog lists separate catalogs for Buddhist inscriptions, the compendium of Daoist texts known as the Daocang, and stone inscription collections from particular prefectures (rather than circuits, or provinces, in the Song). The most novel and intriguing of Huang’s book catalogs are those dedicated to books published in specific areas, such as Huizhou prefecture and Fujian province. One catalog is devoted solely to books published by the commercial printing establishments (shufang) in the Fujian prefecture of Jianyang, famous for its commercial publications. Increased specialization of knowledge is evident in a greater number of highly focused topics in particular fields and book genres, ranging from a book on the varieties of fish in Fujian to separate “classics” ( jing) on horses, oxen, fish, animals, cranes, and even pigeons (a section on food includes titles on unusual varieties of fish in Fujian). In this inclusive spirit Huang includes, for the first time in any extant Chinese catalog, Chinese translations of Western books. Written or translated by Jesuits with the aid of their Chinese converts, these works introduced Western information on earthquakes, Euclidean geometry, telescopes, and eclipses, and other topics in mathematics and the natural sciences. Among the medical works in Huang’s catalog one finds many Ming titles offering diagnoses and prescriptions on a wide range of illnesses. In some cases they are called “guides” (zhinan), indicating that they were intended to be consulted for reference. Even though many of Huang’s medical titles appear to have been written for consultation by both doctors and patients, a trend toward specialization of medical knowledge is clearly evident, even in explicit works of reference. More medical titles are focused on specific parts of the body and their ailments (e.g., at least five on smallpox, and seven on treatment of the eyes, a topic that previously had received minimal attention from Chinese doctors). Such changes, it has recently been argued, reflect a larger change in Chinese encyclopedias and learning from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries. For the first two

13. Ibid.: 174.

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centuries of Song rule (960–1279), according to Hilde De Weerdt, encyclopedias were noted for their inclusive and at times comprehensive character. From the end of the twelfth century this preference for a wide variety of texts and information weakened. In line with some other contemporary cultural and historiographical trends, encyclopedia editors narrowed their selection of texts and information. Intended now to promote the Way of Learning School (Daoxue) associated with the famous neoConfucian scholar Zhu Xi (1130–1200), this type of encyclopedia was directed to a particular readership, that of examination candidates, and so included texts intended to help a student succeed in this unscholarly endeavor. As Zhu Xi’s commentaries and other writings gained the support of thirteenth-century examiners and as they became central texts in all examinations from 1313, any reader intent on becoming an official knew precisely what texts he needed to master. The need to know a wide range of texts, as had been demanded in examinations during much of the eleventh century, underwent a significant decline. Such intellectual hegemony, Benjamin Elman has countered, proved short-lived in the competitive world of commercial publishing and even the examinations of postSong China.14 Beginning in the fourteenth century and gaining pace in the sixteenth century, a more accommodating application of the intellectual principles of the Way of Learning School allowed for the return of nonethical kinds of knowledge as well as the inclusion of new, more practical kinds of information. Alongside texts for literati on how to write poetry, late Ming- and Qing-dynasty encyclopedias contain a wide swathe of “how-to” information on everything from travel routes and cooking to divination and contract forms. Furthermore, some mid- and late Ming reference works sought to break free from the constraints of earlier encyclopedia models based on neo-Confucian models of knowledge. They sought to apply the neo-Confucian practice of “the investigation of things” to the far wider range of subjects now judged acceptable for a scholar’s purview. The boundaries of learning had expanded, and reference works were compiled and published on a much greater variety of subjects than had been considered either intellectually respectable or commercially viable earlier on. To adopt a more global perspective, we can say that the Chinese world of learning had once again been broadened and deepened, so that, unintentionally, some of its key interests overlapped with those of early modern Europe. Hence, as is discussed in the introduction to this volume, representatives of East Asian and European worlds of learning could, on meeting in the sixteenth century, initiate a dialogue on practical topics of common interest, a dialogue that over the next five centuries repeatedly encouraged some of the more enterprising of European and East Asian scholars to propose ways

14. Benjamin Elman, “Collecting and Classifying: Ming Dynasty Compendia and Encyclopaedia (Leishu),” in Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 1 (2007): 131–57.

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to circumvent or bridge their deep religious, philosophical, cultural, and political differences. In Japan, the print explosion and rise of popular reference books came later than in China, from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards, and sometimes followed Chinese models.15 Once again we see “devices of textual order” such as headings, subheadings, and tables of contents.16 The rapid spread of reference books and their appeal to different kinds of readers (samurai, merchants, artisans, women, and children) has been called “a quiet revolution in knowledge.”17 Printed encyclopedias were one important genre, from the Banmin chōhōki (Everybody’s treasury) of 1692 to the Dainihon eitai setsuyō (Eternal inexhaustible encyclopedia of great Japan, 1750). Dictionaries, setsuyōshu, offered explanations of words that resembled entries in encyclopedias. Some volumes combined several reference books in one, like the Eitai Setsuyō (1831), which included a description of Japan, a Chinese-Japanese dictionary, a chronology, a calendar, and guides to letter writing and etiquette.

European Reference Works: 1500 and 1850 Between 1450 and 1850 some changes in Chinese reference works—an expansion in production, specialization, and popularization—were evident in Europe as well. But other changes, like the use of experiment and measurements and the presentation of knowledge in statistical and tabular form, were particular to Europe, as European advances in scientific learning spilled over into the European world of reference works. Many subjects previously lacking a reference volume were increasingly explained not just to professionals but also to amateur enthusiasts. All of these points on European reference works will be explored in detail below.

Expansion From the perspective of users, the vast expansion in the number and range of European reference works is staggering. Around the year 1500, after more than half a century of printing, so few were the printed reference works that the short list in Table 6.1 more or less accounts for all of them (even if we allow for a particularly loose definition of the category of reference book):

15. Carol Gluck, “The Fine Folly of the Encyclopaedists” (1994), reprinted in Amy V. Heinrich, ed., Currents in Japanese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997): 223–51; and Mary Elizabeth Berry, Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006). 16. Berry, Japan in Print: 14. 17. Ibid.: 18.

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Table 6.1 List of reference works printed between 1452 and 1502 1452 1460 1463 1467 ca. 1467 1469 1470 1473 1474 1475 1475 ca. 1475 1476 1476 1477 1485 1489 1490 1492–95 1494 1497 1498 1498 1498 1499 1500 1500 ca. 1500 1501 1502

Donatus, Ars Minor Balbus, Catholicon Villedieu, Doctrinale Hrabanus Maurus, De universo Vocabularius teutonicus-latinus Pliny, Historia naturalis Marchesinus, Mammotrectus Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Maius Roelvinck, Fasciculus temporum Eusebius, Chronicum Ptolemy, Cosmographia Vocabularius iurus utriusque Reuchlin, Vocabularius Lascaris, Erotemata Vocabolista todescho e italiano Breydenbach, Hortus sanitatis Werden, Sermones Dormi Secure Kimhi, Dictionarium hebraeum Nebrija, Dictionarium Trithemius, De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis Brunschwygk, Cirurgia Suidas Dictionarius pauperum (for preachers) Torrentinus, Elucidarius Galfridus, Promptorium Erasmus, Adagia Brunschwygk, De arte distillandi Reisch, Margarita Philosophica Valla, De expetiendis rebus Calepinus, Dictionarium

In other words, virtually all the reference works in print at the beginning of the sixteenth century were, as follows: a description of the world (1475); two chronologies (1474, 1475); two Latin grammars (1452, 1463); a Greek grammar (1476); guides to the Bible (1470), to legal vocabulary (1475), to medicine (ca.  1482), to preaching (1489, 1498), to surgery (1497), and to distilling (1500) (Fig. 6.3); a collection of maxims, compiled by Erasmus (1500); and a bibliography and biographical dictionary of ecclesiastical writers (1494). There were six general encyclopedias (one from 1469, one from 1473, two from 1498, one ca. 1500, and one from 1501); and a handful of dictionaries: German-Latin (1467), German-Italian (1477), Latin-Spanish (1492), Spanish-Latin (1495), English-Latin (1499), together with three monoglot dictionaries, two of Latin (1476, 1502) and one of Hebrew (1490). To a Europeanist, they seem less literary and historically minded—in a word, more practical—than their Chinese counterparts, even those of the late Ming.

Fig. 6.3 Title page, in Hieronymus Brunschwig, Liber De arte distillandi (1512 edition) (Creative Commons).

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At the same time, gaps are obvious, notably a lack of books that mediated between most of the sixty-odd languages of Europe. Imagine someone sitting down in 1450 or even 1550 to translate a book from Italian (say) into French, coming upon an unknown word and being unable to look it up in an Italian-French dictionary. In order to solve the problem it would have been necessary for the translator to work indirectly from a Latin-Italian dictionary or to find a native speaker. It is also worth noting that virtually all the European reference books available before the year 1500 were written in Latin. The Greek grammar was written in Greek, but the Greek writers Ptolemy and Eusebius appeared in Latin translation. As for the vernaculars, they are represented by one item out of thirty, the German-Italian vocabulary. Also, some of these texts were very old. Ptolemy dates from the second century CE, Donatus and Eusebius from the fourth century; Hrabanus Maurus from the ninth century; the Byzantine encyclopedia known as “Suidas” from the tenth century; Balbus, Villedieu, and Vincent of Beauvais from the thirteenth century; and Marchesinus from the fourteenth century. In fact, the encyclopedia of Vincent of Beauvais was reprinted as late as 1624, under a new title, Bibliotheca Mundi (The library of the world). By contrast, the reference works available by the early nineteenth century numbered in the thousands if not ten thousands. As part of what we might call the “nationalization of knowledge,” alongside the foundation of national libraries, archives, and museums, collections of documents illuminating national histories were published, beginning with the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (1826). Encyclopedias took on a national coloring: the Encyclopedia Americana goes back to 1829, the Polish Encyclopaedia powszechna to 1859, the Grand Dictionnaire Universel to 1864. So did dictionaries, among them Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).

Specialization Later on in Europe, as in China, there were many more reference books on a much wider variety of topics. Significantly, these European reference works were almost always written in vernacular languages, especially English, French, and German. In  the case of the law, for instance, texts such as Pietro da Monte’s Repertorium (1475) or Peter of Ravenna’s Compendium juris canonici (1507) were replaced by Joseph  Guyot’s Répertoire universel de jurisprudence (1775–83) or Marco Ferro’s Dizionario del diritto commune (1778). Reference books also tended to expand in size and contents over successive editions. In the case of history, for instance, Louis Moréri’s Grand dictionnaire historique first appeared in one volume in 1674, but it had expanded to ten volumes by the twentieth edition of 1759, with the aid of later scholars such as Jean Leclerc. Manuals

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for merchants were gradually transformed, from small guides to practice to the multivolume encyclopedia of commerce or of what was becoming known in the eighteenth century as “the economy.”18 Instead of a single author, the new reference books were often the work of teams, such as the plusieurs jurisconsultes mentioned on the title page of Guyot’s Répertoire. In the case of geography, world maps became more detailed, and so did maps of individual countries such as France: the map of France produced by the Cassini family was composed of 181 sheets, published between 1756 and 1815. An ambitious collection of views of the cities of the world was published in Cologne in six volumes between 1572 and 1617 (Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum). The cities of China and Japan were absent, but the collection included plates of Algiers, for instance, Cairo, Istanbul, Damascus, Hormuz, Goa, and Mexico City, an indication of the gradual spread of knowledge about the world beyond Europe.

Popularization At the same time as geographers were showing interest in these global surveys, a complementary trend arose, of micro-level guides and maps concerned with the streets and squares, palaces and churches of individual cities (surviving guide books to Ming- and Qing-dynasty cities in any language are much fewer). By the late seventeenth century, travelers, including armchair travelers, could purchase guides to Rome, Paris, Venice, Florence, Naples, Amsterdam, and London. By the eighteenth century, these guidebooks, Joachim Christoph Nemeitz’s Séjour de Paris (1727), for example, were adding to the traditional descriptions of churches and works of art in the city some practical information, including how to negotiate with cab drivers or what streets it was better to avoid at night. Another genre of reference book came into existence to assist urban residents and visitors alike, the directory of addresses, an early modern equivalent of the yellow pages (such guides were compiled for different trades in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Edo, but not, so far as is known today, in any late imperial Chinese city). In  Paris one might turn to Le livre commode des addresses (1692), a book that included information about sales, vacant positions, libraries, public lectures, baths, music teachers, and even the times and places of public audiences with the archbishop. In London in particular, this genre was a success. A Collection of the Names of the Merchants Living in and about the City of London (1677) was followed by The

18. Jöchen Hoock and Pierre Jeannin, Ars mercatoria: Handbücher und Traktate für den Gebrauch des Kaufmanns, 1470–1820 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1991); and, Jean-Claude Perrot, “Les Dictionnaires de Commerce au 18e Siècle,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine (1981): 36–67.

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Directory, or List of Principal Traders in London (1732). The new term “directory” was also a success, as in the case of The Directory (1734), a text that reached its sixtyseventh edition in 1799.19 Specialized guides to sexual services also made their appearance (the resemblance to some extant late Ming books on Nanjing’s pleasure quarters and Qing books on Beijing male actors as well as to the many more on Edo Japan’s demimonde is striking). The Tariffa delle puttane (Venice, ca.  1535) was a dialogue in verse with the names, addresses, attractions, criticisms, and prices of 110 courtesans. It was followed by a catalog of 1570, with 210 names, and later by imitations dealing with the attractions of Amsterdam—Spiegel der Vermaarde Courtisanen, 1630—and London—the Commonwealth of Ladies, 1650—on those working at the New Exchange, and Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, published annually from 1757 onwards.20 It is not always clear whether these guides were intended for visitors or natives, how accurate they were, or indeed whether the intention of the authors was to offer practical information or imaginative pornography (the same could be said of the nineteenthcentury Chinese publication that depicts and describes specific beauties available to merchants at different stops along the Grand Canal). Plans of major European cities were also available, some of them in minute detail (some were also available for large Chinese and Japanese cities, at times published commercially by local government offices). Famous European examples include Jacopo de’Barbari’s map of Venice (1500), Étienne Dupérac’s map of Naples (1566), Matthäus Merian’s map of Paris (1615), and John Ogilby and William Morgan’s map of London (1676). Plans of this kind were becoming more and more necessary as cities grew larger and larger. By the year 1800, Naples and Moscow had more than 400,000 inhabitants apiece, Paris had 600,000, and London nearly 1 million. Interestingly, Beijing and Suzhou had similarly large settled populations as well as many travelers yet appear not to have produced private plans of great detail in these centuries. The Qianlong emperor, however, had one such plan, a house-by-house survey of Beijing, drawn for him; its publication for general use had to wait nearly two centuries, with a 1938 printing by the Japanese and only recently by the Chinese (there is the wellknown ca.  1190 map of Suzhou city carved in stone for consultation and perhaps reproduction; the present fine condition of this stone’s carving suggests that it was not often used for printing). Multivolume reference works also became more common in the course of the period—Guyot’s Répertoire comprised 64 volumes, while the Ökonomische 19. Charles W. F. Goss, The London Directories 1677–1855 (London: Denis Archer, 1932). 20. Antonio Barzaghi, Donne o cortigiane? (Verona: Bertani, 1980): 155–91; Lotte van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 9–12; and Hallie Rubenhold, The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and the Extraordinary Story of Harris’s List (Stroud: Tempus, 2005).

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Encyklopädie reached a total of 242 volumes, published over nearly a century, 1773– 1858. As may well be imagined, such expensive collections were within the means of few buyers. However, there was also a counter-tendency to produce short, cheap reference books for a wider public, the pocket books or dictionnaires portatifs described above were particularly common in France. At the cheap end of the market there was a rise of what might be called popular or semi-popular works of reference, written in the vernacular, published in octavo form, easy to carry and relatively inexpensive, making them accessible to artisans, shopkeepers, housewives and the more prosperous peasants. The widest public was reached by the annual almanacs, pocket encyclopedias which attained high print runs. In seventeenth-century England, Lilley’s almanac alone sold 30,000 copies a year. These little books included information not only about the weather and the stars but also about medicine, fairs, highways, keeping accounts, and even world history, often represented by a short chronological table. In England, common entries in such a table might include the invasion of England by Julius Caesar, the death of Christ, the Norman Conquest, the invention of printing, the Reformation, and the colonization of Virginia.21 After 1800, the use of the steam press and of cheap paper made from wood pulp drove down the price of books and made it possible to combine big books with relatively low prices. Hence it was possible in Britain to market the Penny Cyclopaedia (a multivolume work published over a decade, 1833–43, in parts, in order to make it more affordable to a relatively wide public), with the support of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The Penny Cyclopaedia was the ancestor of later popular encyclopedias distributed by door-to-door salesmen in the United States and elsewhere. The new reference books were also much more “up-to-date,” a concept that was virtually unknown in Europe before the eighteenth century (in the late Ming and the late Edo periods some books were advertised as “new” editions and as having new contents, but their information frequently did not match their claims). When, for example, Abraham Rees produced his Proposals (1778) for revising Chambers’s Cyclopedia, he emphasized his intention “to exclude obsolete science, to retrench superfluous matter.” Again, the chemist Thomas Thomson explained in the supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1815–24) that in ten years so much information had gone out of date that he had to rewrite his article on chemistry completely.22

21. Bernard Capp, English Almanacs, 1500–1800: Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979). 22. Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 68, 186.

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New means of presentation As these reference books grew larger and larger, the problem of organizing information within their covers became increasingly acute. Authors and printers tried various means of making these books more reader-friendly—or to be more exact, browser-friendly (in East Asia such changes came more slowly). For ease of consultation, headings and subheadings were introduced. Attention was drawn to important points by means of a pointing hand in the margin (the maniculus). Indexes became more efficient, referring to individuals by their surnames rather than their first names and making alphabetical order more precise rather than heaping all the Bs, say, randomly together. Notes, whether they were located in the margins, at the foot of the page, or at the end of the volume, acted as signposts for scholars concerned with the original sources of statements. Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) is famous, among other things, for containing more material in the footnotes than in the text.23 Information was increasingly summarized in tabular form, notably the famous tables associated with the sixteenth-century French philosopher Petrus Ramus, whose favorite dichotomies (logic and rhetoric, for instance, or reason and imagination), were divided and sub-divided but presented on a single page with the aid of brackets. Again, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, chronological tables became increasingly elaborate, introducing separate columns for different countries or for emperors and popes or for political and ecclesiastical history.24 In the later eighteenth century, statistical tables became more and more common in reference books concerned with politics and with the new academic subject of economics. The Scotsman William Playfair, who was active around the year 1800, invented new visual forms such as the graph, the bar chart, and the pie chart in order to show graphically variations in imports and exports, revenues, and debts in Britain and in other countries, ranging from Norway to the Ottoman Empire (Fig.  6.4).25 By  these different means, readers were able to take in—or at least they were supposed to take in—detailed information at a single glance. These charts and tables, despite a long tradition of presenting ideas in graphic form and of listing long rows of figures, proved far less common in East Asian, especially Chinese, books up to the past century. 23. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (London: Faber, 1997); and Chuck Zerby, The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes (Montpelier, VT: Invisible Cities Press, 2002). 24. Arnd Brendecke, “Tabellenwerke in der Praxis der Frühneuzeitlichen Geschichtsvermittlung”: 157–90, in Theo Stammen und Wolfgang E. J. Weber, eds., Wissenssicherung, Wissensordnung und Wissenverarbeitung: das europäische Modell der Enzyklopädien (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004); and Benjamin Steiner, Die Ordnung der Geschichte: Historische Tabellenwerke in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008). 25. Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1983).

Fig. 6.4 Table, “Exports and Imports to and from Denmark and Norway,” in William Playfair, Commercial and Political Atlas (London, 1786 edition) (Creative Commons).

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Two additional trends evident in this period merit separate comments, since both should be central to any social history of knowledge or social history of the book and yet highlight the difficulty of making valid general comparisons between European and Chinese books. The first of these trends might be described as the publication of the private, that is, the wider dissemination of kinds of knowledge previously accessible to relatively few people. Take the case of ritual, specifically the rituals of the papal court. Masters of ceremonies had long owned manuscript books describing such rituals, but it was only in 1516 that an account was published, edited by the archbishop of Corfu, Cristoforo Marcello, with the title page proudly proclaiming that the text was “never printed before.”26 When he learned of this publication, the papal master of ceremonies, Paris de Grassis, was furious, presumably because the printed book brought private knowledge, on which his status depended, into the public domain.27 In China, the contrast is clear but needs to be nuanced. Prescriptive information on Ming and Qing court ritual was widely available in official circles, as had been the case centuries earlier for Song- and Tang-dynasty court rituals. Indeed, Daoist rituals in ordinary villages often made use of gestures and other features of court ritual, courtroom cases constituted a popular genre of drama and fiction, and so predictably some villagers on their own sought to adapt court ritual practices for their own communities. If, then, knowledge of proper court ritual procedures was far from secret, it is nonetheless interesting how few descriptions of actual court ritual performances survive, as if this information (along with the private deliberations of court matters) was too important to publish (see the discussion of this point in the chapter by Joseph McDermott on private publishers). Likewise, in politics, state secrets were revealed, so it was claimed, by the anonymous or pseudonymous authors of “secret histories,” a genre that reached its peak in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By the end of the eighteenth century, European court ministers’ memoirs were being published about affairs of state, just as newspapers in some countries were providing their readers easy and rapid access to parliamentary discussions of major political issues. In China, despite the prerogatives of imperial rule, political information circulated both officially and unofficially outside of the court. Government-issued gazettes informed readers throughout the empire of the court’s decisions. The private and commercial publication of an official’s government writings and instructions often posthumously divulged information on the process and rationale of government decisions and policies. Also, as mentioned by Joseph McDermott in his chapter in this volume, court gossip was at times printed up and widely distributed by unofficial publishers. The techniques of 26. Cristoforo Marcello, ed., Rituum ecclesiasticorum libri tres (Venice: Signum Pavonis, 1516). 27. Maria Antonietta Visceglia, La città rituale: Roma e le sue cerimonie in età moderna (Rome: Viella, 2002): 175.

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Wikileaks for gathering and disseminating sensitive information may be new, but the idea behind the practice is an old one, particularly, it appears, in China. Yet, a concern with secrecy seems to have postponed the issuance of accurate information about court deliberations and decisions in China, more than in at least some countries in Western Europe by the eighteenth century. A continued concern with the privacy of some information is likewise evident in the world of handicrafts in East Asia. Whereas the Encyclopédie described the practices of many types of artisan in rich detail, with many illustrations, for a broad public, Chinese and Japanese publications seldom divulged a craftsman’s secrets. Making private technical knowledge public (for the benefit of humanity and economic expansion) was part of Diderot’s campaign against the guild system28 and would seem to have advanced more quickly in Europe than in East Asia. For instance, illustrations and detailed descriptions of the printing process and machinery were printed up in his Encyclopédie—indeed they were printed up within sixty years of Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press—whereas in China such visual and textual information first appeared in print only in the twentieth century (in Japan the depiction of certain stages in woodblock printing appear in Edo-period prints, but detailed textual accounts survive only from the late nineteenth century). This textualization of knowledge—the transcription of information long known but taken for granted or transmitted orally—constitutes another important trend in Western book circles from 1450 to 1850. Such information went beyond the technical (as with the printing press) to encompass even practices of etiquette, often previously considered a matter of “breeding” rather than instruction. As a result, the textualization of social knowledge into reference works replaced age-old practices of personal transmission from elder to junior and thus helped to extend and make explicit different kinds of knowledge and transform their attendant social relations. A striking example of this process in Europe comes from the history of languages. The first time that non-European languages such as Nahuatl or Tupí were written down was when European missionaries compiled dictionaries and wrote grammars of these languages. Sooner or later, these texts affected the spoken languages themselves, fixing fluid forms in print and standardizing the language by privileging one local form over others. We can see the same process, or processes, of textualization and standardization at work in the case of early modern European vernaculars.29 As Italian, Spanish, French, and other modern languages gradually replaced Latin as media for literature and learning, some scholars tried to standardize them, encouraging writers to follow rules and to eliminate regional and other variations. Like the missionaries in the New 28. Jacques Proust, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie (Paris: A. Colin, 1962): 203, 205, 220. 29. For details and references, see Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 89–110.

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World and elsewhere, scholars produced grammars of the vernacular that took as their model the rules for classical Latin. The first printed grammar of a vernacular language was Antonio Nebrija’s Gramática castellana (1492), soon followed by similar grammars of Italian, French, Czech, German, Portuguese, and so on. The project of the grammarians was assisted by the medium of print itself, not so much in disseminating their grammars as by producing thousands of other vernacular texts. Standard languages suited the economic logic of the printing industry, in other words the strategy of selling identical texts to the maximum number of readers. Regional variations in vocabulary were therefore eliminated, and spelling was gradually standardized. Over the centuries, these standardized forms came to penetrate spoken languages as well. In similar fashion, the proliferation of encyclopedias led to what we might call the standardization of knowledge, with increasing numbers of readers seeking knowledge from the same printed sources (not to mention the compilers of encyclopedias copying one another’s entries). From this point of view, the recent rise of Wikipedia is not so much a new trend as the intensification of a centuries-old process.

Types of Reference Works: East and West Among the leading genres of specialized reference book were atlases, chronologies, bibliographies, and dictionaries. The first three types were common in Europe and China, but the last one—at least by our modern Western understanding of these terms—more common in Europe than in China. By examining each of these genres in detail, some major differences between the reference works of East Asia and Europe will become evident. In other words, the general focus of this chapter will now shift from the similarities to the differences in their respective orders of knowledge.

Chronologies Chronologies were a basic form of historical reference work in both East Asia and Europe (where they were often used in schools, especially in the German-speaking world).30 At times, largely for religious or political reasons, their dating schemes proved controversial to a degree that surprises us today. Europeans were accustomed to dating events as either before or after the birth of Christ, but they were long aware of alternative schemes as well. The ancient Greeks dated by Olympiads, the ancient Romans by the number of years from the foundation of their city, and the Muslims from the Hegira. For Europeans interested in ancient or global history the challenge was to harmonize these different chronologies with priority regularly given, of course, to the Bible’s dating order. The widely acknowledged master of this 30. Steiner, Die Ordnung der Geschichte.

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demanding historiographical skill was the great French scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger, as represented by his Emendatio Temporum (Correction of times, 1583). As news of a distinct Chinese chronological tradition filtered back to Europe, initially through the report of Martino Martini in his History of China (Sinica Historia, 1658),31 Western scholars grew interested in the chronology of China’s early history. Traditionally, Chinese dated events by the year in an emperor’s reign era and could confidently trace events in their history to, by European counting, 841 BCE. As Chinese records also contained numerous earlier undated stories on, for example, floods, Western biblical scholars became fascinated by the prospect of using this distinct dating scheme to confirm the Old Testament’s account of the Deluge and other incidents in early recorded history. In China itself, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, historical chronologies also played an important historiographical role in the study of early history. Whereas some Qing-dynasty scholars claimed to be able to date specific historical events to either the reign of the ancient sage-ruler Yao in the year 2637 BCE or the supposedly earliest era of the Chinese people at the time of the Yellow Emperor, other Chinese scholars subjected these and other claims of China’s great antiquity to critical and eventually skeptical review. In disentangling these proposed chronologies’ myth from fact, China’s scholars, unlike their counterparts in Europe, relied solely on Chinese records. As a result of achieving more accurate chronologies, they removed textual accretions from the standard versions of the Confucian canon, detached the sage Confucius from direct involvement in their composition and compilation, and thereby set an important precedent for some early twentieth-century Chinese advocates of cultural modernization. To the consternation of traditionalists and cultural nationalists, these modernists carved more than a millennium from the beginnings of Chinese history (archaeological findings have suggested their skepticism may have gone too far, a point that some contemporary politicians and historians have turned to their advantage in the ongoing debate over the ancient origins of the Chinese race). Chronologies played another historiographical role in China far more vital than in the West: the writing of biographies. Whereas autonomous biographies have constituted a significant part of the Western historical tradition since at least the ancient Greeks, they rarely attained such independent significance in early and medieval China. Concerned in most cases with government officials and their bureaucratic careers, surviving Chinese biographies were usually written for inclusion in the official records and dynastic histories to highlight an individual’s role in the rise and fall of the dynasty. Yet, from the eleventh century a separate biographical tradition of privately compiled chronologies took shape for individuals. Beginning as a means 31. Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

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of appreciating an author’s writings or a painter’s works, these chronologies (nianbiao) went year by year through an individual’s life, taking care to detail its major and minor events. Over time, they proved popular enough as a genre of writing to substitute often for an actual biography. Some 6,000 of these biographical chronologies, for about 3,500 historical figures, are known to have been compiled, mainly between 1500 and 1900. As most of them deal with officials, they could from the mid-Qing draw upon a growing number of other reference publications, such as those on official titles (1780),32 the names of past metropolitan degree holders (1742),33 and changes in the place names of administrative units (compiled in 1837 and published 1871). Even today, these chronologies remain a common way of ordering information on the lives of individuals, institutions, and political units (some counties have posted distinct chronologies for their history on the web). At the same time, the decline in composition of explicit autobiographies during the Qing dynasty, compared to the contemporary surge of interest in ego-documents in Europe, underlines how biography as the autonomous account of an individual’s private and public life has never acquired in East Asia the prestige it has long held in the West.

Bibliographies A second kind of reference work increasingly necessary to handle the proliferation of books from the age of Gutenberg onwards has been the bibliography. In Europe, some libraries published lists of their book holdings in catalogs (e.g., the Bodleian Library at Oxford in the early seventeenth century), so as to notify readers whether a visit to the library was worth the effort (assuming of course, the availability of the catalog to these visitors). Of more general value was the printed bibliography. The Bibliotheca Universalis (1545), compiled by the Swiss polymath Conrad Gessner, claimed to offer biographical and bibliographical details about all writers, living or dead, provided that they wrote in one of three classical languages: Hebrew, Greek, or Latin (writers in the vernacular were clearly considered unworthy of a scholar’s attention).34 The task proved too demanding for later scholars to repeat with success, and in any case more specialized bibliographies proved more useful for most purposes. Some of these bibliographies adopted a national focus, like La Croix du Maine’s Bibliothèque française (1584) or Andreas Schott’s Hispaniae Bibliotheca (1608). Others confined themselves to particular disciplines such as history, politics, or chemistry. Rival 32. Teng and Biggerstaff, Annotated Bibliography: 200. 33. Ibid.: 175, 155. 34. Hans Fischer, “Conrad Gesner as Bibliographer and Encyclopaedist,” The Library 21 (1966): 269–81, and Helmut Zedelmaier, Bibliotheca Universalis und Bibliotheca Selecta: das Problem der Ordnung des Gelehrten Wissens in der frühen Neuzeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 1992).

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bibliographies of both legal and medical books, compiled by the German scholar Martinus Lipenius and the Dutch bookseller Cornelius a Beughem, appeared in 1679 and 1680. As early as 1664, one scholar, Philippe Labbé, thought it necessary to produce a bibliography of bibliographies.35 While some bibliographies tried to be comprehensive, others were deliberately selective. A long series of Bibliothecae Selectae or Bibliothèques Choisies (from the sixteenth-century Jesuit Antonio Possevino to the eighteenth-century Protestant Samuel Formey), helped readers to choose between competing books, at times in the form of giving advice to someone aspiring to form a library.36 The Polyhistor of Daniel Morhof, sometime librarian at Kiel, was a text that was regularly revised and enlarged, and similar accounts of what was known as historia litteraria offered not so much a history of literature in the modern sense as a guide to the world of books and its institutions—in other words, information about information. Chinese bibliographies, by contrast, assumed different guises and had some different purposes. Like most surviving ancient and medieval biographies, they often appeared within dynastic histories. Roughly half of the official dynastic histories from the third-century Han shu onwards contain a list of books written during that dynasty, held in the dynasty’s imperial library, or written earlier and found later (during the Ming and Qing dynasties, list of writings by locals often appear in their home county or prefectural gazetteers or in special regional bibliographies). Chinese also privately compiled a growing number of catalogs of private book collections, whose lists of books likewise serve as bibliographical guides for research on a particular period. These catalogs for an individual or family’s book collection (which sometimes functioned as part of a will for their owner’s heirs) soared in number over time: those known of today grew from ten-odd before the Song, to sixty-odd during the Song, nine in the much shorter Yuan dynasty, and then 167 in the Ming dynasty and an astonishing 670 in the Qing dynasty.37 Even though centuries might pass before these private catalogs were published (the most comprehensive surviving catalogs for the Song and then the Ming were published, respectively, three and a half and then two and a half centuries after their compilation), some eventually became famous enough to serve as models for later collectors’ collections and catalogs.38 Alternatively, people could draw on imperially compiled book lists in various texts. Originally included in the dynastic histories, they were then abridged in privately compiled encyclopedias like the Wenxian tongkao (Comprehensive examination of written documents).39 35. Besterman, Beginnings: 34–37 (on Beughem) and 48–58 (on subject bibliographies). 36. E. Canone, Bibliothecae Selectae da Cusano a Leopardi (Florence: Olschki, 1993); and Zedelmaier, Bibliotheca Universalis. 37. McDermott, Social History: 66. 38. Ibid.: 95. 39. Teng and Biggerstaff, Annotated Bibliography: 16.

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As interest in such lists spread, so did the need for the authentication of the titles in these lists. The first explicit privately compiled Chinese bibliography of authenticated texts is said to have started in 1458 (earlier efforts appear not to have been recorded). The study of this subject was extended in the late sixteenth century by Hu Yinglin’s writings on fake books,40 but scholarly interest in authenticating texts blossomed in the Qing dynasty. At this time we correspondingly see far more specialized types of bibliography, for example, those focused on a single dynasty, a specific topic, and rare editions. Indeed, a substantial number and expanding variety of bibliographies are evident from the seventeenth century (e.g., one for Daoist texts in 1626,41 an annotated Buddhist book catalog in 1654,42 and a descriptive bibliography of 8,317 titles on Confucian writings and commentaries from the Han dynasty to around 1700).43 Tellingly, the type of bibliographical information included in these catalogs changed little over time, betraying a deeply rooted conservatism in matters bibliographical. For instance, even though the compiler of one thirteenth-century catalog had distinguished between the manuscript and imprint copies in his collection, subsequent Chinese book catalogs commonly omitted such a basic bibliographical distinction right up to the early twentieth century. Clearly, such a distinction, for whatever reason, appears to have been less important in Chinese than in European bibliographical circles.

Dictionaries From a comparative point of view, the proliferation of dictionaries in early modern Europe is distinctive and particularly noteworthy. European dictionaries of a single language began by limiting themselves to unusual words (“hard words,” as they were known in English) but gradually expanded to include all the words of a given language, with notes on their etymology and history. The most famous dictionary of French was an official collective enterprise of the Académie Française, begun in 1694, while in the case of English it was the unofficial one-man enterprise of Samuel Johnson (1755). From the early years of our period, in other words the first decades of printing, there was nonetheless a strong interest in bilingual dictionaries (a comparable list of East Asian bilingual dictionaries dates only from the late nineteenth century). These European bilingual dictionaries mediated first between Latin and a vernacular European language such as Dutch (1477), Catalan (1489), Spanish (1492), Danish (1510), Czech (1511), and so on. Bilingual dictionaries of two vernacular languages 40. 41. 42. 43.

Wu Han, Wu Han shixue lunzhu xuanji (Beijing: Renmin, 1984), v. 1: 402–4. Teng and Biggerstaff, Annotated Bibliography: 38. Ibid.; it was first published, however, a century and a half later, in 1792. Ibid.: 42.

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took longer to appear: early examples are Catalan-German (1502), German-Polish (1526), French-English (1530), and Italian-Spanish (1543). Travelers could also make use of one of the most famous of early modern dictionaries, known as “the Calepino” after its original compiler, a Latin dictionary of 1502 that gradually expanded in subsequent editions to include Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish, English, and eventually other languages, among them Japanese. By the year 1779 the Calepino had reached its 211th edition.44 Dictionaries of non-European languages also came onto the market, an early example being an Arabic-Spanish dictionary of 1505, designed to help turn the conquered and newly baptized Moors of Granada into Christians. Missionaries were responsible for many of these compilations: a Nahuatl-Spanish dictionary of 1555, for example, followed by vocabularies of Tarascan, Quechua, Zapotec, Mixtec, Tupí, and so on. A Dutch-Malay dictionary appeared in 1603, an English-Malay dictionary in 1614, and a Latin-Malay dictionary, published in Rome, in 1631. A Latin-PortugueseJapanese dictionary appeared in 1595, while a Japanese dictionary, Nippon Jishu, was published in 1603 by a group of Jesuit missionaries though it may not have been well known in Europe since it was printed in Nagasaki. A Chinese-Dutch dictionary was compiled in the early seventeenth century by Justus Heurnius, a missionary active in the East Indies, but it remained in manuscript, like the Latin-Chinese dictionary compiled by the seventeenth-century Italian missionary Basilio Brollo.45 So did the Vocabularium congoense-latinum-hispanicum (in other words, a Bantu-Latin-Spanish dictionary) produced by another Dutch missionary, Joris van Gheel. However, a  Latin-Amharic dictionary, the work of the German scholar Job Ludolf (with the help of an Ethiopian colleague), was published in London in 1661. In East Asia the political and cultural need for bilingual dictionaries was arguably less than in Europe. Correspondence among China, Korea, and Japan, as well as among their elites, was invariably carried out in Classical Chinese, while for communicating with those East and Central Asian peoples unfamiliar with Classical Chinese, the Ming and Qing courts relied on a team of translation experts. (The Kangxi emperor appears to have intended a similar policy for Latin-language documents. He ordered one of his eunuchs to learn Latin from one of the court Jesuits and then to teach others. For whatever reason, this arrangement lasted for just a few years.)46 With the need for a bilingual dictionary thereby reduced, lexicography saw “few

44. John Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 29. 45. Having circulated in manuscript over the next century, Brollo’s text was finally published in Paris in 1813, but with a different title, Dictionarium Sinico-Latinum, and with the authorship attributed not to Brollo but to its adaptor, Chrétien Louis Joseph de Guignes. In the end, this dictionary “became a celebrated case of plagiarism in 19th century sinological circles.” 46. Our thanks to Prof. Chen Kuo-tung for this information.

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(if any) advances between the late sixth century and the early seventeenth century.”47 Subsequent changes in Chinese lexicography resulted initially from the adoption of the new radical system for ordering characters in Mei Yingzuo’s Zihui (Character glossary) of ca. 1615 and eventually from the European missionaries’ introduction of an alphabetical word order in their bilingual Chinese glossaries and dictionaries (it was used first for Portuguese (1580–88), Spanish (1590), and soon thereafter for Latin, Italian, Dutch, French, and Manchu).48 Yet, this innovation first influenced Chinese editorial practices with bilingual dictionaries or glossaries only in the late nineteenth century (there is no evidence that Chinese knew of these missionarycompiled dictionaries). For example, the late eighteenth-century pentaglot dictionary (for the Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Uighur languages) was arranged by graphic components (also known as radicals), not by Roman alphabetical order. Only in the late nineteenth century did the alphabet begin to win out over other ways for ordering entries in dictionaries, as lexicographical practices (e.g., ordering character entries by their radicals or semantic category), that had for centuries allowed Chinese officialdom to deal with any visitor on its own linguistic terms gave way (the Qing state had even outlawed the teaching of Chinese to foreigners and barred their direct written communication with the court). Bilingual dictionaries, forever enveloped in interstate politics, now became necessary for even China’s officials and rulers. Obliged to descend to an international order decidedly not of their making, they even ordered the compilation of ChineseEnglish, Chinese-French, and Chinese-Russian dictionaries. Tellingly, the compilers of these dictionaries, like the country’s linguists, gave priority to the written Chinese language, and so their bilingual dictionaries, unlike those compiled by nineteenthcentury Western missionaries, rarely concerned Chinese regional dialects.

Atlases The atlas was a European invention of this period, the most famous example being the already mentioned Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), a collection of fifty-three maps published in Antwerp by the Flemish geographer Abraham Ortelius and enlarged in subsequent editions. In the seventeenth century, the best-known atlases, splendid folios, came from the presses of the Blaeu family in Amsterdam. Atlases

47. Jerry Norman, Chinese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 171–73. 48. On these dictionaries see Luis Filipe Barret, review of John W. Witek, ed., Dicionario PortuguesChines, in Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies 5 (December 2002): 117–26; Wilkinson, Chinese History: 84; and W. South Coblin and Joseph A. Levi, Francisco Varo’s Grammar of the Mandarin Language (1703): An English Translation of ‘Arte de la lengua Mandarana’ (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2000): xi, xii.

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were complemented by gazetteers, descriptions of all the places in a given region, like John Norden’s Speculum Britanniae (Mirror of Britain, 1596), or Pierre Duval’s La description et l’alphabet d’Espagne (1660). It was also through atlases, among other media, that early modern Europeans learned about China. A map of China was included in the 1584 edition of Ortelius, while the Italian Jesuit Martino Martini published his maps of China in the 1655 edition of the Blaeu atlas. Road maps were a genre that emerged in this period, increasingly necessary as the number of travelers increased. Among the most famous examples are Pedro Juan Villuga’s Repertorio de todos los caminos de España (1546), Charles Estienne’s Guide des chemins de France (1552), and John Ogilby’s Britannia (1675). By contrast, Chinese atlases and other maps underwent few widely accepted changes in the Ming and Qing dynasties. China’s remarkable premodern cartographical tradition had established in the fourteenth century a reasonably accurate representation of the shape of both Eurasia and Africa, and the Chinese government had mapped minority-dominated tropical parts of the empire like Guizhou in the fifteenth century. In the last century of Ming rule—that is, before the Jesuits displayed Western maps and techniques—maps gained unprecedented importance in Chinese publications. As Alexander Atkin has argued, Ming publishers and authors printed up maps of cities, countries, and even the world in their publications, successfully spreading geographical knowledge of both China and the rest of the world.49 That said, textual knowledge of other countries, especially non-Asian countries, thereafter made few advances. Although a few premodern Chinese visitors to the West wrote very briefly of their experiences there, none of these men to my knowledge brought back a map of Europe or even drew a crude map of Europe for a Chinese imprint. In a country that banned its subjects from traveling overseas and from publishing maps without government approval, such knowledge could easily cause trouble to its holders and promoters. Yet, European advances in cartography (made in part to map their colonies) posed a major challenge to traditional Chinese cartographic practices. Matteo Ricci’s world map in its several printings and its wealth of new geographical information astonished Chinese scholars in the late Ming, and the cartographical practices introduced in the early eighteenth century by French Jesuits won court approval for use in surveys of western China. Yet these innovations, as Cordell Yee has argued, were far less widely adopted than many scholars have assumed.50 Qing-dynasty makers of world maps, aware of gov49. Alexander Akin, “Printed Maps in Late Ming Publishing Culture: A Trans-Regional Perspective” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2009). 50. Cordell D. K. Yee, “Traditional Chinese Cartography and the Myth of Westernization,” in J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., The History of Cartography: Volume 2, Book 2, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), ch. 7.

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ernment restrictions on printing such maps, continued to use pre-Jesuit practices of representing the globe, while many Chinese private publishers of maps (and perhaps their makers) either refrained from printing, or were ignorant of, the Jesuit accomplishments in mapping parts of China. The Kangxi emperor had stored the Jesuits’ maps of the Western Territories away in his imperial archives (they were released and printed for distribution well over a century and a half later), and so Chinese gazetteers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are full of maps that could have been (and in some cases were) carved onto publishers’ woodblocks centuries earlier. Consequently, Chinese atlases, though intriguing, prove far less informative about certain early modern kinds of knowledge than their Western counterparts.

Forgotten genres Before we conclude our discussion of our findings on the fate of these common types of reference work in East Asia and Europe, it might be instructive to consider briefly how the disappearance of certain Chinese and European reference works might mark a change in what is commonly considered necessary knowledge. For while most of the genres and titles of reference book mentioned above still exist, reminding us of the importance of continuities in cultural history, some have faded from common and even scholarly memory. If only to show how in some respects early modern Europe and China have become foreign countries to their present residents, it may be illuminating to mention some successful reference books that have no precise equivalents today. For China, one thinks of reference books like Xiaoxue ganzhu (Purple Pearl: A memory-book for the study of words), compiled by Wang Yinglin (1223–96), to help students “learn the idea of numbers and the foundations of natural phenomenon and human society, by combining figures and characters.”51 Divination has a perennial interest for Chinese in all works of life, and so many Chinese books have naturally pursued this interest (more pre-1911 titles survive today on the Book of Changes than on any of the other Confucian classics). But bookstores today, even in Taiwan, do not sell historically minded works of divination like Xinbian fenmen gujin leishu (A new compilation of classified ancient and contemporary strange omens), a twelfth-century compendium that culled examples from over 180 historical works to convince its readers that everything in their life was predetermined by fate.52 And of course, there were and are the books of aphorisms intended to grace the lintels of one’s door at the New Year or to fend off inoffensively the pleas of would-be clients or dependents. In fact, this last type of reference work constituted a distinct genre of

51. Hervouet, Sung Bibliography: 329. 52. Ibid.: 344.

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reference work known as Zacuan (Miscellaneous compilations). Begun by the poet Li Shangyin (d. 885), it has faded from publishing lists only in the last half century. One entry in an oft-reprinted eleventh-century example of this genre, Zaxuan xu (Continuation of miscellany compilation), runs, “It is easy to snatch: the neighbor’s kitten, the child’s toy, and an antique painting, if it belongs to a subordinate in one’s office.”53 However useful the advice remains, it would seem vulnerable to censorship in parts of China today. For Europe we should like to discuss three successful reference books for which there are no precise equivalents today (though they had their loose counterparts in China): the Elucidarius, the Specimen epithetorum, and the Theatrum vitae humanae. The Elucidarius (Elucidator) of the Netherlands humanist Hermannus Torrentinus (not to be confused with an eleventh-century work with the same title) was first published in 1498 and went through many editions. It was a kind of “poetic dictionary” (as some editions describe it), an encyclopedia of classical antiquity containing “famous legends, histories, provinces, cities, islands and mountains.” The Specimen epithetorum, a collection of Latin adjectives useful in different contexts, was compiled by the French humanist Jean Tissier (or Tixier) de Ravisi, better known in the scholarly world of his day as “Johannes Ravisius Textor.” The Specimen was first published in 1518 and, like the Elucidarius, it was frequently reprinted.54 For whom were such books compiled? Probably for a large captive audience, that of schoolboys, to aid them with the task, common in colleges at this time, of composing Latin verse. As for the Theatrum vitae humanae (Theater of human life, 1565), the work of the Swiss Protestant humanist Theodor Zwinger, this collection of exempla, in other words of good examples from history that readers should imitate and of bad examples that they should shun, was too large to be reprinted very often. All the same, it went through four editions, expanding all the time, before it was revised and reorganized by a Flemish Catholic theologian, Laurentius Beyerlinck (1631), and went through three more editions. The public for this book evidently cut across the confessional divisions of the age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. To understand the appeal of the Theatrum, it is necessary to remember that readers of both history and fiction at this time, like individuals composing orations or sermons, often focused on “exemplarity.”55

53. Ibid.: 348. 54. I. D. McFarlane, “Reflections on Ravisius Textor’s Specimen Epithetorum,” in R. R. Bolgar, ed., Classical Influences on European Culture, A. D. 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976): 81–90. 55. Timothy Hampson, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); cf. Peter Burke, “Exemplarity and Anti-Exemplarity in Early Modern Europe,” in Alexandra Lianeri, ed., The Western Time of Ancient History: Historiographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 48–59.

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Encyclopedias Finally, we consider encyclopedias, the most ambitious and indeed the quintessential kind of reference work in both East Asia and Europe. To any Westerner acquainted with the Encyclopaedia Britannica or Larousse, the term “encyclopedia” evokes shelves of volumes with erudite synopses on a wide range of topics that a reader dips into as he or she pleases. In East Asia such books do exist (e.g., the Wenxian tongkao by Ma Duanlin). But they are far fewer than other books commonly classified with them as leishu, the bibliographical category most commonly translated as “encyclopedia.” These other types of leishu—over 800 leishu are recorded, of which 200 survive and 10 to 20 are still regularly used by researchers—are better categorized as miscellanies or anthologies. Their contents may be diverse like a Western encyclopedia, but unlike a Western encyclopedia they are usually a random collection of excerpts or abridgements of already written works. Over time, they were further distinguished from their Western counterparts by the breadth of the nature of their non-erudite contents and the social composition of their readership. Hence, it is useful to consider Chinese encyclopedias, particularly of the post-1400 period, as consisting of three distinct types for often different readerships: the imperial commissioned work, the compilation assembled by and for officials and would-be scholar-officials, and more popular anthologies covering a wide range of subjects (Qing encyclopedia titles, by contrast, account for only half as much as the Ming). Qing publishers commonly preferred to reprint old titles or, if necessary, repackage them under new titles. Compilers and collectors likewise became much more interested in compiling numerous unabridged texts into large compendia (congshu) that would retain the distinct identity of each text. The first two of these types of Chinese encyclopedia have long been of great interest to Western bibliographers, not least because the Chinese state played a central role in shaping the production and reproduction of their knowledge either as the actual commissioner of these compilations or as the final adjudicator of the relative merits of those claiming knowledge of them in civil service examinations. Thus, even after due attention is given to the long and widespread practice of commercial printing in China, it is the bureaucratic organization of knowledge that is hard to overlook at least for a European as a salient and distinctive feature of Chinese encyclopedias and the Chinese order of knowledge, at least for its educated males. The main function of the first of these types of encyclopedia was to provide the emperor and his officials with quick access to existing recorded knowledge.56 The earliest of all recorded encyclopedias, Huanglan (Imperial reading, compiled 220–22), reflects that concern in its title. A better-known variant of the imperial encyclopedia was the great imperial compilation of existing knowledge. For example, in compiling

56. Wilkinson, Chinese History: 955.

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the Yongle dadian (Great literary repository of the Yongle reign), 2,169 scholars from two court institutions, the Hanlin Academy and the National University, spent nearly five years putting together 22,277 chapters ( juan), in 370 million characters, with excerpts of traditional Chinese writings on virtually every subject under the sun. As the sponsor of this cultural project, the Yongle emperor was so anxious to put all of China’s literary culture under his immediate grasp, that neither he nor his successors allowed anyone else access to any of the three manuscript copies of this remarkable “encyclopedia.” Although this imperial effort preserved in full or in extensive quotations several hundred works that would have otherwise been lost, its prolonged isolation within the palace and then its destruction through fire and foreign invasion made it become a painful symbol of the wasteful folly of imperial rule.57 A second well-known tradition of Chinese encyclopedia revolves around compendia put together by scholar-officials for other scholar-officials, often to provide phrases and information for discussion and composition in their examinations and official writings. Two Ming-dynasty (1368–1644) examples highlight changes in the range of different types of knowledge evident in this genre. The Tushu bian (Compilation of books and charts), put together by the scholar Zhang Huang (1527–1608) between 1562 and 1577, contains a wide variety of information useful to both serving and aspiring officials: fifteen chapters on the Confucian classics, thirteen on cosmology, the calendar, and astronomy (an optional subject in the official exams), thirty-eight on the geography of the Ming empire, fifty-seven on important historical figures and the activities of the Six Ministries, and a final pair of chapters on how to assess odd natural phenomena and how to write poetry. By contrast, the Sancai tuhui (Collection of illustrations of the three talents) devotes only a third or so of its 106 chapters to the same topics as the Tushu bian, letting its other two-thirds deal with topics of more general interest to the educated reader of the early seventeenth century: utensils, clothing, human affairs (including calligraphy and painting instructions, dances, and cock fights), ceremonies, precious objects, literary history, birds and beasts, and trees and plant life. The illustration for each listed object is accompanied sometimes by a historical or literary reference (e.g., the first recorded use of the object, or its mention in one of the Confucian classics), and at other times by information on how it is actually used. As very little detail is given on how it was made, this is a book not for producers of these objects (i.e., artisans) but for their actual or potential owners (i.e., the scholar-official landlords and merchants). The scholar has replaced the state as the producer and consumer of a type of encyclopedia now devoted to explaining and extolling his interests and lifestyle, rural as well as urban (Fig. 6.5).

57. Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China: Volume 7, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 220–21.

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Fig. 6.5 A Chinese water wheel, ca. 1609 (Wang Qi, Sancai tuhui, Ming edition) (courtesy of the Naikaku Bunko Library, Tokyo).

The varieties of leishu included model examination essays and even a text entitled “Secret tricks for responding to policy questions.”58 During the Ming dynasty, reference books were directed at merchants, farmers, and even children (witness titles such as “Trees of Knowledge for Children”). These books were provided with “navigation features” such as pagination, headings, division into chapters, and tables of contents, and these features were advertised by the printers.59 In recent decades a third type of Chinese encyclopedia has attracted considerable scholarly attention.60 Identified as “household encyclopedia for daily use” (riyong leishu), it is a genre that emerged in the Song, grew greatly in popularity during the print “explosion” of the sixteenth century (no fewer than forty-four examples survive 58. De Weerdt, “Encyclopaedia”: 83. 59. Ibid.: 86. 60. See Cynthia Brokaw’s discussion of the popularity and contents of this kind of encyclopedia in her chapter in this volume.

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from the Ming, all but two from its final century), and was most eagerly preserved in the collections of Japanese daimyo. Divided into numerous chapters dedicated to a specific type of largely practical knowledge, this kind of encyclopedia is best understood as a compendium of different kinds of miscellany—usually anthologies of abridged excerpts—for a great variety of useful and enjoyable types of knowledge, that eventually “incorporated almost all the nonliterary genres of contemporary commercial publications.”61 In addition to containing abridged treatises on agriculture, contracts, travel routes, official forms, etiquette and ritual forms, letter models, medicine, crimes and punishments, calendars, geomancy, divination, martial arts (Fig.  6.6), and dream interpretation, the household encyclopedia might contain

Fig. 6.6 A martial arts move, “Two Women Vying for One Man” (Miaojin wanbao quanshu) (Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2004). 61. Shang Wei, “The Making of the Everyday World, Jin Ping Mei and Encyclopaedias for Daily Use,” in David Der-wei Wang and Shang Wei, eds., Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005): 63–92, esp. 64n1.

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collections of jokes, anecdotes, plays, essays, and even a “comic book” of images of people from a great number of countries, some real and others totally fictive (e.g., “the country of people with a hole in their stomach”). In fact, the widespread practice of pirate publishing and “plagiarism” assured not only the repeated reprinting of this kind of textual and visual information (even when long obsolete) but also the repackaging of already existing reference works on specific bodies of knowledge into separate chapters or volumes of an all-encompassing “household encyclopedia.” Hence, their sometimes odd marriage of high and low culture (chapters on how to write rhyming couplets placed alongside others on how to “read” a person’s hands and face and practice astrology), the serious and the humorous (a chapter on laws followed by ones on jokes and insults), and the highly practical and useless lists of information (a chapter of medical advice for sick oxen is followed by one listing literary clichés, all of them sixteen characters long). It would seem as if the publishers, worried about the limited market for each chapter’s particular body of knowledge, aimed their multivolume publication at the widest possible readership in a down-market venture. Thus, the book in its separate parts was intended to be of use and amusement for all members of a household, regardless of gender, and indeed for all members of a community, regardless of their age, their occupation, and their level of literacy (merchant as well as farmer, student as well as teacher). In European encyclopedias, one can observe many similar features. Admittedly, entertainment never acquired as important a place in them as in late Ming encyclopedias. But the mixture of practical and scholarly knowledge, the interest in organizational principles, and the focus on selected readerships, are if anything more defined and powerful trends in early modern Europe than in East Asia, particularly China. Practical and scholarly information can be found in texts ranging from the “Philosophical Pearl” (Margarita philosophica, 1503) by the Carthusian monk Gregor Reisch, which claimed to deal with “every kind of knowledge” (de omni genere scibili), to the famous Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean D’Alembert (thirtyfive volumes, 1751–65) or the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–71), which reached its seventh edition in the years 1827–42. Changes took place in the principles for organizing these encyclopedias. Until the late seventeenth century, encyclopedias were generally arranged into various disciplines according to the divisions of the university curriculum. A well-known example is the massive Encyclopaedia (1630), compiled by one man, the German scholar Johann Heinrich Alsted, dealing in turn with philology, philosophy, the three higher faculties of the university (theology, law, and medicine) and the “mechanical arts,” devoting a final volume of farragines (i.e., miscellanea) to whatever he had not been able to fit into the earlier ones, notably occult studies.62 This form of organiza62. Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 95.

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tion helped readers to see the connections between different branches of the tree of knowledge, but it also made the volumes difficult to consult, especially for readers in a hurry (though Alsted did provide his volumes with an index). To find information quickly, it was more efficient to have recourse to alphabetical order. Alphabetical indexes to books that were organized thematically were common, but it was only very slowly that alphabetical order was accepted as a means of organizing books (it is still rare in China). The first volume of Gessner’s Bibliotheca, for instance, listed writers in this way, though the second volume was organized by academic disciplines. Geographers used the system, as in Pierre Duval’s gazetteer the Alphabet de la France (1658). Pierre Bayle used it in his celebrated Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697). Although it was often criticized for fragmenting knowledge, the system was adopted, with some hesitation, in the Encyclopédie, to become, finally, the “default setting” for works of reference.63 By the eighteenth century a commercial revolution was under way in England, France, and elsewhere. Thanks to increased urbanization, more concentrated markets, and a rise in popular literacy, it was possible to print and sell encyclopedias to an upper-middle-class public, either by subscription or in serial form.64 These general reference books—somewhat like their Chinese counterparts—had the advantage of appealing to many different kinds of reader. In the case of John Harris’s Lexicon technicum (1704), for instance, the list of subscribers, published in the volume itself, included nearly nine hundred people, including lawyers, merchants, booksellers, a shipwright, a watchmaker, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Sir Isaac Newton. Large encyclopedias were obviously within the reach of elites alone, though not always the elite that one might have expected. Churchmen, for instance, were numerous among the purchasers of the Encyclopédie despite its reputation for anticlericalism.65 In Britain, a leading work of this kind was the Cyclopaedia of Ephraim Chambers (Fig. 6.7), the first of many editions of which appeared in 1728. In France, the famous Encyclopédie (originally modeled on Chambers) was followed by a number of imitators and rivals, of which the most important, just after the end of our period, was “Larousse,” in other words the Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle compiled by Pierre Larousse and his assistants. First published in 1863, the Grand Dictionnaire was frequently updated and remains in print. 63. Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, “La naissance des index,” in Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier, eds., Histoire de l’édition française 1 (Paris: Promodis, 1983): 77–85; Béatrice Didier, Alphabet et raison: le paradoxe des dictionnaires au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996); and Helmut Zedelmaier, “Facilitas inveniendi. Zur Pragmatik alphabetischer Buchregister,” in Theo Stammen and Wolfgang Weber, eds., Wissenssicherung, Wissensordnung und Wissenverarbeitung: das europäische Modell der Enzyklopädien (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004): 191–203. 64. Frank Kafker, ed., Notable Encyclopedias of the Late Eighteenth Century: Eleven Successors of the Encyclopédie (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, 1994). 65. Robert Shackleton, The Encyclopédie and the Clerks (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).

Fig. 6.7 Surveying, in Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia, vol. 2 (1738, second edition) (courtesy of Cambridge University Library).

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In Germany, following Johann Hübner’s Reales Staats-, Zeitungs- und Conversationslexikon of 1704 (intended, as the title suggests, to help readers understand references in both newspapers and conversation), the most famous encyclopedias were organized by two entrepreneurs, the bookseller Johann Heinrich Zedler (the Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon, 1731 onwards), and the publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, whose Conversations-Lexicon first appeared in 1810 and remains, like Larousse, in print. The Brockhaus encyclopedia was described on the title page as intended “for the educated classes” ( für die gebildeten Stände). Alongside these general encyclopedias one finds an increasing number directed instead to holders of more specialized knowledge. For instance, although Brockhaus’s Conversations-Lexicon was directed to all sorts of readers, another form of this new and increasingly important print genre in this period was compiled solely for women, with titles like Frauenzimmerlexicon. In an increasingly competitive and commercial society specialization also took place in the types of knowledge the encyclopedias contained and the professional educated readerships they aimed to reach among the professions. Treatises on accounting, for instance, were intended for merchants and shopkeepers. Guides to the law, or rather to different legal systems (civil law, canon law, or common law), were targeted at lawyers and law students. Collections of treaties, such as Thomas Rymer’s Foedera (twenty volumes, 1704–13) were for diplomats (these bulky volumes were printed in an edition of only 250 copies). Likewise, a wide range of reference books were aimed at the clergy, whether higher or lower, Catholic or Protestant: dictionaries of theology, for instance, encyclopedias of moral dilemmas or “cases of conscience,” or collections of the decrees of councils of the Church. An early successful example, published in several editions before the year 1500 as well as afterwards, was the collection of sermon outlines nicknamed the “Sleep Well Sermons” [Sermones dormi secure] since these outlines allowed uninspired preachers to sleep well on Saturday nights. It was eventually replaced by a book with a more pedestrian title, Francisco Labata’s Apparatus concionatorum (1614), a collection of commonplaces that might be useful in sermons. This tendency to record highly practical and specialized information naturally led to proliferation of other “how-to-do-it” books. This genre was extremely varied, including treatises on many practical skills or “arts” such as bookkeeping, dancing, conversation, cooking, farming, horsemanship, memory, midwifery, navigation, traveling, building houses, interpreting dreams, writing letters, or taking notes from books. On horses and horsemanship alone, 184 items published before 1850 have been identified.66 66. John B. Padeschi, Books on the Horse and Horsemanship (London: Tate Gallery for the Yale Center for British Art, 1981); Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Joan-Pau Rubiès, “Instructions for Travellers,” History and Anthropology (1995): 1–51.

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Since some practices are resistant to verbal descriptions, illustrations, including diagrams, formed an important part of European treatises on dancing or horsemanship, for instance, as they did of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593), a reference book for artists that told them with what attributes to represent personifications of Charity, for example, Fame, or History (Fig. 6.8). The eleven volumes of plates in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, most of them illustrating the practices of particular crafts, were the product of a tradition of technical illustration by means of woodcuts and engravings. Indeed, Louis-Jacques Goussier, who drew about 900 of the plates, was one of

Fig. 6.8 Image of charity (Carità), in Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Padua, 1630): 70 (courtesy of Cambridge University Library).

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the most important collaborators in the joint enterprise. Since Diderot’s time it has become impossible to imagine an encyclopedia without illustrations. Manuals for merchants were one of the most successful types of the how-to-do-it book. About a thousand editions of such manuals had been printed by the year 1600, including useful phrases for bargaining, buying, and selling in foreign languages; ways of testing the quality and condition of various kinds of goods; problems of multiplication and division; information about weights and measures (which varied a good deal from region to region in the Europe of the Old Regime); the conversion of currencies and, above all, detailed instructions about the keeping of accounts.67 Noel de Berlaimont’s multilingual Colloquia, first published in 1536, was one of the most popular of these manuals, while Daniel Defoe’s Complete Tradesman (1726), thanks to its author, offers a well-known English example. Manuals of etiquette or “conduct books” seem to have been even more successful. An American scholar once listed no fewer than 945 treatises on the gentleman published in Europe before 1625. She later discovered another 472, not to mention 891 books offering “doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance.”68 It is natural to wonder about the kind of people who bought or read such books. Were they ladies and gentlemen, or members of the middle class who wished to be taken for ladies and gentlemen? Another kind of how-to-do-it book, a genre within the genre, might be described as “do-it-yourself ” medicine. In early sixteenth-century Germany there was a rise of medical manuals for self-help for the “common man,” for “lay people,” a “reformation of medicine” running parallel to and surely inspired by Martin Luther’s reformation of theology.69 The so-called Medicine for the Poor (Medicina pauperum, 1641) by Johannes Praevotius was only accessible to those few poor people who knew Latin, but the book went through several editions as well as appearing in an English translation in 1664, to be replaced a century later by best sellers such as John Theobald’s Every Man His own Physician (1764), with six editions in 1764 alone and six of the Welsh translation by 1820, and William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine (1769), which had reached its twenty-first edition by 1813. By the eighteenth century, a wide range of reference books in a cheap and portable form had come into existence, especially in France, offering information about theaters, for instance, great men, proverbs, or preachers, and bearing such titles as petite encyclopédie or dictionnaire portative. Indeed, by 1759, a German man of letters living in France, Melchior Grimm, was complaining that “the craze for dictionaries has 67. Hoock and Jeannin, eds., Ars mercatoria. 68. Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1929) and her Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1956). 69. Joachim Telle, “Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit im Spiegel der deutschen Arzneibuchliteratur,” Medizinhistorisches Journal 14 (1979): 32–52.

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become so great among us that someone has just published a Dictionary of dictionaries.” He was referring to Jacques-Bernard Durey de Noinville’s Table alphabétique des dictionnaires en toutes sortes de langues et sur toutes sortes de sciences et d’arts (1758).

Conclusions Our survey has revealed some uncanny parallels between the book worlds of East Asia and Western Europe. For example, there were two great encyclopedic projects of the eighteenth century, the French Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean D’Alembert and involving some 140 scholars, and the Qinding Siku quanshu (Imperially designated complete books of the Four Treasuries), its scholarly participants numbering about 350 and its editors just two, Ji Yun and Li Xixiong. At a more popular level, the Western almanacs and other household encyclopedias not only served similar functions to the riyong leishu but also included some of the same components, such as medical information and guides to the interpretation of dreams. The parallels between some botanical and pharmacological leishu and medieval collections of extracts or florilegia are quite close.70 Even the titles of popular reference works run parallel: “flowers,” for example, “mirror,” or “pearl.” There are also some striking parallels between the emergence of certain printed genres of reference book, such as collections of maps or guides to letter writing, etiquette and bookkeeping in early modern Japan and in the West at more or less the same time. For example, the similarity of the route maps published by Ogilby in Britain (above, p. 265) and the Dai Nihon dōchu kōtei saiken ki (Handy guide to the roads of great Japan) of 1770 will be obvious enough, although Ogilby’s routes are represented in vertical strips and the Japanese routes in horizontal ones.71 The rise of booksellers’ catalogs took place at much the same time in Japan and in Europe, and in both cases publishers advertised their wares in pages inserted in the books themselves.72 Directories became popular at roughly the same time in Western Europe and Japan (where book readers could buy lists of great lords and retainers, of officials, of Edo and Kyoto temples, shrines, and streets, of craft shops in certain quarters, and even of the names of doctors and poets). “How-to books” also proved increasingly popular in eighteenth-century England and France, as well as in Japan with its guides (chohoki) on a virtually endless range of subjects, from rearing children and wrapping flowers to the tea ceremony, carpet making, and even the way to put on one’s armor. As we have seen, there were also parallels in guides to their pleasure quarters at night: the hyōbanki, guides to the courtesans of Edo and Kyoto, will remind some 70. Blair, “Florilège latin.” 71. On the Dai Nihon dōchu kōtei saiken ki, see Kären Wigen, A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600–1912 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010): 45, 50, and plate 5. 72. On Japanese advertising, see Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1998): 187–92.

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Western readers of similar guides to Venice, Amsterdam, and the “Covent Garden Ladies” of London. Alternatively, reversing the perspective, we might view the List of Covent Garden Ladies as a guide to London’s “floating world” or a parallel to the list of “beauties” active in towns along the Grand Canal in nineteenth-century China. Similar social trends like rapid urbanization underlay the rise of cheap print and in particular the rise of reference books in Europe and East Asia alike, most obviously in the publishing booms in south China in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and in Edo and London from the late seventeenth century. Together with urbanization came what some historians of eighteenth-century England and elsewhere in the Western world have recently come to call “the birth of a consumer society” or “the consumer revolution.” These social changes made the rise of printed directories of all sorts of tradesmen and tradeswomen desirable and possible. The cultural trend identified by British historians as the “commercialization of leisure” underlay the general expansion of reference works (including books about plays and actors and a wide range of hobbies and private interests) in Western Europe and East Asia alike during their early modern times.73 As one might expect, the juxtaposition of Western Europe with East Asia has also revealed major differences, not least the antiquity of some Chinese reference work traditions. Whereas Europe experienced a major cultural break between antiquity and the Middle Ages, China did not despite the political division of the country between the third and sixth centuries and its enthusiastic adoption of Buddhism at the same time. Hence, the first recorded Chinese leishu dates to the years AD 220–22 and initiated a reference genre that expanded its interests and readership over time but did not fundamentally change its character. It is also humbling for Westerners to discover that in the thirteenth-century, several centuries earlier than in Europe, commercial publishers in China had already adopted the strategy of serialization and that some Chinese publishing projects dwarfed in scale and purpose any corresponding efforts in the West. Whereas in early modern Europe large encyclopedias might reach 300 volumes, the Yongle dadian contained 11,000 volumes (ce), the Gujin tushu jicheng 850,000 pages, and the Siku quanshu 36,000 chapters ( juan). The role of government, so marginal in Europe and Japan, was greater in China (hence the scale of these imperial compendia). Simplifying drastically at the expense of late imperial China’s thriving commercial printing, we might contrast what might be called the bureaucratic organization of knowledge in China with the entrepreneurial organization of knowledge in Europe and Japan. In China, a large share of the surviving body of books, including some reference books, were, as shown in the essays of David McKitterick and Joseph McDermott in this volume, never intended 73. J. H. Plumb, The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England (Reading: University of Reading, 1973); and Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Hutchinson, 1983).

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to be sold. As for the intellectual organization of knowledge, the European and East Asian systems were diverging in our period as alphabetical order became increasingly important in the West and found no counterpart in East Asia. Again, despite the love of lists in Japanese directories, statistics along the Western model did not take hold there until the 1870s. In China the change came much later, arguably only in the last two to three decades.74 Some genres of reference book were peculiar to Europe or East Asia or at the very least more important in one of these places. In contrast to the numerous composition manuals, guides to the examinations, and instructions for light entertainment and hobbies in East Asia (e.g., flower arrangement and mahjong), we find in Europe bilingual dictionaries and a wide range of books for all the educated professions, from law and accounting to preaching and memory. Hence, the ability of Matteo Ricci to impress late sixteenth-century Chinese scholars with his “memory palace.”75 Turning from books to readers, the different educational requirements for aspiring males in Western Europe and East Asia led to divergent publishing emphases. Whereas in Europe the growing power of the educated professions was accompanied by a greater specialization in their knowledge and their reference books than is evident in China, there was no European parallel to the importance of examination candidates as consumers of reference books. Some Western reference books such as the Elucidarius (above, pp. 248, 267) were aimed at a student market, but written examinations were only taking hold in Europe at the end of our period (including examinations for candidates for the civil service, following the Chinese model). Conversely, clerical and legal markets for printed reference books were far smaller and narrower in China and Japan than in Europe, if only because their publication was directed toward officials rather than lawyers or pettifoggers and their contents at least until the eighteenth century showed little interest in the accumulative role of precedents in legal reasoning and decision making.76 Only with the great educational reforms of Meiji Japan and the collapse of the imperial system and its civil 74. Wigen, Malleable Map: 139–66. 75. Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (London: Faber, 1985). 76. The late Ming printing boom in legal casebooks and commentaries on the Ming Code appears to belie this claim. But Tam Ka-chai has shown that these books were usually compiled (and even published) by local officials intent less on establishing precedents for other officials’ use than on impressing their superiors with their legal reasoning skills and thus their merit for promotion to court office as a censor (“Favourable Institutional Circumstances for the Publication of Judicial Works in Late Ming China,” Études chinoises XXVIII [2009]: 51–71). Intended primarily to help officials gain bureaucratic appointment rather than to guide professional knowledge, these casebooks rarely cross-reference one another and their decisions seldom instruct other officials’ rulings. For the greater Qing interest in legal precedents, however, see Pierre-Étienne Will, “Developing Forensic Knowledge through Cases in the Qing Dynasty”: 62–100, in Charlotte Furth, Hsiung Ping-chen, and Judith Zeitlen, eds., Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011).

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examinations in China did we begin to see anything like the profusion of professional reference books found in Europe. Predictably, perhaps, in these countries with a deep tradition of bureaucratic rule, the emphasis then would fall less on medicine and religion than on engineering, the sciences, and law. Thus, the traditions of reference work production and consumption would shape the new orders of knowledge in modern East Asia, even as their traditional teachings gave way to foreign learning. Finally, we would like to comment on possible “connections” in the book worlds and knowledge orders of East Asia and Europe. As the practitioners of histoire croisée or “connected history” urge their colleagues, both comparisons and contrasts need to take account of possible links between the items compared. In our case this means considering the effect on reference books of early modern cultural encounters, notably the great encounter between East and West. In China, the early Jesuit introduction of European learning has persuaded some scholars like Joseph Needham to date the beginning of this “interconnectivity” to the seventeenth century. Instead, we would date this crucial moment to the end of our period, when Protestant missionaries and their Chinese colleagues collaborated in translating a wide range of books on medicine, astronomy, and geology and editing journals such as the Chinese Scientific Magazine (intended by its founder, John Fryer, to be the equivalent of Scientific American).77 The Chinese involvement in this effort was ultimately far more positive, active, and wide-ranging than in the seventeenth century. In the case of Japan this involvement came sooner, perhaps because the Japanese were accustomed to learning from foreign countries like China, not least through imported reference works. Much attention is usually paid to the role of Western medicine in opening Japanese eyes to what they could learn from the West. Yet, their contact went beyond the body and its parts to include society and the economy. In the late eighteenth century, some Japanese were already making use of Hübner’s Konversationslexicon, and in 1811 the Bakufu’s translation office began work on Chomel’s economic dictionary.78 The Japanese adaptation of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (the Buritanika, 1972) is simply a very late example of their long tradition of transcultural connections.

77. Benjamin Elman, A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006): 7, 127. 78. Gluck, “Fine Folly”: 233–34.

7 Books for Women and Women Readers Peter Kornicki

In this chapter I will be considering the consumption of books in early modern East Asia, covering China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam in the age of xylographic printing, so why focus on books for women and women readers? The production of books for women in China has a history of some 2,000 years, but it is a history in which the desire to inculcate moral virtues has constantly been in tension with the suspicion, not necessarily well founded, that women readers would not be able to cope with the classical Chinese of the canonical texts in which those moral virtues were expounded. In time that suspicion became a conviction, with the result that every effort was made not only in China but also in Korea, Vietnam, and Japan to make conduct books for women linguistically accessible and, in the context of the commercial production of books to be sold on the open market, attractive products as well. So the history of books for women in East Asia is one that is closely connected with the vernacularization of the book, as the vernacular came to be seen as the best means to influence women’s moral sensibilities. Within China that meant the replacement of texts in classical Chinese by texts that were closer to the spoken vernaculars, and beyond the frontiers of China it meant the production of conduct books in the Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese scripts, which gradually displaced Chinese texts. The importance of that transformation in the history of the book in East Asia is reason enough for a focus on books for women, particularly since it is a phenomenon that has so far been inadequately studied, but that is not all. It goes without saying that female literacy, once acquired, was not necessarily applied only to conduct books, and this in turn generated a male anxiety about the reading habits of women that is certainly common to Europe and East Asia. The superficial parallels with Latin, vernacularization, and the proliferation of vernacular conduct books for women in Europe are striking, but there are equally striking differences, such as the lack in East Asia of conduct books with a religious message or basis and the lack of any equivalent of the Bible as a point of reference. And that is to say nothing of the profusion of illustrations in Chinese, and in particular Japanese, conduct books, and the lack of anxiety about women’s literacy in spite of the very real anxieties about what they were reading. In the pages that follow I will

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discuss these issues as far as possible from a perspective that covers the whole of East Asia, but for lack of evidence and/or lack of relevant research there is less to say about Korea and Vietnam and because of the wealth of documentary and archival material that is accessible there is more to say about Japan than about China.

Books for Women The study of conduct books for women is beset with difficulties, partly because there is so little evidence, particularly in East Asia, to show how they were read, what functions they served, and what influence they may have had. It needs to be emphasized that women who read conduct books cannot be supposed to have been reading nothing but conduct books, and that even when we restrict ourselves to conduct books it is by no means the case that gendered conduct books were all that came within the purview of women. As some of the examples mentioned below reveal, some of the Chinese classics were also recommended to women readers with a command of literary Chinese, and there were simpler conduct books or primers that may also have been used for the education of girls.1 Finally, given that there are good reasons for doubting the efficacy of the conduct books aimed at women, it is worth reminding ourselves that these texts are invaluable for what they tell us about perceived levels of female literacy and about the moral lessons they are perceived to be in need of, in other words about the ways in which female morality was constructed by authors and publishers. The earliest texts for women that have survived in East Asia date from the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), and the older of the two is Lienü zhuan (Collected biographies of women). This takes the form of a series of themed biographies of women who either exemplified the practice of social and familial virtues esteemed at the time, such as Mencius’ mother, or who served as negative examples of behavior to avoid. The virtues were ones of subordination and were encapsulated in the “three followings,” which required women to subordinate themselves to their fathers in childhood, their husbands in marriage, and their sons in widowhood. The norms for correct behavior elaborated in the Collected Biographies of Women, however, need to be understood in a context in which the behavior of boys and men was also expected to conform to rigidly defined social norms. The format of the Collected Biographies of Women derived from the usual biographical sections which were to be found in the dynastic histories giving biographies of notable men. There is nothing explicit in

1.

Cynthia J. Brokaw, Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007): 527–28, 543–44; and Peter Kornicki and Nguyen Thi Oanh, “The Lesser Learning for Women and Other Texts for Vietnamese Women: A Bibliographical and Comparative Study,” International Journal of Asian Studies 6 (2009): 147–69.

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the text as it exists today to make it clear that it was intended as a conduct book, but printed editions in the sixteenth century in Ming-dynasty (1368–1644) China and later elsewhere made the connection quite explicit.2 The first collection of biographies devoted to women in the West was Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (On famous women), written in the early 1360s. This was similarly inspired by a male biographical tradition, in particular by Petrarch’s De viris illustribus (On famous men), but in the background also lie collections of the lives of female saints which were already in circulation by this time.3 Furthermore, De mulieribus claris is addressed to a noble woman in the first instance and is much more explicitly didactic in intent than Collected Biographies of Women at the same time as being more concerned to engage readers by providing entertainment as well as instruction. As Boccaccio himself noted in his preface, most of his subjects were pagan women, both because the deeds of Christian women were already well known and because they were often “at odds with human nature”; thus the focus was on Renaissance virtues rather than on standard Christian morality. While both De mulieribus claris and Collected Biographies of Women adopted a format that was devised for male subjects and presented women as worthy subjects for biography, it is Boccaccio’s text, written more than 1,000 years later, that extols and clearly approves of the literary and artistic accomplishments of women, notions that were alien to Han-dynasty China.4 The second Han-dynasty text to survive is Nü jie (Admonitions for women). This was written by Ban Zhao (41–ca. 120), a widow who, most unusually, succeeded her brother as a scholar-historian. In Nü jie she expanded upon various passages in the Li  ji (Book of rites) and other ancient texts to elucidate the behavior expected of women in their new homes after marriage and to emphasize the need to be submissive

2.

3.

4.

Joanna F. Handlin, “Lü K’un’s New Audience: The Influence of Women’s Literacy on Sixteenth-Century Thought”: 13–38, in Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke, eds., Women in Chinese Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975); Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994): 54–55; Thomas H. C. Lee, Education in Traditional China: A History (Leiden: Brill, 2000): 468–77; Sherry J. Mou, Gentlemen’s Prescriptions for Women’s Lives: A Thousand Years of Biographies of Chinese Women (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004): 79–86; Albert Richard O’Hara, The Position of Women in Early China According to the ‘Lie Nü Chuan’ (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1945); and Lisa Raphals, Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998). A. S. G. Edwards, “Fifteenth-Century English Collections of Female Saints’ Lives,” Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 131–41; and Michael E. Goodich, “The Contours of Female Piety in Later Medieval Hagiography”: 20–32, in Michael E. Goodich, ed., Lives and Miracles of the Saints: Studies in Medieval Hagiography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001): xi, xx, 5, 9, 11, 329, etc.

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to their parents-in-law.5 It is, therefore, the oldest extant text in East Asia explicitly designed as a conduct book for women. These two texts formed the foundations of a tradition of texts for women that permeated East Asia, but the contours are difficult to trace in detail. The best evidence comes from Japan, where a catalog of Chinese books which were available in Japan was compiled in the late ninth century by Fujiwara no Sukeyo and survives today in a manuscript dating from the twelfth century. This catalog provides invaluable information about precisely which Chinese books had reached Japan by this time, many of which were subsequently lost in China although a few survived in Japan. It also tells us that a number of Chinese conduct books for women had already been transmitted to Japan by the ninth century; among them were Admonitions for Women, several different versions of Collected Biographies of Women, and another work, Nü xiao jing (Classic of filial piety for women), which was written in the Tang dynasty (618–907) and is thus evidence of the continuing production of conduct books in China.6 Were it not for this catalog, there would be no evidence to show that any of these texts had reached Japan before the seventeenth century. Unfortunately, no such helpful catalog has survived to give us a terminus ante quem for Korea and Vietnam, too: in the former the destruction caused by the Japanese invasion of the 1590s and then the Korean War, and in the latter the damage caused by the Ming invasion and then by what is called in Vietnam the American War, have much depleted the documentary record. However, an entry for the year 1404 in the Chosŏn wangjo sillok (Annals of the Chosŏn royal dynasty) states that a Korean ambassador returned from China with gifts from the Chinese emperor that included what seems to be a Ming edition of the Collected Biographies of Women.7 This is much later than the ninth century but is the first record of Chinese conduct books for women in Korea. However, if this and other texts had already traveled the much greater distance across the seas to reach Japan by the ninth century, it is surely a priori likely that they had already reached Korea and Vietnam by then, given the much closer diplomatic relations those two states had with China compared to Japan, to say nothing of the shorter distances.

5.

6.

7.

Nancy Lee Swann, Pan Chao: Foremost Woman Scholar of China, First Century A.D.: Background, Ancestry, Life, and Writings of the Most Celebrated Chinese Woman of Letters (New York: Century, 1932). See also Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004): 17–42 (they translate the title as “Precepts for my daughters”). Onagaya Keikichi, ed., Nihonkoku genzaisho mokuroku kaisetsukō (Tokyo: Komiyama shuppan, 1976; facsimile of 1956 edition): catalog section, 4, 10; and Shimomi Takao, Ryūkyō Retsujoden no kenkyū (Tokyo: Tōkai daigaku shuppankai, 1989): 38–39. Chosŏn wangjo sillok, T’aejong sillok 4.11.1 (Seoul: Kuksa p’yonch’an wiwŏnhoe, 1981), vol. 8.26b.

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It should be mentioned here in passing that although books produced in China did travel, this was not because there was a thriving international trade in books but rather because diplomatic and other visitors to China acquired books on their own account or on behalf of governments or other institutions back home. No Chinese bookseller seems to have been aware of the business opportunities that existed throughout East Asia, at least until the eighteenth century, when some shipping merchants and booksellers in various Chinese ports were involved in the export of books to Japan.8 Some shipping merchants had an inkling of the truth and transported books from China to Vietnam and Japan, but for the most part the circulation of Chinese texts depended not on the availability of imports but on the production of local editions of those texts. Again, although books written in literary Chinese in Vietnam, Japan, or Korea could have been read throughout East Asia, in fact very few such texts traveled to China or to other societies in East Asia, and those that did travel did not do so as a result of commercial enterprise.9 It was only in the Ming dynasty in China that these conduct books for women seem to have come into their own, in the sense of being printed, revised, and widely circulated as independent books with gendered titles. This happened at around the same time in Korea, and somewhat later in Japan and Vietnam, so far as the available evidence suggests. In the case of the Collected Biographies of Women, the Korean court recommended in 1517 that this and other Chinese works that were suitable for women to read should be rendered into Korean using the hangŭl alphabet that had been invented and promulgated in the middle of the previous century. A manuscript translation survives, but there is no sign that a translation was ever printed by the state; one provincial edition was produced, but it is not clear if that was in Chinese or in Korean.10 However, as early as 1475 Queen Sohye, the mother of King Sŏngjong, made extracts from the Collected Biographies of Women and various other morally instructive books and translated them into Korean. This book, which bore the title Naehun (Instructions for the inner quarters), was printed several times in the sixteenth century; the editio princeps does not survive but is thought to date from shortly after its composition and certainly no later than 1522. Both the comments appended by Queen Sohye and her preface present a vigorous argument for the

8. 9.

Ōba Osamu, Edo jidai ni okeru Chūgoku bunka juyō no kenkyū (Kyoto: Dōhōsha shuppan, 1984). For Vietnam, see Alexander Barton Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971): 123; and for Japan, Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1998), ch. 7. 10. Chosŏn wangjo sillok: Chungjong sillok 12.7.sinmi (vol. 28: 22a). The manuscript translation is in the National Library of Korea in Seoul (Kim Tujong, Han’guk koinswae kisula [Seoul: T’amgudang, 1974]: 218).

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value of educating women with a view to playing their proper part in marriage and in society.11 She herself, of course, could read the literary Chinese of the originals, so the production of this digest was an act of divulgation for women without that knowledge. The Chinese writings of other women such as Ho Nansŏrhŏn (1563–89), Sin Puyong (1732–91), and Kim Samŭidang (1769–1823) reveal that literacy in literary Chinese was not confined to palace circles, and the recent discoveries in tombs of caches of letters written by women in the late sixteenth century have begun to extend our knowledge of female hangŭl literacy, but it should not be supposed that even hangŭl literacy was available to more than a limited number of women, and those part of the yangban bureaucratic elite.12 In Japan, in contrast, before the final decades of the sixteenth century almost all printed books were Buddhist texts or scriptures, so it was not until 1653 that the Chinese text of the Collected Biographies of Women was printed in Japan. Just two years later, however, it was translated into Japanese and printed, using a mixture of Chinese characters and the kana syllabary, under the title Kana retsujoden (Collected biographies of women in kana; retsujoden is the Japanese pronunciation of the characters used to write Lienü zhuan, the Chinese title of Collected Biographies of Women). This in turn launched a series of commercially published biographical works for women readers in Japan, which nationalized the content: Honchō jokan (Mirror for women of our land, 1661) and Honchō retsujoden (Collected biographies of women of our land, 1668) took worthy Japanese women of the past as their subjects, while Kenjo monogatari (Tales of outstanding women, 1669) featured both Chinese and Japanese women. In some of these at least some degree of fictionalization can be traced, together with the adaptation of the biographies to fit seventeenth-century moral categories in Japan.13 Owing to the loss of books in Vietnam, the history of the reception of the Collected Biographies of Women is impossible to trace before the nineteenth century and no printed copies have yet come to light either in Chinese or in the demotic nôm script. However, it is clear from a number of manuscript texts that the Collected Biographies of Women was well known in Vietnam, some of the manuscript texts being translations of some of the biographies. The only printed text related to Collected Biographies

11. Yi Ki’mun, “Naehun e taehay,” Kyujanggak 10 (1987): 1–15; Martina Deuchler, “Propagating Female Virtues in Chosŏn Korea”: 142–69, in Dorothy Ko, Jahyun Kim Haboush, and Joan Piggott, eds., Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003); and John Duncan, “The Naehun and the Politics of Gender in FifteenthCentury Korea,” in Young-Key Kim-Renaud, ed., Creative Women of Korea: The Fifteenth through the Twentieth Centuries (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004): 26–57. 12. Jahyun Kim Haboush, ed., Epistolary Korea: Letters in the Communicative Space of the Chosŏn, 1392– 1910 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009): 222, 251–52, 260, 269–70, 308. 13. Hamada Keisuke, “Honchō jokan no kyokō,” Kokugo kokubun 55.7 (1986): 1–16 and 55.8 (1986): 16–26.

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of Women is Quỳnh lưu tíết phụ truyện (Biographies of virtuous women of Quỳnh Lưu district, 1900), which is entirely in literary Chinese and adapts the format for a set of female biographies of purely local interest.14 Meanwhile, in the seventeenth century, in late Ming China, Admonitions for Women formed part of a compendium of books for women called Nü sishu (Four books for women), which derived its title from the canonical Four Books of the Confucian tradition (consisting of the Analects, Mencius, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean) used in the civil service examinations. The other books contained in this version for women were Nü lunyu (Analects for women), which was written in the Tang dynasty and was modeled on the Confucian Analects; Neixun (Instructions for the inner quarters), written by Empress Xu in 1405; and Nüfan jielu (Brief record of models for women), which dates from the Ming dynasty.15 This collection was first published in China in 1624, but by 1656 it had already been published in a Japanese translation by Tsujihara Genpo. What is significant here is not only the fact that instead of being reprinted in Chinese the text appeared immediately in translation, quite explicitly in order to make prescriptions of correct behavior accessible to female Japanese readers, but also the fact that Onna shisho, the Japanese version, did not conform to the Chinese original, for Tsujihara replaced Models for Women with the Classic of Filial Piety for Women.16 A much later edition in 1835, under the title Onna shisho geibun zue (Illustrated and artistic four books for women), further replaced Instructions for the Inner Quarters with an illustrated version of the Collected Biographies of Women. Thus the original imported text was immediately adapted to produce a Japanese version perceived to be more suitable for Japanese women readers, for whom the social realities were very different from those underlying the Chinese Models for Women. In Korea, where almost all printing was undertaken by organs of the state or by provincial government institutions, King Yŏngjo (1694–1776, r.  1724–76) ordered Yi Tŏksu to translate the Four Books for Women into Korean; the result of his efforts was published in 1736 (Fig. 7.1). This edition, too, did not exactly conform to the Chinese prototype, for Yi Tŏksu rearranged the four texts in the order of their composition, and he added a preface in which he lamented the declining standards of learning (i.e., sinological learning) among both men and women and explained that he had rendered the four texts in the vernacular “as an aid to women’s instruction.”17 In Vietnam, there is no trace of the Four Books for Women, but the Admonitions for

14. The only copy known to me is in the Hán-Nôm Institute in Hanoi (VHv.1734). For details of the manuscripts, see Kornicki and Nguyen, “The Lesser Learning.” 15. Yamazaki Jun’ichi, (Kyōiku kara mita) Chūgoku joseishi shiryō no kenkyū (Tokyo: Meiji shoin, 1986), preface: 4. 16. For details of these editions, see Kanazōshi shūsei (Tokyo: Tōkyōdō shuppan, 1983), 40: 124, 287–94. 17. Yi Sug’in, Yŏ sasŏ (Seoul: Tosa Ch’ulp’an Yŏiwŏn, 2003): 13–16, 351.

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Fig. 7. 1 Opening page of Admonitions for Women, in a Korean edition (Nyŏgye). This edition, published in 1736, is bilingual, with the Korean pronunciation indicated underneath each character and some Korean grammatical particles inserted (private collection, Korea).

Women at least was printed in Chinese with ample glosses and a rendering into nôm script to make it more accessible.18 Thus, these two ancient texts, Collected Biographies of Women and Admonitions for Women, enjoyed a long life in East Asia, generating reprints, translations, and localized versions for nearly 2,000 years. The implicit timelessness of the moral lessons they gave is, however, misleading, and nothing makes this clearer than the publication of many other texts for women from the sixteenth century onwards. As Ming commercial publishing got into its stride, the first attempts were made to make books for women more of an attractive commodity.19 The provision of ever more elaborate illustration was one way to achieve this, but the contents also needed attention, for the 18. The only extant copy dates from 1908, but this is a reprint of a lost earlier edition: see Kornicki and Nguyen, “The Lesser Learning.” 19. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: 29–50; and Handlin, “Lü Kun”: 16–18.

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two earlier classics were already 1,500 years old by this time and inevitably spoke to women living in a very different society. If this was a problem in China, then the difficulty was compounded elsewhere, for the lives of women in Han-dynasty China were not only chronologically but also culturally far removed from the lives of women living in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam in the seventeenth century and later. The first sign of a shift in China came in the fifteenth century with several works written by Lü Kun. He produced an illustrated version of the Collected Biographies of Women, but much more significant and commercially successful was his Guifan (Models for the women’s quarters, 1591). In his preface to this book Lü Kun frankly acknowledged that the established texts written to encourage women to be virtuous were dull and difficult to read; consequently, he had decided to present a new collection of model lives with explanatory glosses to make the message clear and with illustrations to make for attractive volumes. Some of these lives were based on the Collected Biographies of Women, but he excluded the biographies of “evil” women, added some new ones from more recent times, eliminated allusions to canonical texts, and added illustrations. He was inspired to take these measures because of the anxiety he felt about a decline in the moral behavior of women and, given his unease about the flood of books in the marketplace, was doubtless also concerned about the kinds of books that were getting into the hands of women readers. Be that as it may, the number of editions of this work that appeared in the following decades testifies to the fact that, as Katherine Carlitz has suggested, “morality” was now a marketable commodity.20 This was also true in Japan from the seventeenth century onwards. By the 1650s a number of conduct books for women had already appeared in print, but in 1670 the Kyōto booksellers guild published a new classified catalog of books in print that for the first time included a new category called nyosho (Books for women) (Fig. 7.2). The catalog lists nineteen titles under this category, of which three are no longer extant. The remainder include several of the collected biographies mentioned above which were produced on the model of the Collected Biographies of Women, some homegrown conduct books such as Jokunshō (Selection of lessons for women, 1639, and later editions in 1642 and 1658), and a number of works of a more practical nature, such as guides to etiquette, letter writing, and calligraphy.21 What is significant 20. Katherine Carlitz, “The Social Uses of Female Virtue in Late Ming Editions of Lienü zhuan,” Late Imperial China 12 (1994): 117–52, and her “Desire, Danger, and the Body: Stories of Women’s Virtue in Late Ming China,” in Christina K. Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White, eds., Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Handlin, “Lü Kun.” 21. Shidō Bunko, ed., (Edo jidai) Shorin shuppan shojaku mokuroku shūsei (Tokyo: Shidō Bunko, 1962– 64), vol. 1: 100; for analysis of the contents, see Peter Kornicki, “Women, Education, and Literacy”: 7–37, in Peter Kornicki, Mara Patessio, and Gaye Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject: Women and the Book in Japan (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2010).

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Fig. 7.2 A section of the Japanese booksellers’ catalog of 1670 (Zōho shojaku mokuroku) listing “Books for Women” (nyosho): the first item is Admonitions for Women (private collection, London).

is that no works in Chinese were listed; Japanese translations of Admonitions for Women and the Four Books for Women are included, but not the Japanese translation of the Collected Biographies of Women, let alone the Japanese editions of any of these works in their original literary Chinese form (Fig. 7.3). What is more, Ming conduct books such as Lü Kun’s Models for the Women’s Quarters are not only missing from this list but do not appear in the catalog anywhere else: they were evidently not imported to Japan, not valued sufficiently to be reprinted there, or, most likely, considered to be too much tied to the expectations of Chinese society to be of any use to Japanese women. By this time, then, we can say that the production of books for women in Japan had been nationalized: not only the language but also the contents were unmistakably Japanese, including the dress of the women shown in the illustrations and the frequent depiction of the women outside the domestic setting.22 Nothing made this clearer than the appearance in the early eighteenth century of Onna daigaku (Great learning for women), a text of uncertain authorship, which is at least indebted to some of the populist works of the teacher and scholar Kaibara Ekiken.23 The core text presents a series of injunctions aimed mainly at young women before marriage which 22. Aoyama Tadakazu, Kanazōshi jokun bungei no kenkyū (Tokyo: Ōfūsha, 1982), provides a detailed study of seventeenth-century conduct books for women. 23. Martha C. Tocco, “Norms and Texts for Women’s Education in Tokugawa Japan”: 199–200, in Ko, Haboush, and Piggott, eds., Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan.

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Fig. 7.3 Opening page of Admonitions for Women, in the Japanese edition of 1652 ( Jokai). The text has been translated into Japanese and printed mostly in the kana script: the few characters carry glosses giving the pronunciation in kana (private collection, Tokyo).

urge them to observe the “three followings” mentioned above and in particular to yield to the wishes of husband and parents-in-law without question. The context is unequivocally that of eighteenth-century Japan rather than Han-dynasty China, and the illustrations are again based on the realities of contemporary Japan. This work went through a very large number of editions right up to the late nineteenth century, all sharing the core text with increasing quantities of ancillary material added at the front, the back, and even the upper margins of each page. Further, in spite of the easy availability of printed versions, many manuscript copies of the Great Learning for Women survive, often consisting of the central text alone and carrying the name of the woman who copied it out. The act of copying it out was in fact recommended in the text, but it is impossible to know now whether such copies were made at parental command or on the woman’s own initiative, and if the latter, whether for calligraphy practice or to commit the contents to heart. To give one example of many, in the

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middle of the nineteenth century Kanbe Taka, the daughter of a village headman who was engaged in pawnbroking and sake brewing as well as agriculture and had a large collection of books in his house, made two copies.24 It is clear from this, and from later examples, that this text continued to serve a function well after it was originally written, and even in the Meiji period, when it came under attack, a woman activist and reformer like Kishida Toshiko was reluctant to dismiss it out of hand.25 The ancillary material attached to the Great Learning for Women, it is important to note, does not partake of the moral message of the core text; rather, it provides a wide variety of practical matters and information, ranging from a quick summary of The Tale of Genji to the elements of flower arrangement and advice on childrearing, from information about games and leisure pursuits to sample letters.26 It is, in fact, all this ancillary material, which is to be found in the large numbers of books produced for women readers, and not just in the Great Learning for Women alone, that suggests “the marketability of morality” is not the most useful way in which to understand this phenomenon in Japan. In the first place, it should be noted that the core text of the Great Learning for Women was customarily written in large script in an elegant female hand and was clearly designed for reading and calligraphy practice as well as a guide to behavior in the in-laws’ house.27 Secondly, as Yokota Fuyuhiko has argued, the prescriptions in the Great Learning for Women already in the early eighteenth century sat none too comfortably with the realities of life for urban working women, of divorce rates, and of other patterns of life which are completely at odds with prescriptions aimed at a stay-at-home daughter-in-law.28 Katherine Carlitz has suggested that “the packaging of women’s virtue as a commodity” in China might have resulted in “ethics as entertainment,” and in Japan it does seem clear that the evolution of books commercially produced for women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted in a diminution of the ethical component and a gradual increase in pure entertainment and/or information.

24. The Kanbe family lived in Motojuku village in Kōzuke province (now Gunma Prefecture); see Gunma Kenritsu Monjokan shūzō monjo mokuroku (Maebashi: Gunma kenritsu monjokan, 1999), vol. 17: 10–11, and items 11539 and 11375 in the Kanbe Kanetaka-ke monjo in Gunma kenritsu monjokan. 25. Sugano Noriko, “Kishida Toshiko and the Career of a Public-Speaking Woman in Meiji Japan”: 171–89, in Kornicki, Patessio, and Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject. 26. Sugano Noriko, “Onna daigaku kō,” in Onna daigaku shiryō shūsei, supplementary volume (Tokyo: Ōzorasha, 2006). For facsimiles of some of the variations, see Koizumi Yoshinaga, ed., Onna daigaku shiryō shūsei (Tokyo: Ōzorasha, 2003–6). 27. Large numbers of calligraphy manuals for women were published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Koizumi Yoshinaga, Nyohitsu tehon kaidai (Musashi-murayama: Seishōdō shoten, 1998). On later conduct books, see also Esther Rühl, “Frauenbildungsbucher aus der späten Edo-Zeit (1750– 1868): Versuch einer Charakterisierung anhand beispielhafter Werk,” Japanstudien 9 (1997): 287–312. 28. Yokota Fuyuhiko, “Imagining Working Women in Early Modern Japan”: 153–67, in Hitomi Tonomura, Anne Walthall, and Wakita Haruko, eds., Women and Class in Japanese History (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1999).

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As mentioned, there was little room for Chinese texts intended for women in the marketplace of seventeenth-century Japan, and that raises the question of the foundations of the ethical or instructional elements of the flood of books for women that appeared in Japan from the end of the seventeenth century onwards.29 Works like Great Learning for Women purveyed a secular ethic that is Confucian in the sense that such formulas as the “three followings” were considered to be part of the Confucian construction of human relationships. But, in contrast to Chinese books for women, their emphasis is not on paternal authority but on the family as an institution and on the contribution of the bride even to its economic prosperity. As a result, for example, the new bride is instructed to subordinate herself to her mother-in-law as well as to her father-in-law and to do all that she can to contribute to the well-being of the family as a whole. But how was a woman to behave and how were her social relations to be determined outside the home if not by the Chinese models of the Han or even of the Ming dynasty? The only available Japanese model was that of the courtly age of the Heian period (794–1185), when the female authors of court romances such as The Tale of Genji were active. Thus, the visual and textual slant provided in these Tokugawa texts frequently resorted to recreated or imagined courtly styles of dress, hairstyling, letter writing, and sociability, as the titles often made abundantly clear (Fig. 7.4). To the extent that these elements began to eliminate ethical elements altogether, we need no longer think even of “ethics as entertainment” but of marketdriven consumption in Japan. Much of the profusion of illustrated and accessible books for women that characterized late Ming China and Japan from the seventeenth century onwards must be attributed to the growth of educational opportunities for women and in particular to the commercialization of the book in those two societies.30 In neither Korea nor Vietnam were these conditions realized until the nineteenth century or even later. Mention has been made of the early appearance of vernacular texts for women in Korea from the fifteenth century onwards and the subsequent publication of these and a few other works, including some practical manuals covering subjects such as clothing, the preparation of food, and the care of houses. But it is important to note that none of it was published commercially, and it is clear that such texts were very limited in their social reach.31 Instructions for the Inner Quarters, originally written in 1475 by Queen Sohye, was published under government auspices under the new 29. Many are reproduced in facsimile in the hundred volumes of Edo jidai josei bunko while images of others are to be found on the website of Nara Women’s University (http://www.lib.nara-wu.ac.jp/ nwugdb/jindex.html) and on Koizumi Yoshinaga’s website (http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/ha/a_r/index Ourai.htm). 30. On education, see Lee, Education in Traditional China; and Kornicki, “Women, Education, and Literacy.” 31. Ch’oe Yŏnmi, “Chosŏn sidae yŏsŏng p’yŏnjŏja, ch’ulp’an hyŏmnyŏkja, tokja ŭi yŏk’hal e kwan han yŏn’gu,” Sŏjihak yŏn’gu 23 (2002): 113–47.

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Fig. 7.4 Frontispiece from Onna teikin gosho bunko (The Palace Library of Home Education for Women, 1790) showing a courtly lady reading formally at a desk while some maids bring more books in a wheeled chest. The artist is Tsukioka Settei (1726–87) (private collection, London).

title of Royally Sanctioned Instructions for the Inner Quarters (Ŏje naehun) in 1611, 1656, 1727, and 1736.32 Even as late as the end of the eighteenth century, one of the few Korean women whose compositions in literary Chinese survive provided her daughter with instruction from a women teacher using a simple conduct book in literary Chinese entitled Rules for the Inner Quarters (Nae ch’ik) with the intention that she learn from it how to serve her in-laws after marriage.33 Thus conduct books with an uncompromising emphasis on marital conduct still had a role to fulfill in elite life in Korea, and there was little practical information, let alone entertainment, to be had. In Vietnam, where no extant books for women date from before the early nineteenth century, we find some signs of vernacularization with the publication of nôm translations, some in verse, and even a few translations in the romanized script in the early twentieth century, but many were still in Chinese. Judging from the number of surviving copies, the most widely circulated of all was a Chinese text entitled Jiaonü yigui (Rules bequeathed for the instruction of women, 1878); the text was written in 32. Sin Yangsŏn, Chosŏn hugi sŏjisa yŏngu (Seoul: Hyean, 1997, second edition): 171. 33. Haboush, Epistolary Korea: 288–91.

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1742 by Chen Hongmou, a Chinese provincial governor, and a great deal of it was drawn from conduct books for women produced in the late Ming (Fig. 7.5).34 The trajectory followed by books for women in premodern East Asia is significant for the lack of any anxiety about female literacy per se although, as we will see, there was indeed anxiety about what women were reading, and for the dominance of commercial considerations, particularly in Japan. What is striking is the lack of a religious component to the conduct books or to other books for women, for Buddhism had no place whatsoever in any such books produced in China, Japan, and Korea and only a marginal role in a few books produced in Vietnam in which readers were advised not to take the lives of any animals.35 By contrast, Christian morality informed many books for women in the West: after all, Christine de Pizan (1365–ca. 1430) included

Fig. 7.5 The opening page of the Vietnamese edition of Chen Hongmou, Jiaonü yigui (Rules bequeathed for the instruction of women, 1742), entitled Giáo nữ di qui and published in 1878; the first section is an extract from Admonitions for Women (private collection, Ho Chi Minh City). 34. Kornicki and Nguyen, “The Lesser Learning.” 35. Ibid.

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female Christian martyrs in The Book of the City of Ladies, thus rejecting Boccaccio’s focus on pagan women for his biographies; Domenico Cavalca’s Specchio della croce (Mirror of the cross) circulated widely in manuscript before going through many editions in print; and The Instruction of a Christian Woman by Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), which was first published in Latin in 1524, was published in English translation in 1529 and enjoyed Europe-wide popularity.36 This is not, of course, to suggest that Christian morality had a stranglehold over the production of books for women in Europe, for by the sixteenth century if not earlier technical manuals for embroidery or lace, letter writers, books on cooking, health, and domestic service, and entertaining literature such as Philip Sidney’s Arcadia were being produced with women readers in mind in ever-increasing quantities.37 Rather, it is to point to the almost complete absence of Buddhist themes from commercially published books intended for women readers in East Asia, with the sole exception of Vietnam, as mentioned above.38 In contrast, there is nothing in East Asia to match, for example, the books produced in nineteenth-century Britain which dealt with women’s work, political roles, and intellectual advancement, such as Mrs. Reid’s Women Workers in the Liberal Cause (1887).39 It is true that there are in Japan a few works which address the needs of working women, such as Onna shōbai ōrai (Commercial primer for women, 1806), which offers instruction in commercial language and terminology and contains illustrations showing women fulfilling various roles involving commercial administration and bookkeeping.40 These are, however, practical handbooks and no more than that. Works that challenged the political or social order or the place of women in the social order, or even books that were aimed at women with intellectual or political interests, were not to appear until the collapse of the various anciens régimes in East Asia. The earliest, therefore, are to be found in Japan following the Meiji Restoration of 1868;

36. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, 1982): xxxvii; Axel Erdmann, My Gracious Silence: Women in the Mirror of Sixteenth Century Printing in Western Europe (Lucerne: Gilhofer and Ranschburg, 1999); Diane Bornstein et al., eds., Distaves and Dames: Renaissance Treatises for and about Women (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1978): 535; and Tiziana Plebani, Il “genere” dei libri. Storie e rappresentazioni della lettura al femminile e al maschile tra medioevo e età moderna (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001): 40–41. 37. Ibid.: 44–54; and Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475–1640 (San Marino CA: Huntingdon Library, 1982): 76–77. 38. Nor do there seem to have been private or government publications with Buddhist content intended for women. 39. See, for example, the works included in Roy Vickers, ed., Conduct Literature for Women (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), esp. in the first and sixth volumes. 40. Ishikawa Matsutarō, Nihon kyōkasho taikei ōraihen (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1973), vol. 15 “Joshiyō”: 585–89; images of the 1806 text are available at http://ir.u-gakugei.ac.jp/handle/2309/7884 (accessed June 21, 2010). See also Umihara Tōru, Kinsei no gakkō to kyōiku (Kyoto: Shibunkaku, 1988): 258–59.

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this is when the first women’s intellectual journals and the first women gave political speeches in public.41

Women as Readers It goes without saying that conduct books and other books written for women readers were anything but the only books being read by women in East Asia just as in Europe. Print greatly increased the possibilities of access to books and in East Asia, again as in Europe, this aroused male anxieties about the consequences of female literacy and encouraged male writers to take a restrictive line on books that were thought suitable for women. Thus, Vives in the early sixteenth century opposed allowing young women access to secular literature, a view shared by Roger Ascham in his work The Scholemaster (1570), who deplored the “fowlest adoulteries by subtlest shiftes” in La Morte d’Arthur.42 Just a few years later Thomas Salter railed against the various books that young women found exciting; as Carol Meale and Julia Boffey have noted, “The anxieties  .  .  .  suggest that women routinely took advantage of the available opportunities to read a wide variety of texts both in manuscript and print.”43 Views about what women should and should not be reading in East Asia were similarly focused upon moral issues. In sixteenth-century Korea the great Confucian thinker Yi T’oegye (1501–70) laid down a list of the books that women ought to read: the list included the canonical Shi jing (Classic of poetry) and Shu jing (Book of documents), Shi ji (The records of the historian), the elementary Xiao xue (Lesser learning) and Nü ze (Examples for women).44 These were, however, at that time in Korea all available only in Chinese, so it is clear that he was addressing himself to the most educated levels of court society in his day and assuming a degree of competence with literary Chinese that few women would have had. His prescriptions are not explicitly the result of anxiety about the reading habits of women, but within a century the anxiety had become palpable and it related to the reading of fiction. One writer argued that precisely because women were only taught to read Korean they naturally gravitated toward unsuitable fiction. By this, he was referring to the burgeoning tradition of fiction written entirely in the Korean alphabet (kodae sosŏl ), which originally circulated in manuscript and began to be commercially printed in the early nineteenth century. His remedy, of course, was to forbid women access to 41. Mara Patessio, “Readers and Writers: Japanese Women and Magazines in the Late Nineteenth Century”: 191–213, in Kornicki, Patessio, and Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject; and Sugano, “Kishida Toshiko.” 42. W. A. Wright, ed., Roger Ascham: English Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970): 231. 43. Carol M. Meale and Julia Boffey, “Gentlewomen’s Reading”: 526–40, esp. 595, in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp, eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 3, 1400–1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 44. Ch’oe, “Chosŏn sidae yŏsŏng p’yŏnjŏja”: 137.

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such fictional works and to direct them instead to the Classic of Filial Piety, the Lesser Learning, and the Four Books for Women, all of which were by the eighteenth century available in bilingual editions.45 By that time, however, Queen Insŏn (1618–74) was writing to her daughter about her reading of Chinese colloquial fiction such as the Shui hu zhuan (Outlaws of the marsh) as well as Korean fiction, and toward the end of the seventeenth century another woman, Nam Wŏn’yun (1647–98), translated a Chinese historical novel into Korean and passed it around her circle in manuscript.46 It is therefore clear that the prescriptions were being routinely ignored. Perhaps because commercial publishing in Korea did not generate a flood of distracting books until the nineteenth century, complaints about women’s reading are relatively few, and in Vietnam none have yet come to light. By contrast, in Japan from the seventeenth century onwards, commercial publishers may have been producing conduct books for women, but they were producing a great deal else at the same time and the availability of books was beginning to cause male unease. Much of this unease was aroused by two works of Japanese classical literature in particular, The Tale of Genji and the Tales of Ise, both of which became readily available in printed editions, including digests and cheap editions, from the early decades of the seventeenth century.47 The fact that male Confucian scholars began in the mid-seventeenth century to find fault with women who read The Tale of Genji and the Tales of Ise undoubtedly owes much to the ready availability of newly printed texts and to the perception that women were reading them. This was of course nothing new, for court women had long been expected to know The Tale of Genji as a matter of course. At the dawn of the age of commercial printing in Japan one of them, Kaoku Gyokuei (b.  1526; d.  sometime after 1602), who came from the highest echelons of the Kyōto court aristocracy, wrote several commentaries on the text for female readers, therefore deliberately eschewing the exegetical apparatus based upon sinological knowledge which had accrued around the text in the hands of male readers and arguing for an engagement with the text that had no end in view other than the pleasure of reading it.48 It was precisely this sort of engagement with the text that occasioned concern, at least from 1653 onwards.49 Yamaga Sokō (1622–85), one of the leading Confucian thinkers of the age and at the same time a teacher of military science, wrote a piece on the education of 45. Ibid.: 141–42. 46. Ibid.: 140–41. 47. Peter Kornicki, “Unsuitable Books for Women? Genji monogatari and Ise monogatari in Late Seventeenth-Century Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 60 (2005): 147–93. 48. G. G. Rowley, “The Tale of Genji: Required Reading for Aristocratic Women”: 39–49, in Kornicki, Patessio, and Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject. 49. For further details, see Kornicki, “Women, Education, and Literacy”: 155–60, in Kornicki, Patessio, and Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject.

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women which provided a rationale for keeping such texts out of the hands of women. He noted that the practice of reading works like The Tale of Genji and the Tales of Ise for leisure and of hiring female tutors to read and explain the texts to young women in their homes had become common. This passing evidence of the existence of professional women readers and teachers is interesting, but it is worth pausing to ask precisely which young women he had in mind. It was surely not the limited and secluded female members of the Kyōto aristocracy that he was thinking of but rather the daughters and wives of his peers among ranking samurai and in the households of the daimyo (territorial barons); in other words, women like those depicted somewhat later by Hishikawa Moronobu in his Wakoku hyakujo (One hundred women of Japan, 1695) and said to be amusing themselves with The Tale of Genji, the Tales of Ise, and the Kokinshū (Collection of poems ancient and modern), the first of the official court collections of waka poetry.50 What, then, was wrong with these books? To his mind they were inherently unsuitable because they were immoral if not pornographic, because they encouraged young women to write love letters, and because they led to loose behavior. His views were shared by many contemporaries.51 What is remarkable is that neither he nor any of those who in later decades turned their attention to the reading habits of women inveighed against reading any genre apart from classical literature. This surely cannot be taken to mean that women were never to be found reading the popular fiction that was becoming an increasingly lively sector of the market. It might simply be that they considered, perhaps mistakenly, that the class of women they were addressing was more likely to be reading classical literature, or it might be that they themselves were unfamiliar with current popular literature and unaware of the need to combat its influence. Be that as it may, the authors of conduct books for women did not, however, necessarily agree with Yamaga Sokō. While some saw danger in The Tale of Genji, others presented love as a normal human emotion and on such grounds presented a defense of it. For example, the preface to Mirror for Women of our Land (1661) argued that women should at least be familiar not only with the Genji and the Tales of Ise but with works by other writers of the Heian period and with the Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern.52 Similarly, when Nonaka En (1660–1725) wrote a text for an acquaintance about to be married, she praised the “gentle Japanese ways” to be found in works like The Tale of Genji but warned against using books of classical poetry as a means of getting acquainted with the emotions of love.53 50. Illustrated in Kornicki, “Unsuitable Books for Women?”: 169. 51. Ibid.: 157–58. 52. Aoyama, Kanazōshi jokun bungei: 23ff; and Asai Ryōi, Honchō jokan, in Nihon kyōiku bunko (Tokyo: Dōbunkan, 1910), Kōgihen v.2: 263. 53. Nonaka En, “Oboroyo no tsuki”: 699–701, in Nihon kyōikushi shiryō (Tokyo: Monbushō, 1891), vol. 5. This work survives only in manuscript and was first printed in 1891.

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Thus male moralists, who were often familiar with the Genji and the Tales of Ise themselves, found fault with the classics of Japanese literature when in the hands of women readers. However, the courtly turn in conduct books, mentioned above, and the construction and valorization of “Japanese etiquette” gradually brought about a reassertion of the value of those same books for women readers. Thus a letter writer for women published in 1747 introduced into the sample letters a wealth of information not only about The Tale of Genji and the Tales of Ise but about a wide range of classical literature including poetry.54 The women who formed the market for these commercial publications probably came from nonelite samurai households or the upper segments of the merchant class. Whether they went on to read such works or not, it was clearly becoming expected that they have at least a superficial knowledge of classical literature, perhaps precisely because of the connotations it carried of being well educated and acquainted with “Japanese etiquette.” Publishers responded to this shift in values by openly recommending such works to women readers. A four-page printed catalog dating from the late eighteenth century and entitled “Catalogue of books useful for girls to read” exemplifies this by listing not only an amplified edition of the Great Learning for Women and a number of calligraphy manuals, letter writers, and encyclopedias for women but also anthologies of poetry, three editions of the Tales of Ise, some fiction, a large number of books of illustrations (ehon), and even two books on numismatics.55 The shift can also be traced in Japanese versions of the Four Books for Women. The preface to the Japanese translation of 1656 drew attention to the licentious and erotic nature of most monogatari (romances) and other works of fiction produced in Japan, and warned that too much exposure to them would have disturbing effects on the sentiments of women. The preface remained intact for the 1772 reprint, but the new edition of 1835, which bore the new title of Illustrated and Artistic Four Books for Women, contained a modified preface which silently removed this passage.56 Thus, although the message may have continued to be considered valuable up to the late eighteenth century, it was no longer so by the nineteenth. By that time women were already a recognized part of the market for fiction, particularly for the romantic novels known generically as ninjōbon (books of sentiment), which addressed women readers and frequently included scenes in which female characters are reading.57 54. Koizumi, Nyohitsu tehon kaidai: 109. 55. Kinsei shuppan kōkoku shūsei (Tokyo: Yumani shobō, 1983), vol. 1: 355–58. As is clear from Joshua S. Mostow, “Illustrated Classical Texts for Women in the Edo Period,” in Kornicki, Patessio, and Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject, many editions of the Tales of Ise were produced with women readers in mind. 56. Copies of the 1772 reprint of the 1656 edition (using the same woodblocks) and of the 1835 edition can be conveniently compared at Ōsaka Nakanoshima Toshokan. 57. See, for example, Tamenaga Shunsui, Harutsugedori, in Nihon Koten Bungaku Zenshū 47 (Tokyo: Shōgakukan, 1971): 403, 421; Itasaka Noriko, “Woman Reader as Symbol: Changes in Images of the Woman Reader in Ukiyo-e”: 103–4, in Kornicki, Patessio, and Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject; and

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What evidence do we have relating to the actual rather than recommended reading of women and to their intellectual or literary responses? In the West we are fortunate to have a rich store of documentary evidence and now of secondary literature that has explored its significance. The documentary evidence used to date ranges from commonplace books, marginalia, diaries, letters to autobiographies, and handmade copies. From all this it has been possible to demonstrate, for example, that as early as the twelfth century there were women who were widely read in Latin and were able to correspond in it; Katherine Parr, for example, the author of Lamentacion of a Synner (1546), may have described herself as “unlettered,” but she corresponded with Roger Ascham in Latin; and somewhat later in Italy, Elena Cornaro clearly knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic.58 Examples such as these raise the question of the levels of knowledge of classical Chinese attained by non-Chinese women. All the Korean women readers and writers that we know of seem to have had no difficulty with classical Chinese, and examples have come to light even of rural women writing in Chinese.59 Vietnamese conduct books for women often assumed such knowledge, since they were not infrequently in Chinese rather than Vietnamese.60 In Japan, too, the common assumption that women in general were unable to read Chinese is clearly mistaken. To mention just three examples, Inoue Tsū (1660–1738) read extensively in the Chinese classics, Ōgimachi Machiko (1679–1724) was well acquainted with Chinese historical and poetical works, and Arakida Rei (1732–1806), one of the few women writers of prose in Edo-period Japan, has left unmistakable evidence in her writings of her extensive familiarity not only with the poetry of the Tang dynasty that was highly esteemed in Japan but also with supernatural tales and other fictional works.61 Diaries, correspondence, and inventories have proved invaluable sources of information not merely for telling us what early modern women were reading in Europe but also how and why. Recently studied examples include the correspondence of Elise

58.

59. 60. 61.

Jonathan E. Zwicker, Practices of the Sentimental Imagination: Melodrama, the Novel, and the Social Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006). Joan M. Ferrante, “The Education of Women in the Middle Ages in Theory, Fact and Fantasy”: 9–42, in Patricia H. Labalme, ed., Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past (New York: New York University Press, 1980); Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Learned Women of Early Modern Italy: Humanists and University Scholars,” in ibid.: 91–116; Margaret L. King, “Book-Lined Cells: Women in Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance”: in ibid.: 66–90; Edith Snook, Women, Reading and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005): 44–49; and Sara Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), esp. ch. 3. Haboush, Epistolary Korea: 222; Ch’oe, “Chosŏn sidae yŏsŏng p’yŏnjŏja.” Kornicki and Nguyen, “The Lesser Learning.” Chikaishi Yasuaki, “Inoue Tsū-jo shōden narabi ni nenpu”: 371–91, in Inoue Tsūjo zenshū (Marugame: Kagawa Kenritsu Marugame Kōtō Gakkō dōsōkai, 1973): 371–91; Rowley, “The Tale of Genji”: 52, in Kornicki, Patessio, and Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject; and Sakaki Atsuko, “The Taming of the Strange: Arakida Rei Reads and Writes Stories of the Supernatural”: in ibid.

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von der Recke (1754–1833) and of Hélène Legros (b. 1874), the diary of Anna Larpent (1773–1828), and the inventory of Ana de Toledo y Osorio’s books (ca. 1549), while the memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington (1712–50) have revealed the close connection in her mind between reading and erotic pleasures.62 By comparison, the documentary record in East Asia has so far proved to be rather meager, with the inevitable consequence that we know far less about the consumption of books by women. In the case of Vietnam, even nineteenth-century printed texts have had a precarious path to survival, to say nothing of archives, letters, and the like. As for Korea, although it is now clear that surprisingly many letters written by women have survived, few of these have much to say about books or reading.63 In both Korea and China, however, some conclusions can be drawn from the activities of women writers and intellectuals even though a more thorough account will have to await the exhumation of long-forgotten archives and more detailed research. In China, the first learned woman we know of is Ban Zhao, the author of Admonitions for Women; unfortunately, most of her extensive oeuvre has been lost.64 She had a number of successors in the Tang dynasty and then in the Song dynasty, when commercial printing was still in its infancy. By the Ming dynasty at the latest, however, women readers were beginning to cause male moralists some anxiety, and this signifies that they had become a recognized phenomenon by that time.65 Unlike male readers, they had no need to concern themselves with the canonical tradition in order to pass civil service examinations, so they were able to read with greater freedom. As Dorothy Ko has noted, the very fact that being a “teacher of the inner chambers” was now a respectable profession for a man to undertake indicates that the cultural education of women had now become socially acceptable.66 It was also during the Ming dynasty that more and more published books were addressed to a female audience, while in the first half of the seventeenth century woodcut prints became a standard feature of commercial publications and often depicted, or were associated with the tastes of, women readers.67 It has been suggested that the growth of literacy 62. Helen Fronius, Women and Literature in the Goethe Era, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007): 125ff; Martin Lyons, Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women, Peasants (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001): 108–16; John Brewer, “Reconstructing the Reader: Prescriptions, Texts and Strategies in Anna Larpent’s Reading”: 226–45, in James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmore, eds., The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Pedro M. Cátedra and Anastasio Rojo, Bibliotecas y lecturas de mujeres: siglo  XVI (Madrid: Instituto de Historia del Libro y de la Lectura, 2004): 403–5; and Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 122–27. 63. For a selection, see Haboush, Epistolary Korea: 68–76, 197–203, 287–94, etc. 64. On Ban Zhao, see Swann, Pan Chao, and Idema and Grant, Red Brush. 65. Yu Li, “A History of Reading in Late Imperial China, 1000–1800” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 2003): 163. 66. Ibid.: 169; and Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: 68, 91–98, 128, etc. 67. Yu, “A History of Reading”: 50–59.

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in the late Ming was due to growing expectations that concubines and courtesans be literate.68 But whatever the case, it seems, as Li Yu has argued, that it was not literacy per se that aroused male anxieties so much as “the expansion of women’s literate practices, particularly writing in the sphere of men.”69 When Lü Kun produced his Models for the Women’s Quarters in 1591, he attached a brief section on “literary women” but made it clear that he did not approve of women becoming writers.70 If far more women in China were now acquiring cultural literacy and sufficient literary confidence to write, what fields were they active in and what does this tell us about their reading? It is clear from the fact that a number of anthologies of women’s poetry were published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that poetry was becoming the key arena in which women could exercise their literary talents. One of the first was Mingyuan shigui (Selections of poems by famous ladies, ca. 1620), but the male anthologist appears to have valued poetry by women for the “purity” that resulted from their seclusion in the inner quarters.71 Somewhat later Wang Duanshu (1621–?), an unusually active woman writer who resisted the expectations of a married woman, compiled Mingyuan shiwei (Classic poetry by famous ladies), which was an anthology of poetry by women of her time and was published in 1667.72 All this was certainly still a challenge to orthodox expectations, but the growing involvement of fathers and other males in the education of women provided some encouragement if not justification.73 In the eighteenth century, Yuan Mei (1716–98) published a collection of verse by his female pupils under the title Suiyuan nüdizi xuan (Selection of verse by the female disciples of Suiyuan), which was transmitted to Japan and published there by the poet Okubo Shibutsu (1766–1837), where it encouraged Japanese sinologists to take on women pupils.74 By this time, the boundaries in China were being pushed still further as the daughters of some peasants were aspiring to write poetry, and Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801), in an essay entitled Fuxue (Women’s learning), celebrated the achievements of learned women of the past and went so far as to mark out 68. Patricia B. Ebrey, The Inner Chambers: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993): 119–21. See also Chloë Starr, “The Aspirant Genteel: The Courtesan and Her Image Problem”: 155–75, in Daria Berg and Chloë Starr, eds., The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations Beyond Gender and Class (London: Routledge, 2007). 69. Yu, “A History of Reading”: 154. 70. Ibid.: 168. 71. Idema and Grant, Red Brush: 350–51. 72. Ibid.: 439; and Kang-i Sun Chang, “Ming and Qing Anthologies of Women’s Poetry and Their Selection Strategies: 147–70,” in Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang, eds., Writing Women in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997): 147–70. 73. Yu, “A History of Reading”: 177; see also Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: 68–69, and Grace Fong, Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). 74. Patricia Fister, “Female Bunjin: The Life of Poet-Painter Ema Saikō”: 108–9, in Gail Lee Bernstein, ed., Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991).

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a role for women as preservers and transmitters of the Confucian tradition. Zhang was, however, no enthusiast for women poets, considering that there was something of the courtesan about a respectable woman who wrote poetry, and he disapproved of the publication of women’s writings.75 Nevertheless, it was through the medium of poetry that some women wrote about their reading habits, and the works they mentioned ranged from conduct books and poetry to Buddhist sutras and even to books on geometry.76 By the early nineteenth century it is clear from works addressed to women readers and from the writings of women themselves that women were now a recognized part of the audience for fiction, drama, and poetry. Nevertheless, because of concerns about propriety, authors handled the possibility of female readers with caution and voiced the expectation that their reading would be supervised.77 With the sources that have so far come to light, our grasp of the significance of reading in the lives of Chinese women is still limited; the presence of reading women in fictional works is suggestive although yet to be explored in depth.78 The very lack of archival sources is itself suggestive of the restricted possibility for women of creating an archival presence through diaries or manuscript writings, not to mention the limited freedom of movement in a patriarchal society. It is only in the case of Japan that we have diaries and other archival resources to draw upon for a detailed examination of women readers although even there the huge resources preserved in provincial archives have barely been skimmed for the papers of literate women. In addition, there is the profusion of visual representations of women readers which results from the extensive use of woodcut illustrations in Japanese woodblock-printed books. Thus the remainder of this section will focus upon Japan, a consideration of women active as writers in early modern East Asia to follow in the next section. Few Japanese women of the Edo period have left diaries. One of the best known is Ōgimachi Machiko, who grew up as the daughter of an aristocratic Kyōto family of limited means and who later became the concubine of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, a high government official in Edo. Her Matsukage nikki (Pine shadow diary), written in the early eighteenth century, not only reveals the breadth of her reading through its allusions to a wide range of works but also uses her deep knowledge of The Tale 75. Yu, “A History of Reading”: 172; Idema and Grant, Red Brush: 572; Susan Mann, “‘Fuxue’ (Women’s Learning) by Zhang Xuecheng (1738–1801): China’s First History of Women’s Culture,” Late Imperial China 13.1 (1992): 40–62; and her Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). See also Paul Ropp, Banished Immortal: Searching for Shuangqing, China’s Peasant Woman Poet (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001) on He Shuangqing, the female peasant poet of the eighteenth century. 76. Yu, “A History of Reading,” 198, 204–5. 77. Ellen Widmer, “Considering a Coincidence: The ‘Female Reading Public,’ circa 1828,” in Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia H. Liu, with Ellen Widmer, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan (Cambridge, MA, 2003): 273–314; and her The Beauty and the Book: Women and Fiction in Nineteenth-Century China (Cambridge, MA: 2006). 78. See, for example, Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chamber, and Mann, Precious Records.

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of Genji to construct a account of the life and times of Yanagisawa that partakes of courtly elegance.79 Another diarist was Iseki Takako (1785–1844), and it is perhaps not a coincidence that she, too, lived a relatively privileged life as the wife of a high government official in Edo and had no children. She wrote a number of historical romances that were never published in her lifetime, and she must therefore have been familiar with much of the literature of the Heian period which furnished the idiom and the language she used. Her diary quotes from the Tales of Ise and other works and thus furnishes some record of her reading, but at the same time it shows that she was also intellectually and politically engaged. She was a keen follower of controversies in Kokugaku (National Studies, also known in English as Nativism), a proto-nationalist intellectual movement devoted to the study of Japan rather than China, and she read widely in the works of its chief practitioners, Keichū, Motoori Norinaga, and others.80 She was by no means the only one: another Kokugaku scholar, Kamo Mabuchi (1697–1769), had fifty-eight women followers, while Motoori Norinaga’s adopted son and successor, Motoori Ōhira (1756–1833), had seventy-one, all of whom must have had some familiarity and sympathy with Kokugaku writings to be enrolled.81 The best-known woman with Kokugaku sympathies was undoubtedly Matsuo Taseko (1811–94), whose wide reading, participation in Kokugaku circles, and involvement in loyalist movements during the Meiji Restoration reveal the limits of what was possible for a literate woman.82 The appeal of Kokugaku can probably be attributed to the high value it placed on Japanese classical texts, unlike the other intellectual currents of the time, which either focused on Chinese texts or sought Western scientific knowledge through Dutch texts. If any women were involved in either of these traditions, then no trace has yet been found of their activities. Another who left an intimate record of her life is Tadano Makuzu (1763–1825), who grew up as the daughter of a cultured doctor and then before marriage spent some years as a lady-in-waiting in the women’s quarters of elite households. Her reflections are marked by the conviction that it was “better for a woman who will become a wife not to study things too deeply” but at the same time testify to a distaste for conduct books and their attempts “to suppress young women’s preference for the up-to-date” and to a preference for intellectual texts in the Kokugaku tradition. She also considered that her narrative style had benefitted from having read the Tales

79. Rowley, “The Tale of Genji”: 49–55. 80. Fukazawa Akio, Iseki Takako no kenkyū (Osaka: Izumi shoin, 2004): 65, 72–87, etc. For the diary, see Fukazawa Akio, Iseki Takako nikki, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Benseisha, 1978–81). 81. Mie-ken shi, shiryōhen kinsei (Tsu: Mie-ken, 1994), vol. 5: 65–67, 998–91, 1031; Umihara Tōru, Kinsei no gakkō to kyōiku: 277, 282–83. 82. Anne Walthall, The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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of Ise in her childhood.83 The most voluminous record of a woman’s reading so far found is the fifty-eight-year diary kept by Rai Shizu (1760–1843), the daughter of an Osaka scholar and physician; she was until recently best known as the mother of Rai San’yō (1780–1832), the famous scholar and writer. Her diary is replete with references to purchasing or borrowing books and to copying them or reading them, and although she tells us little of her opinions, we learn that, in spite of her father’s disapproval of women reading The Tale of Genji and the Tales of Ise, she read both of these books. For once, however, we learn what else she read, and it was an eclectic mixture ranging from conduct books such as the Great Learning for Women to Kokugaku texts and from popular light fiction to illicit manuscripts containing lightly fictionalized accounts of political scandals.84 In the absence of diaries we can turn to biographies, which are rare for premodern women in Japan, and more promisingly to manuscript copies of books made by women. Copying texts by hand was an extremely common practice and copyists, whether men or women, often wrote somewhere their names and the date when they had finished making the copy. Provincial archives contain many such copies made by women, and their value as evidence is only now coming to be appreciated. One who undertook rather more copying than was common was Den Sute (1634–98), who grew up in the countryside to the west of Kyōto. She had six children and then moved with her husband to Kyōto. There they both studied waka and haikai poetry under Kitamura Kigin (1624–1705), who was the translator of the Collected Biographies of Women and the author of the best-known commentary of The Tale of Genji; she later became a published poet. We know of her youthful reading from the fact that she copied out by hand the Tales of Ise and other early romances, presumably in order to have copies of her own.85 Another form of access to books lay through having them read aloud, as some biographies attest. According to a biography of the highranking courtesan Yachio (b. 1635, left the demimonde in 1658) written in 1678, she was talented enough to have some of her haikai poetry published in anthologies but acquired her knowledge of The Tale of Genji and other classical texts by having them read aloud to her by a reciter summoned from Kyōto.86 Female autobiographies are rare, but that of Hatoyama Haruko (1861–1938), a  samurai daughter who later became a prominent educator, testifies to her solid 83. Janet R. Goodwin, Bettina Gramlich-Oka, Elizabeth A. Leicester, Yuki Terazawa, and Anne Walthall, “Solitary Thoughts: A Translation of Tadano Makuzu’s Hitori kangae,” Monumenta Nipponica 56 (2001): 174–75, 180, 182, etc.; and Bettina Gramlich-Oka, Thinking Like a Man: Tadano Makuzu (1763–1825) (Leiden: Brill, 2006). 84. Bettina Gramlich-Oka, “A Father’s Advice: Confucian Cultivation for Women in the Late Eighteenth Century”: 123–39, in Kornicki, Patessio, and Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject; and Azuma Shōko, “Baishi no bunji”: 51–69, in Ōguchi Yūjirō, ed., Rai Baishi nikki no kenkyū (Tokyo: Ochanomizu Joshi Daigaku jendaa kenkyū sentaa, 2001). 85. Mori Shigeo, Den Sute-jo (Osaka: Seiunsha, 1928): 234. 86. Noma Kōshin, ed., (Kanpon) Shikidō ōkagami (Kyoto: Tomoyama bunko, 1961): 564.

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sinological training in the Analects, Mencius, and other texts.87 Supportive parents were probably decisive, but she was not alone in acquiring the ability to read Chinese texts. Some examples have already been mentioned, but Nonaka En, who defended reading The Tale of Genji in a letter to her niece, received a thorough education in sinology from her father and put it to use as a practitioner of medicine in a Shikoku village that is now part of Kōchi city, and she was recognized as such by the local domain authorities. Medical practice then required the mastery of the classic Chinese medical texts, and without that mastery it would not have been possible for her to become the first recognized female medical practitioner in Japan in the late seventeenth century. Much of the evidence mentioned so far relates to the reading of Japanese classics or to Chinese texts. Rai Shizu was one of very few women to testify to reading the cheapest genres of popular literature and illicit manuscripts. Surprisingly, from a European perspective as well as from a Chinese perspective, very little attention was paid by male moralists to women readers of current fiction, and their fixation remained with The Tale of Genji, which was by no means an easy text to read for the untutored. There are a few references to women readers being prone to neglect housework, but the popular romantic novels of the 1830s known as ninjōbon do not seem to have aroused any moral fears until much later, and then in visual form.88 In addition to the kinds of evidence mentioned above, there is much to be deduced from representations of women reading either in fictional settings or in the profuse illustration that accompanied most Japanese-language books printed in Japan. In early modern England, according to Edith Snook, the most common textual representations of women readers were either as a sexualized reader usually of romances or as a reader of religious texts (often identifying themselves as Protestant by their reading of the vernacular Bible).89 The latter has no equivalent in Japan but the former many, particularly in the romantic ninjōbon. Thus, in nineteenth-century Japan the textual representation of women readers was little different from that in contemporary France, where the female reader was “constructed as a superficial consumer of light romantic or sensational fiction,” and bovarysme was the epitome of romantic or sexual constructions put upon women’s reading.90 A further reflection of constructions of female reading in Japan was the use of terminology that trivializes women’s reading and the sexualization of the language used to refer to women reading, and here there are parallels with seventeenth-century Britain.91 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

Hatoyama Haruko, Jijoden, in Nihonjin no jiden (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1981), vol. 7: 329–31, 353. Itasaka, “Woman Reader”: 105–7. Snook, Women, Reading and the Cultural Politics: 35, 120; and Hull, Chaste, Silent, and Obedient. Lyons, Readers and Society: 81, 87–91. Heidi Brayman Hackel, “‘Boasting of Silence’”: Women Readers in a Patriarchal State,” in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): 110–11; and Kornicki, “Unsuitable Books”: 180.

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These constructions are much more visible in the case of Japan in the ways in which reading women are represented in painting or in printed illustrations. These of course need to be interpreted with caution, particularly since women, much more than men, were frequently depicted with their heads in books, a mode of depiction much rarer in China.92 For example, it seems likely that the frequent depiction of courtesans with books in their rooms—sometimes neglecting their clients with their heads in books or even reading while being penetrated from behind—needs to be understood as a way of identifying courtesans of high rank who, in the seventeenth century, were likely now to be at least literate if not capable of composing poetry.93 Be that as it may, the overwhelming tendency in paintings and prints is to show women’s reading as a leisure activity; the striking intensity of the reading pose, though, conveys not merely leisure but solitary absorption that is suggestive of interiority and psychological independence.94 These representations frequently have erotic dimensions, hence the frequency with which books appear in the background of the erotic prints known as shunga.95 The logical limit is perhaps reached in the erotic parodies of conduct books.96 Similar developments can be detected in China. It has been suggested that the rising expectation that concubines be literate enhanced the spread of female literacy.97 The playwright and literatus Li Yu (1611–80), who also wrote on women’s reading, made it clear that the purpose of reading was to enhance the attractiveness of women just as other accomplishments did:

92. For Western examples and some considerations of the difficulties, see Stefan Bollmann, Reading Women, trans. Christine Shuttleworth (London: Merrell, 2006), and the essays in Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor, eds., Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence (London: The British Library, 1997). 93. For examples, see the scene from Hishikawa Moronobu’s Imayō makura byōbu (early 1680s; shown in Kornicki, “Unsuitable Books”: 170), the scene from Moronobu’s Yoshiwara fūzoku zukan (ca. 1680); on the cover of no. 383 of the journal Nihon no bijutsu, and a print by Sugimura Jihei (1680s); and in Richard Lane, “Kōshoku hanazakari,” Teihon ukiyoe shunga meihin shūsei (Tokyo: Kawade shobō, 1998), vol. 22: 14. 94. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980) for the concept of “absorption” in painting. 95. Itasaka Noriko, “Kusazōshi no dokusha—hyōzō to shite no dokusho suru josei,” Kokugo to kokubungaku 83.5 (2006): 1–13, and “Woman Reader”; for examples of leisure poses, see the illustrations in Kornicki, “Unsuitable Books,” and for erotic examples see Lane, Kōshoku hanazakari 22: 38–39, and his “Neya no hinagata,” Teihon ukiyoe shunga meihin shūsei (Tokyo: Kawade shobō, 1996), vol. 11: 20–22 and 24–25. 96. Luigi Bernabò Brea and Eiko Kondo, Ukiyo-e Prints and Paintings from the Early Masters to Shunshō; Edoardo Chiossone Civic Museum of Oriental Art Genoa (Genoa: Sagep, 1980): 127–30; and Hayakawa Monta and C. Andrew Gerstle, “Bidō nichiya johōki,” Kinsei enpon shiryō shūsei 5 (Kyoto: Kokusai Nihon Bunka Kenkyū Sentā, 2010). 97. Ebrey, Inner Chambers: 119–21; and Fong, Herself an Author, ch. 2, on the “literary vocation” of concubines.

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You will benefit enormously if women read books and practice writing Chinese characters, especially when completing their studies. Even when they are just embarking on the road of learning, it is beneficial to the viewer: when women simply lay a book on the desk, or hold a brush, while sitting under the green window and emerald bamboo curtain, then this becomes a picture . . .  Why do you have to wait until you see their poems and compare their literary skills before you finally enjoy the pleasure of sharing the chamber with a cultivated lady?

We see here an eroticization of female reading very similar to that found in Japan, even if it is not matched by erotic visualizations to the extent of the Japanese shunga.98 In the Meiji period, frivolous representations of reading, to say nothing of the eroticized or erotic representations, were pushed into the background as serious reading became the order of the day. As an article in the most intellectual of the new magazines for women, Jogaku zasshi (founded 1885), argued, reading was for selfimprovement and required intellectual effort and respect for books. Other journals for women, the various women’s associations, and the speeches of Kishida Toshiko all drove home the message that reading ought to be a serious business for women. Their views differed little from those expressed in the early years of the twentieth century in articles in the women’s magazine La femme nouvelle, which argued against exposure to romantic fiction both because it might lead to disappointment and because it would not enable women to play a useful role in society.99

Women as Authors Women in East Asia who wrote did so in conformity with or resistance to contemporary writing conventions and genre expectations and were therefore not only among the best-read women of their age but also those who, for whatever reason, did not internalize expectations of domestic passivity. There can be little doubt that women appear to have been traditionally more active as authors in a wider range of fields in the West than in East Asia, at least until the end of the nineteenth century, but that is partly the result of two circumstances: one is a reluctance to appear in public print, which was of course far from unknown in the West but was more pervasive in East Asia, and the other is the simple fact that the discovery, identification, and publication of manuscript texts by women writers is at an earlier stage in East Asia than it is in Europe.100 The recent publication of anthologies of writings by women in Latin and of political writings by women have challenged two misconceptions, but whether or 98. Yu, “A History of Reading”: 202–3; the translation from Xianqing ouji is adapted from Yu’s here. 99. Ebikawa Kyoshichi, “Dokushoron,” in Jogaku zasshi 220 (1890): 7–10; Patessio, “Readers and Writers,” in Kornicki, Patessio, and Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject; Sugano, “Kishida Toshiko”: 96, in Kornicki, Patessio, and Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject; Lyons, Readers and Society. 100. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670– 1820 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994).

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not it would be feasible to compile similar anthologies, mutatis mutandis, for China, Japan, or Korea remains to be seen.101 Several of the conduct books considered earlier were in fact written by women, including Admonitions for Women of the Han dynasty and in Korea Queen Sohye’s Instructions for the Inner Quarters. But when did women begin writing other texts and not just for women readers? In Japan, the development in the ninth century of the kana syllabary, which was referred to, and looked down upon, as the “women’s hand,” was undoubtedly responsible for the large number of romances and other works written by women which survive from the Heian period, but these were not printed until the seventeenth century.102 In Korea, where the hangŭl alphabet was invented in the mid-fifteenth century, it had little impact on the literary creativity of men or women, but we know from extant texts and documentary records that women writers were active from the sixteenth century onwards. Much of their writing consisted of poetry in Chinese, travel narratives, natural history, and fiction, and some of it was published. For example, Nansŏrhŏn si, a collection of poetry by Hŏ Ch’ohŭi (1563–89), was published after her death by her high-ranking brother in a typographic edition of 1606, followed by two xylographic editions of 1608 and 1632.103 Her writings were probably the first by a woman to be printed anywhere in East Asia outside China. In  Korea, Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn was followed by others, many writing in literary Chinese.104 In Vietnam, fewer women writers are known, with the exception of the poet Hồ Xuân Hương, and it was not until 1918 that Nữ giới chung (Women’s bell), which was edited by a woman and was the first periodical aimed at women, was published, forty years after the first women’s periodical had appeared in Japan. In late imperial China, poetry was the area in which women had most room to be active.105 In the late Ming, a number of courtesan poets were sufficiently talented 101. Jane Stevenson, Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority, from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Hilda L. Smith, Mihoko Suzuki, and Susan Wiseman, eds., Women’s Political Writings, 1610–1725 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007). 102. Richard Bowring, “The Female Hand in Heian Japan,” in Donna C. Stanton, ed., The Female Autograph (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Paul Gordon Schalow and Janet A. Walker, eds., The Women’s Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 103. Ch’oe Yŏnmi. “Chosŏn sidae yŏsŏng p’yŏnjŏja”: 126; the title of this collection uses her pen name to indicate that it is a collection of her verse. See ibid.: 124–25 for a table showing the reading of thirteen women writers. See also Susan Hwang, Janet Jun, and Sara Kile, comps., “Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn 姙㘗㦲 (1563–1589). Charting authenticity: The politics of gender and place in the anthologizing of a Chosŏn woman poet,” http://www.columbia.edu/~sek2114/content/intro.html (accessed July 9, 2014). 104. For a collection of their writings, with translations into modern Korean, see Yi Hyesun and Chŏng  Hayŏng, Han’guk kojŏn yŏsŏng munhak segye sanmunp’yŏn (Seoul: Ihwa Yŏja Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2003). 105. For anthologies of translated writings by women in China, see Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy, Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Idema and Grant, Red Brush.

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to have their poems included in the Liechao shiji (Collected poems of the successive reigns), a general anthology of poetry not restricted to women. “Given that writing courtesans were such a highly visible presence in late Ming society,” write Idema and Grant, “it is understandable that elite women with literary aspirations would want to avoid the public domain and make use of their own all-female networks for the exchange of poems and letters.”106 In Hong lou meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber; also known as The Story of the Stone), published 1791–92, one of the female characters is so concerned that the poems of another, Lin Daiyu, might escape from the inner quarters in which they lived that she cites the proverb, “In women lack of talent makes for virtue,” and argues that literary renown is not what elite women like them need. Poetry, she says, is just a hobby “to while away the time in the women’s quarters.”107 However, it is clear that not all shunned the public domain; exceptions include the writings of some Buddhist nuns and the writings of the anthologist Wang Duanshu, who also wrote biographies of male and female Ming loyalists.108 The other extreme is represented by writings in the nüshu script, a simplified syllabic script used only by women in the Jiangyong county of Hunan. They used the script, which appears to have been comprehensible only to women, to record ballads and songs of their own composition.109 In Edo-period Japan, these concerns about the public domain are more muted and feature much less in contemporary discourse about women writers. The first published texts written by women were calligraphy manuals, letter writers, and the like, for these could only have been written by women if they were to serve as credible models of calligraphy or style. But by the end of the seventeenth century, a number of women had already had some of their works published in poetic anthologies devoted to the courtly tradition of waka poetry, the more plebeian haikai poetry, or even kanshi, meaning Chinese poetry written by Japanese.110 Many of these women poets lived in remote provincial towns but nevertheless managed to achieve renown by traveling long distances, by showing their works to traveling scholars, or by sending their works to metropolitan scholars for criticism. Ueda Kotokaze (d. 1844), for example, who in her youth in southwest Japan studied both sinology and Kokugaku, was both a painter and a writer of kanshi, and her output in both fields was highly esteemed by one of the greatest scholars of the 106. Ibid.: 383 and, for the courtesan poets, 359–82. 107. Ibid.: 569. 108. Ibid.: 439, 457; for a translation of her preface to the anthology of Ming women’s poetry she published, see Chang and Saussy, Women Writers: 691–94, and for translations of other writings by Ellen Widmer, see Susan Mann and Yu-yin Cheng, eds., Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001): 179–96. 109. Idema and Grant, Red Brush: 543–53. 110. For women writers of kanshi, see Fukushima Riko, Edo kanshisen, vol. 3, Joryū (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995).

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day, Rai San’yō (1780–1832).111 Tagami Kikusha (1753–1826), in contrast, who was widowed and childless and lived not far from Ueda Kotokaze, had her first haikai poems published in 1786. In the course of her life she traveled some 5,000 miles, visiting Kyōto at least three times, taking part in the commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the death of Bashō, and following in reverse the route Bashō took to the far north of Japan; to celebrate her sixtieth birthday she had a collection of her poems published in four volumes by a commercial publisher of haikai books in Kyoto.112 As a statistical analysis of known women writers active in the Edō period shows, more than 90 percent were poets writing in Japanese while fewer than 4 percent wrote either kanshi or prose in Japanese.113 Indeed, the rising tide of women practitioners made the publication of anthologies devoted solely to women’s poetry commercially viable. The first such anthology, Onna hyakunin isshu (Women’s version of One Hundred Poems from One Hundred Poets, 1688), includes no contemporary or even recent poets and mostly draws upon the official court anthologies of waka poetry. In the eighteenth century, however, it is clear that poems by contemporary women were marketable: the Tamamoshū (Jeweled water-grass anthology, 1774), contains haikai verses by 118 contemporary women.114 Some of them became famous poets in their own right, such as Kaga no Chiyo (1703–75), who wrote the preface to Tamamoshū and has been the subject of monographs in French and German.115 The only genre of prose writing which survives in any quantity is travel diaries. These have mostly been excavated from archives only recently and range from simple records of itinerary and expenses to more literary accounts drawing on the long tradition of travel writing in Japan; none of them were published in their writers’ lifetimes.116 The quantities so far found testify to the possibilities for travel that women had in the Edo period; pilgrimages were common, but others traveled in connection with a change in a husband’s or a father’s employment. In some cases, mostly in the case of older women who often took the tonsure as a matter of form to facilitate 111. Ogawa Gorō, “Bōchō joseishi,” Mori no shitakage 37 (1937): 6; and Yoshida Shōsaku, (Zōho) Kinsei Bōchō jinmei jiten (Tokuyama: Matsuno shoten, 1976): 52. 112. Ueno Sachiko, ed., Tagami Kikusha zenshū (Osaka: Izumi shoin, 2000), vol. 2: 835–85, 1009–31, 1048–49. 113. Kornicki, “Women, Education, and Literacy”: 26–27. 114. Cheryl Crowley, “Women in Haikai: The Tamamoshü (Jeweled Water-Grass Anthology, 1774) of Yosa Buson,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 26 (2004): 55–74. 115. Gilberte Hla-Dorge, Une poétesse japonaise au XVIIIe siècle, Kaga no Tchiyo-jo (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve, 1936); and Helga Szentiványi, Frauen in der Bürgerkultur der Edo-Zeit. Anhand von Beispielen aus der haikai-Dichtung under besonderer Berücksichtung von Kaga no Chiyo (Munich: Iudicium, 2008). 116. Maeda Yoshi, Kinsei nyonin no tabi nikki shū (Fukuoka: Ashi Shobō, 2001); Shiba Keiko, Kinsei onna tabi nikki (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1997); and Laura Nenzi, Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender, and Status in Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).

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solitary travel, travel was undertaken for the poetic possibilities and literary contacts that it afforded, such as Tagami Kikusha, mentioned above. It is also striking that the travel diary was not a metropolitan affectation, for women from the far north and the far south as well as other remote regions of Japan have left accounts of their travels. A small number of women tried their hand at fiction, mostly drawing upon the traditions of the romances written by women in the Heian period and thus perhaps consciously rejecting the genres of contemporary fiction that were written solely by men. These, too, were unpublished in the lifetimes of their authors, and the only one whose work has become well known is Arakida Rei (1732–1806). Her many fictional works were first published in 1915 in an edition produced by Yosano Akiko (1878– 1942), who was herself a renowned poet and the first translator of The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese.117 In the Meiji period there was more public space for women, and this manifested itself in the emergence of a number of novelists, speechmakers, activists, publicists, and so on.118 By then, however, the examples provided by Western women in such roles, together with the government’s desire to present Japan as a “civilized” nation in the European sense of the term so as to secure revision of the treaties signed with the Western powers in the 1850s, were conspiring to generate rapid changes in the social position of women.

Conclusion Reading and writing are not undertaken in empty spaces: the contexts of sociability, education, paternalism, and family circumstances can hardly be left out of the picture. As Anne Walthall has argued in the case of Japan, “happenstance” in the form of sympathetic fathers, chance encounters, and early widowhood often had a decisive impact on what was possible, and many of the instances referred to above will have already shown the role of happenstance in the lives of literate women in China and Japan, at least.119 It goes without saying that the commercial market for books and the social spaces in which literature was produced and consumed, even before we can begin to talk of the “public sphere” in Habermas’s sense, were often closed to women, and this 117. For a thorough study of Arakida’s writings, see Sakaki, “The Taming of the Strange”; on her life and background see Sakaki Atsuko, Obsessions with the Sino-Japanese Polarity in Japanese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006): 115–21. 118. Rebecca L. Copeland, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000); Yukiko Tanaka, Women Writers of Meiji and Taishō Japan: Their Lives, Works, and Critical Reception, 1868–1926 (London: McFarland and Co., 2000); Mara Patessio, “Women’s Participation in the Popular Rights Movement ( Jiyü Minken Undō) During the Early Meiji Period,” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal 27 (2004): 3–26, and her “Readers and Writers,” in Kornicki, Patessio, and Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject. 119. Ann Walthall, “Women and Literacy from Edo to Meiji”: 215–35, in Kornicki, Patessio, and Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject.

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was as true of Europe as it was of East Asia. Thus in Germany it was only at the end of the eighteenth century that it became common for women to be admitted to the Lesegesellschaften (reading societies), which combined the principle of common ownership of books with premises in which to read and socialize.120 In contrast, salons in France and salotti in Italy provided recognized opportunities for sociability, and even though they were not primarily designed for literary consumption and creation, they depended upon a literate and well-read body of men and women.121 The sort of public but unofficial spaces which Lesegesellschaften constituted simply did not exist in premodern East Asia, but literary circles which included women were not unknown. In Suzhou, for example, Ren Zhaolin (fl.  1776–1823) had a group of ten women to whom he taught poetry and music. Ignoring notions of propriety and assumptions of female inferiority, he referred to them as his “women disciples” (nüdizi) and in 1789 published an anthology of their work under the title Wuzhong nüshi shichao (Selected verses of Suzhou ladies). One of the ten, Zhu Zongshu, wrote: “The classics, the histories, let them feed the [male] bookworms; from now, literature belongs to the moth-eyebrows [women].”122 There were other such circles elsewhere in Qing China, such as the Jiaoyuan shi she (Banana Garden Poetry Club) in late seventeenth-century Hangzhou.123 In Japan, too, it was mostly poetry circles that provided social space for women readers and writers, for most forms of poetry thrived in contexts in which exchanges of verses and collaborative composition of strings of verses were common. Thus, most of the Japanese women poets mentioned above partook of such occasions, and their verses were included in the published records of poetry meetings and only rarely in their own personal anthologies. This was true of kanshi poets, too; Rai San’yō had a number of female pupils, including Ema Saikō (1787–1861), who was one of the most accomplished poets of her time even though she declined to publish her work.124 Women readers aroused anxiety everywhere, albeit not as much as women writers. Writing in Germany in 1802, Karl Rose considered even such canonical writers as Wieland and Goethe unsuitable reading matter for women; not surprisingly, therefore, women who were determined readers, such as Luise Meyer and Elise von der Recke, found their femininity questioned and their habit taken to be neither conducive to

120. Fronius, Women and Literature: 95–103. 121. See D. Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), and the essays in Maria Luisa Betri and Elena Brambilla, eds., Salotti e ruolo femminilie in Italia: tra fine seicento e primo novecento (Venice: Marsilio, 2004). 122. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: 198, 210. 123. Ibid.: 219–50; Daria Berg, “Negotiating Gentility: The Banana Garden Poetry Club in SeventeenthCentury China”: 73–93, in Berg and Starr, eds., The Quest for Gentility in China; and Idema and Grant, Red Brush: 471–95. 124. Crowley, “Women in Haikai”; Sakaki Atsuko, Obsessions: 121–28; and Hiroaki Sato, Breeze Through the Bamboo: Kanshi of Ema Saikō (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

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personal happiness nor in keeping with the social order.125 Medical writers in Britain even suggested that women who read novels exposed themselves to medical dangers and suggested that it was women’s reproductive functions that made them susceptible to unhealthy influences from fiction.126 In Europe, it is striking that such anxieties were expressed over a span of many hundreds of years, from Roger Ascham onwards, albeit with targets shifting as the perceived reading habits of women changed. In East Asia, by contrast, that anxiety was muted and less long lived; there are especially few expressions of concern about the reading of current fiction, and medical reservations about the harm that reading could bring upon women seem to be nonexistent. This might be put down to the religious dimension to women’s reading in the West and the contexts in which it was debated, a dimension that was lacking in East Asia. But, as Helen Fronius has suggested, that seems insufficient to explain the high levels of anxiety in the context of late eighteenth-century Germany; rather, she draws attention to the challenge women posed to the male monopoly of the written word and the perceived threats to the institution of marriage that educated women posed.127 In East Asia, by contrast, women did not challenge the male monopoly of sinological learning, and the notion that educated women posed a threat to the institution of marriage is alien, perhaps because of the acceptability, or even desirability, of educated courtesans and concubines or simply because of the high value placed on education for the access it gave to moral teachings and for the practical benefits it conferred. There is an almost complete lack of religious conduct books or devotional literature addressed to women in East Asia. It is possible, at least in the case of China, that some such texts did exist and that they have been lost as a result of the disdain in late imperial China for texts produced by Buddhists, Daoists, and those belonging to other religious cults. In Japan and Korea very few can be found at all, and there is no evidence that religious primers were ever used in schools or in other contexts in which moral instruction was imparted. Thus, the moral concerns we encounter are little if at all concerned with sin, the divine, or even the afterlife, and are overwhelmingly concerned with domestic relations and duties in this world. The only conduct books I have encountered which deal with the afterlife are some Vietnamese ones produced in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, which warn of the dire consequences of taking the lives even of ants and point to the rewards due to those that respect life.128 By contrast, in France the diary of Eugénie de Guérin in the 1830s records her spiritual reading and frequent rereading of sermons and the Lives of the Saints, coupled with an explicit rejection of romantic fiction. In the light of publications like 125. 126. 127. 128.

Fronius, Women and Literature: 120–34. Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993): 56–58, 73–79. Fronius, Women and Literature: 113–17. Kornicki and Nguyen, “The Lesser Learning”: 163.

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the Bibliothèque des dames chrétiennes (1820–25), with its medley of sermons, spiritual guidance and so on, she was by no means a lone example.129 Similarly, in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Bible came first in the lists of recommended reading carried in conduct books, and Anna Larpent records her intensive devotional reading in the early nineteenth century.130 Of similar cases, even of similar publications, in East Asia little is to be found, for three reasons: Buddhism was very much on the margins of the more or less Confucianized societies of China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan; the canon of Buddhist scriptures was yet to be translated into the vernaculars; and the involvement of Buddhist institutions or individuals in education or the provision of texts for women was minimal. For the same reasons, there is no equivalent to the religious discourses tied up with the reading habits of women that developed in nineteenth-century France as the church came to terms with female literacy.131 The reading habits of women, whether scandalous or not, seems to have been of no interest to any Buddhist thinkers or preachers, and such debates as there were, as mentioned above, were conducted entirely in the secular context of moral prescriptions of Confucian origin. If the secularism of East Asia was not to be matched in Europe until later, the political dimensions of the literature of resistance to patriarchy and opposition to the condescension of conduct books has little or no match in East Asia. Thus, there are no equivalents to Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Female Reader (1789) or to the range of political writings by women in early eighteenth-century Britain, which testify to political literacy and the existence of spaces in which women’s political views might be expressed.132 It is only with the end of the old regimes in Japan, Korea, China, and Vietnam that such spaces open up for women, initially in Japan following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. It is as well to end this chapter on the consumption of books by women with a note of caution relating to what Jonathan Rose has called the “receptive fallacy,” the unjustified assumption that the message perceived by the reader is the same as that intended by the author or that hypothesized by later critics.133 Much of what has been written about reading has inevitably had to work from the outside in and to be based upon what can be deduced from diaries, marginalia, memoirs, and the like, but the evidence is rarely richly documented enough to allow us to extrapolate confidently from individual cases and to draw more general conclusions. The conduct books 129. 130. 131. 132.

Lyons, Readers and Society: 82, 103–8. Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain: 44; and Brewer, “Reconstructing the Reader”: 239. Lyons, Readers and Society: 92–94. Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain: 14–16, 48; Smith, Suzuki, and Wiseman, eds., Women’s Political Writings; and the essays in Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton, Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 133. Jonathan Rose, “Rereading the English Common Reader: A Preface to the History of Audiences,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 49.

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I have examined here are particularly susceptible to readings tainted by the “receptive fallacy”: just how many of the Japanese readers and copyists of the Greater Learning for Women imbibed the moral lessons as intended and how many found the assumptions did not fit them because they were either divorced or working outside the home? How many simply copied the text as an exercise in calligraphy, or ignored the moral lessons for the ancillary matter at the top of the pages, or consciously rejected the lessons, as did Tadano Makuzu?134 There are limits to what we can know about the consumption of books by women in early modern East Asia, but what is undeniable is that the production of conduct books for women was predicated upon at least a limited population of literate women throughout East Asia, that women constituted a growing segment of the market for books in China and Japan, where commercial publishing dominated the market from the sixteenth century in China and the seventeenth in Japan, and that a diet of solely conduct books failed to satisfy the female reading public.

134. Kornicki, “Women, Education, and Literacy”: 31–32.

8 Epilogue Joseph McDermott and Peter Burke

To the contemporary observer of our digital age, this history of the Eurasian book world—with its account of the obstacles to intercommunication, the problems in counting books, the importance of private noncommercial printing, the imperial encyclopedias, the extensive distribution of books from woodblocks carved in Chinese villages, and the morality books for women in early modern Japan—may seem entirely irrelevant. Far more relevant would seem the predominance now of connections between Eurasian and indeed global book worlds. Between 1850 and 1950, the technological distinctions that once loomed so large between the European printing press and East Asia’s woodblocks disappeared, and over the last three decades publishers in both of these regions as well as elsewhere have commonly converted to digital printing. European publishers have their books for European readers printed in China, just as Chinese publishers are now looking to print books in English that will expand their overseas market. East Asian novelists and scientists are so wellknown and appreciated beyond their country’s borders that some even receive Nobel Prizes in Stockholm. Chinese women write best sellers on the New York real estate market. European scholars write books that are required reading in East Asian universities set up along the lines of their European counterparts. And, a science journal like Nature regularly publishes research from not just East Asia and Europe but some of the intervening countries as well. An international world of books and learning unthinkable a century or two ago has taken shape throughout Eurasia and transformed and unified book worlds that had once thrived separately at its opposite ends. An even greater change, especially from the 1990s onwards, has been the loss of the book’s traditional monopoly as the sole medium for transmitting learned knowledge. Now, electronic media transmit information and ideas more widely and quickly, if  less permanently, than books, and computer databases accumulate and share research and other information at a pace that printing machinery cannot match. Newspapers and journals have borne the brunt of this challenge more ruinously than books, but the sight of library desks in China and France crowded with screens rather than books indicates that even these sanctuaries of the book worlds of East Asia and Europe are seriously under threat.

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Meanwhile, this heightened sense of the connectivity of European and East Asian knowledge has been accompanied by a growing sense that ties within their once distinct book worlds are being whittled away. Beyond their traditional network, publisher, printer, distributor, seller, librarian, author, and reader now operate part of the time in a world of digital connections that transcend national boundaries and override the traditional institutions and ties that once constituted each nation’s or region’s separate book worlds. Not only do authors sign contracts for several national book markets and readerships at one time, but local and even national bookstores are also being replaced by branches of international bookstore chains. Famous urban book neighborhoods like Charing Cross Road in London, Liulichang in Beijing, and even St. Germain in Paris have become shadows of themselves in their not-so-distant prime. Even the Kanda/Jimbōchō area of Tokyo with its more than 150 secondhand bookstores and tens of stores for new books has seen its ranks decline from the glory days of the 1960s. Enter these quiet stores, and you find shelf prices unchanged for more than a decade, as if the owner is living off the capital of his real estate more than off his books’ value and more off his books’ assessed value than off his sales’ profits. Some of the bigger bookstores make much of their revenue from the sale of videos and comic books (also known as manga). Readers in East Asia and Europe too are changing. Just as books everywhere (but for Japan) are now opened from the right and read from the left and their paragraphs punctuated with the same markings, so everywhere do young readers lap up the latest version of Harry Potter and urban adults enjoy international spy stories and whodunits. Yet, with the younger generation in Europe and East Asia reading so much less than their educated elders, much public discussion bemoans the impending end of the traditional book culture (witness the recent uproar over the French Minister of Culture’s admission that she had not read a book for over a year and the 2013 publication of the Chinese study Why Are Chinese No Longer Reading Books?).1 Students and some authors are more accustomed to writing mobile texts than essays, and some Japanese text writers have sold their compositions as books. The younger generation is sometimes described by critics as having forgotten how to read, “scanning” texts rather than following them from start to finish. Though this criticism is surely exaggerated—browsing books is an old tradition—the balance between skimming and real reading has almost certainly changed during the last few decades. Surely the whole point of the present book world is that the pre-1850 book world described here separately for East Asia and Europe is over. And yet, beneath these standardizing changes, one can find signs, significant as well as superficial, of the survival of these pre-1850 cultures. In Europe, just as early printed books were described as “written” by the printing press and adopted the format of manuscripts, complete with pointing hands in the margins to indicate 1.

E Maobi (a pen name), ed., Zhongguo ren weishenma bu dushu (Beijing: Beijing gongye daxue, 2013).

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emphasis, so the computer has adopted some features of scribal and print culture, such as the commands “cut” and “paste” so reminiscent of the era of “scissors and glue” corrections. Some presses important in the period 1450–1850, such as Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, are, happily, still active today, even while many of their more commercial rivals have been taken over by large companies. Longmans, for instance, so important in eighteenth-century Britain, is now known as Pearson. In the Netherlands, the prospering publisher Elsevier, founded in 1880, takes its name from an earlier publishing house, a leading publisher of the seventeenth century. The techniques of typesetting and the correction of “galley proofs,” followed by “page proofs” (using a set of symbols known as “proofreader’s marks,” some of which date from no later than the early seventeenth century) all survived long after 1850, like the production of “offprints” from learned journals for their authors to distribute to their colleagues.2 Only now are they disappearing, replaced by digital equivalents such as the PDF. In China and other parts of East Asia, the traditional technology has been discarded, but not the role of the state. In fact, perhaps the most important survivor of the pre-1850 East Asian book world is the ever mindful state. Whereas in Europe and North America the state has largely receded from book production and distribution, in China it still plays a predominant role in publishing as well as in censoring. It serves as the patron of publishing projects, expected like those of imperial times to be gargantuan; and, when it wishes, it is actively censorious. Indeed, far more than ever before in Chinese history, the post-1950 state has controlled the publication and circulation of printed material. It harasses disobliging authors and publishers, oversees and changes books in certain genres, and through its own agencies and publishing houses prints countless books advocating its views on everything from national defense to child care. In Japan and South Korea, the state does not interfere so directly. But as recent attacks on journalists and newspapers in both countries have demonstrated, its rougher supporters can privately do what its political patrons hesitate to do more publicly. A second line of continuity, perhaps surprisingly, is the print-to-order business model that woodblock publishers once used to reduce the risk of bankruptcy. Whereas the printing press required the publisher to decide how many copies he could sell within a given period to make a profit on a book, the East Asian woodblock publisher could print up as few or as many copies as he was confident of selling in a brief period of time. Once this printing was sold out, he subsequently could at any time hire the same workers, minus the carvers, to redo their work, and sell off his stock again with minimal overhead costs. The option of digital printing—and its 2.

On the history of proofreader’s marks, see Percy Simpson, Proof Reading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Oxford University Press, 1935): 132–36; our thanks to James Raven for this citation.

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ability to produce additional copies to order—now offers publishers everywhere this same economic model for printing books. Thirdly, there are the types of books that people in East Asia still like to read. While the evidence on reading preferences is not wholly clear for many parts of East Asia and Europe before 1850, commercial publications now dominate the East Asian book world almost as much as they have always done in the Western book world (most titles from Chinese government publishers are sold for profit). Hence, the mixture of entertainment (novels, pornography, and comics), examination manuals, and reference guides (on health, gambling, business, and other kinds of fortune-telling) that so dominated the commercial sector of Ming- and Qing-dynasty printing remains central to the financial health of numerous Chinese publishers today. In place of Confucian classics the student memorizes his or her state-issued textbooks, and The Thousand Character Classic and other primers once used to learn characters from are replaced by English-language textbooks designed to assure the dimwitted that even they can master this inscrutable language. In Japan, despite the political and social differences between 1850 and today, the same mindless diet of school primers and textbooks, pornography, fiction, health guides, comic books, and other juvenilia predominates, along with the latest university-entrance examination fodder. Certainly, its best-selling titles (the Harry Potter series and some business books aside) by and large remain distinct, even from elsewhere in East Asia. Fourthly, on reflection, the tradition of private noncommercial publishing has not completely disappeared. While it is nowhere as dominant as it once was in learned and literati circles, scholarly and poetry books in East Asia, even when published by a commercial publisher, sometimes still appear in limited not-for-sale editions. Reports of its demise in academic publishing in China, where, for a price, books can be printed under virtually any publisher’s name, can be countered by the survival of the not-for-sale type of publication elsewhere in East Asia, including Taiwan. More importantly, religious texts still get published and distributed for free—witness the printing in Chinese of 120 million copies of the Bible by private parties in China over the past three decades of Communist party rule. And, finally, the East Asian author still engages in certain activities no longer expected of European authors. As in Europe, he or she is most likely to be a professional writer, obliged to write (perhaps as well as teach) for a living. More often than in Europe and even Japan, however, in China “he” will sometimes turn out to be a committee of scholars and their disciples. Drawn together by institutional and personal ties, these men (and sometimes a few women) are engaged by the government or a publisher to complete a large research project that, when published, is expected to occupy a library shelf or two. Individually, East Asian authors, as in the past, fill their books with loosely linked essays rather than with chapters tightly bound into an overarching analysis.

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Even more interestingly, many East Asians still see books as ways to fulfill social obligations. For friends and students they regularly write prefaces and blurbs for book covers, for teachers and friends they submit essays and compose memorials, and for their research institutes’ and universities’ periodicals they annually dash off the specialized articles their employment there requires. As before, professional ties often matter less than institutional ones, and institutional less than personal. In China and Europe, politicians commonly employ ghost writers for their books; but whereas in China these books proclaim the politician’s prescriptions and commitments, in the West they are memoirs and autobiographies that defend their “authors” decisions; predictably, the former are state publications, while the latter are strictly commercial (in Japan leading politicians are usually ex-bureaucrats accustomed to explaining nothing and so feeling no need for a defensive or exculpatory book). Book ownership in East Asia is still thought to confer status, and a scholar’s bookshelf to indicate the quality of his or her scholarship. In Japan books are commonly used to hide bills of money. But otherwise printed material has never had the same virtually religious status it has long enjoyed in many parts of China right up to today (the Japanese Sinologist Kubō Noritada tells of the Chinese police during the First Sino-Japanese War discovering a Japanese spy, simply because he was found to have done something they knew no Chinese would ever do: use printed paper to wipe his bottom).3 And, for further evidence that much else in the traditional book worlds of East Asia and Europe is alive today, we recommend a visit to a private library like the Tōyō Bunko and Seikadō in Japan (each now functions also as a museum), the once private but now state-owned Jiaye tang Library north of Hangzhou in China, the monastic libraries of central Europe, the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp complete with sixteenth-century presses and type, and your own neighborhood or university library. Each of these places, in addition to containing a wealth of books, is testimony to the present viability of certain production, distribution, and consumption practices that have long enabled the East Asian and European book worlds to thrive in challenging times.

3.

Kubō Noritada, Okinawa no shūzoku to shinkō: Chūgoku to no hikaku kenkyū (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1971): 104.

East Asian and European Book History A Short Bibliographical Essay1

For important secondary scholarship on specific topics the footnotes in each chapter provide expert guidance. But, as readers of these chapters may wish to pursue broader book history interests, a list of some of the seminal studies that have over the past half-century made book history so vital a field of scholarship in the West and East Asia may prove of interest. Among the pioneering studies on Europe we can note Henri-Jean Martin’s Print, Power and People in 17th-Century France (Geneva: Droz, 1969: English translation, London: Scarecrow Press, 1993) and La naissance du livre moderne (xive-xviie siècles) (Paris: Editions du Cercle de la librairie, 2000); Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974), which launched the idea of an eighteenth-century “reading revolution.” Also essential reading are Don  MacKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986); Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Robert Darnton, The Forbidden BestSellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1995), which provoked the responses in H. T. Mason, ed., The Darnton Debate (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998). Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker then offered “A New Model for the History of the Book,” in Nicolas Barker, ed., Potencie of Life: Books in Society (London: British Library, 1993): 5–43. David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) offers a judicious summing-up of these scholarly disputes as well as his own research on a variety of other important book history topics. For East Asia the most significant studies so far have had a national basis. For China major works of book history have until recently tended to focus on printing technology and cover a long stretch of time, most notably in the cases of Zhang  Xiumin, A  History of Chinese Printing, revised by Han Qi (Paramus, NJ: Homa and Sekey Books, 2009) and Tsien Tsuen-hsuin, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 5: 1.

This set of recommended readings is written with the Western reader in mind and so omits all relevant studies in an East Asian language, largely on East Asian book history. For such information, please see the bibliographies found in the volumes mentioned above by Tsien Tsuen-hsuin, Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-Wing Chow, and Joseph P. McDermott.

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Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Those wishing to understand new approaches to long-term changes in the history of the Chinese book can consult two excellent conference volumes. Lucille Chia and Hilde De Weerdt, eds., Knowledge and Text Production in an Age of Print: China, 900–1400 (Leiden: Brill, 2011) covers the early centuries, and Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-Wing Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005) the later. Read together, they show the evolution of not just China’s book world over the past millennium but also Western study of that Chinese book world ever since its first important contribution nearly a century ago, Thomas Carter’s richly researched The Invention of Printing and Its Spread Westward (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925, second revised edition, 1955). Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2012) likewise summarizes a great deal of previous Chinese, Japanese, and Western research to present a superb cornucopia of information on Chinese books and book history. Essential reading for all bibliophiles, this scholarly treasure trove can be profitably read section by section or just by serendipitous “dipping.” It is that rare manual, a book to start with and yet to return to frequently and happily for wise instruction. For premodern Japan there presently is no counterpart to Wilkinson, but fortunately we have Peter Kornicki’s authoritative The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginning to the Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1998). It is a judicious synopsis of decades of Japanese research, enriched by personal observations. Just as McKitterick’s survey is useful to students of both East Asian and European books, so is Kornicki’s volume valuable to students of Chinese and Korean as well as Japanese printing. A number of European national histories of the book have been published or are under way, among them Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier, eds., Histoire de l’édition française, 4 volumes (Paris: Promodis, 1982–86) and The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 6 volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2011). Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), presents an exemplary national case study for Italy. The shift from manuscript to imprint books has attracted a great deal of research, much of it stressing changes not just in book production but also in the world of learning and culture. Two classics advocating the imprint’s revolutionary impact in Europe are Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, L’apparition du livre (Paris: Michel, 1958; trans. The Coming of the Book [London: N. L. B., 1976]) and Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). More recent and noteworthy proponents of this view are Michael Giesecke, Der Buchdruck in den frühen Neuzeit: Eine historische Fallstudie über die Durchsetzung

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neuer Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991) and Frédéric Barbier, L’Europe de Gutenberg: le livre et l’invention de la modernité occidentale (XIIIe–XVIe siècles) (Paris: Belin, 2006); both authors make comparisons between the digital and print revolutions. A critique of the notion of “a print revolution” from an East European perspective is Gary Marker, “Russia and the Printing Revolution: Notes and Observations,” Slavic Review 41 (1982): 266–83. A more general critique, from the perspective of a historian of science, is Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Johns’s rejection of the idea that print led to the fixity of texts provoked a debate: Eisenstein, “An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 87–105; Johns, “How to Acknowledge a Revolution,” ibid.: 106–25; and Eisenstein, “Reply,” ibid.: 126–28. David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830, reviews the issues and the evidence to offer a thoughtful account of book history up to the nineteenth century. In East Asia similar, if more muted, debates have taken place about the introduction of printing and its impact. For discussions of the earliest years, see the stimulating studies of Timothy H. Barrett, especially The Woman Who Invented Printing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007) and D. C. Twitchett’s brief but wideranging Printing and Publishing in Medieval China (London: The Wynkyn de Worde Society, 1983). The impact of printing technology in China has long been considered far less revolutionary than in Europe (at least according to Eisenstein and Martin). Some recent studies have strengthened this understanding by delaying the imprint’s replacement of traditional scribal culture to the sixteenth century within at least the core area of late imperial Chinese culture (for example, Joseph P. McDermott’s A Social History of the Chinese Book: Books and Literati Culture in Late Imperial China [Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006]). Skepticism of such views can be found in some chapters in Chia and De Weerdt. Interest in the survival and transformation of a manuscript culture has thus become common in European and East Asian studies. Major contributions to this research on the West include Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); François Moureau, ed., De bonne main: la communication manuscrite au 18e siècle (Paris: Universitas; Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993); Fernando Bouza, Corre manuscrito: una historia cultural del Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2001); and Brian Richardson, Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For East Asia, see the discussions on China by Tian Xiaofei, Tao Yuanming and the Manuscript Tradition (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2005), and McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book. One change that some Sinologists attribute to the transition from manuscript to imprint production is the growth of notions of authorship and textual fixity. The most

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searching discussions of this issue include Christopher M. B. Nugent, Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011); Susan Cherniack, “Book Culture and Textual Transmission in Sung China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54.1 (1994): 5–125; and David McMullen’s critique in “Boats Moored and Unmoored: Reflections on the Dunhuang Manuscripts of Gao Shi’s Verse,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 71.1 (2013): 83–145. The actual process of making and compiling a book clearly differed not just between manuscripts and imprints but also between East Asia and Europe. For instructive studies on technical and social difference we can turn, respectively, to Tsien’s Paper and Printing volume in the well-known Needham series, Science and Civilisation in China, and to Kai-wing Chow’s Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). Chow’s account of the late Ming editorial and publishing process casts a clear light onto previously obscure activities. Likewise, He Yuming’s insightful Home and the World: Editing the “Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013) delves into the more popular varieties of late Ming publications to reveal readers’ notions of both a fashionable lifestyle and a social and political modernity. A number of seminal studies focus on the book business. Besides numerous monographs on individual printers, major works on Western book business include Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian, eds., The Book and the Book Trade in 18th-Century Europe (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1981); Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), on the publishing history of the famous Encyclopédie; and on Britain, James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). For China, see Lucille Chia, Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th–17th Centuries) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002) and Cynthia Brokaw, Commerce and Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007). The first combines bibliographical expertise with historical analysis to produce a model study of regional commercial printing, while the second probes the history of “popular” imprints to recover an exceptionally rich record of one rural region’s commercial book history. Financial records survive in far greater numbers for late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Shanghai. Christopher Reed’s Gutenberg in Shanghai (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2007) presents a convincing account of the impact of Western technological innovations in the printing industry on Shanghai’s modernization and domination of Chinese book production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wang Feixian’s forthcoming book on copyright practices in premodern and modern China promises to make a similarly important contribution to the business dimensions of book history. The Japanese record for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is even richer, and we

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can look forward to important studies making stimulating comparisons with Chinese and European commercial publishers. Popular literature has been another common focus of interest in the book history of East and West. For Europe there are, to name but a few, Robert Mandrou, De la culture populaire aux 17e et 18e siècles (Paris: Imago, 1964); Julio Caro Baroja, Ensayo sobre la literature de cordel (Madrid: Ediciones de la Revista de Occidente, 1969); and Joad Raymond, ed., Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). An exemplary study of pamphlets, focused on mid-seventeenth-century France, is Christian Jouhaud, Mazarinades: la Fronde des mots (Paris: Aubier, 1985). Cynthia Brokaw’s Commerce and Culture as well as Robert Hegel’s Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) provide useful bases for a comparison with popular medical, morality book, and novel publication in Qing China. Nuanced accounts of how reading practices have changed in the West can be found in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds., A History of Reading in the West (English translation, Cambridge: Polity, 1999) and Elisabeth Décultot, Lire, copier, écrire: les bibliothèques manuscrits et leurs usages au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: CNRS, 2003). Half a century after its appearance, Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1962) remains provocative but needs to be used with care. Scholarly work on Chinese reading practices has begun, and so far the most stimulating book-length analysis of changes in late imperial times remains Ann McLaren, Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables (Leiden: Brill, 2001). For the early modern West, newspapers, newsbooks or gazettes have been an object of considerable attention, including Folke Dahl, “Amsterdam—Earliest Newspaper Centre of Western Europe,” Het Boek 25 (1939); Jeremy Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789–1799 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990); Joad  Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron, eds., The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2001); and Stéphane  Haffemayer, L’information dans la France du 17e siècle: la gazette de Renaudot de 1647 à 1663 (Paris: H. Champion, 2002). Private newspapers were introduced to China only in the late nineteenth-century treaty ports (see Barbara Mittler, A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity and Change in Shanghai’s News Media (1872–1912) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), but for earlier government efforts there is Hilde De Weerdt, “‘Court Gazettes’ and ‘Short Reports’: Official Views and Unofficial Readings of Court News,” Biblio 27.2 (2009): 167–200. General studies of encyclopedias include Robert Collison, Encyclopaedias: Their History throughout the Ages (New York: Hafner Pub. Co, 1966); Frank A. Kafker, ed., Notable Encyclopaedias of the 17th and 18th Centuries (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1981) and Notable Encyclopaedias of the Late 18th Century (Oxford: Voltaire

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Foundation, 1994); Franz Eybl et al., eds., Enzyklopädien der frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1995); and Theo Stammen and Wolfgang Weber, eds., Wissenssicherung, Wissensordnung und Wissensverarbeitung: Das europäische Modell der Enzyklopädien (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004). Useful Western studies of Chinese encyclopedias are conveniently collected in the special issue of Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 1 (2007) under the title, “What Did It Mean to Write an Encyclopaedia in China?” Understandably seen as encyclopedias writ large, libraries have sometimes been studied together with encyclopedias, as in Roland Schaer, ed., Tous les savoirs du monde: encyclopédies et bibliothèques, de Sumer aux XXIe siècle (Paris, 1996). Besides the many monographs on particular European libraries, there are a few general studies, including Werner Arnold and Peter Vodosek, eds., Bibliotheken und Aufklärung (Wiesbaden: In Kommission bei Harrassowitz, 1988); Claude Jolly, ed., Les bibliothèques sous l’ancien régime (Paris: Promodis, 1988); Frédéric Barbier, “Les pouvoirs politiques et les bibliothèques centrales en Europe, XVe–XIXe siècles,” Francia 26 (2) (1999): 1–22; and Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber, eds., The Cambridge History of Libraries in Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). And, on the demise of many important libraries, James Raven, ed., Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity (Basingstoke, 2008) shows how the study of libraries lost to war, pillage, and censorship can revive previously forgotten worlds of learning and thereby reveal kinds of knowledge crucial to our understanding of many historical problems. For China, the library long played a central role in the preservation and transmission of court culture. But war, dynastic changes, and restricted access to important government and private collections plagued efforts to assure the transmission of cultural knowledge over time. For an informed discussion of this problem at the imperial level, see Glen Dudbridge’s Lost Books of Medieval China (London: British Library, 2000). For studies of the problem for private libraries in late imperial times, see Benjamin E. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984; second revised edition, Los Angeles: UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series, 2001) and Chapters 4 to 6 in McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book. For a discerning account of the formation of the celebrated imperial library of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95), see R. Kent Guy, The Emperor’s Four Treasuries: Scholars and the State in the Ch’ien-lung Era (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987). John W. P. Campbell’s Libraries: A World History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013) brings within its covers images of some of the most beautiful man-made spaces in the world. These glorious photographs, graced by a knowledgeable text, almost persuade one that the wisdom of the past is in safe keeping. One hopes that future studies of book history adopt a similarly global approach to the study of the problems

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of book preservation and to their diverse solutions. In China, where librarians have in recent years increased the restrictions on access to rare and valuable books, readers are regularly provided with microfilms and reprints rather than old editions and original copies. For the time being, those unable to view these editions in the libraries of other countries can find solace in examining the photographs of these treasures in selective Western and East Asian collections, as reproduced in exhibition catalogs like Philip K. Hu, comp. and ed., Visible Traces, Rare Books and Special Collections from the National Library of China (New York: The Queens Borough Public Library; and Beijing: The National Library of China, 2000) and Monique Cohen and Natalie  Monnet, eds., Impressions de Chine (Paris: Bibliliothèque nationale, 1992). Just as the Western scholars in this volume have made a contribution to the study of East Asian book cultures, so we hope that in the future East Asian scholars, aware of their own countries’ traditions in book culture, will more actively participate in studies of Western book culture. A major aim of this book, the growth of a Eurasian dialogue in book history, will then be one step closer to realization.

Index

Adams, Thomas R., 133, 148 Allsen, Thomas, 18–19, 22 alphabetical order, 254, 273, 280 Alsted, Johann Heinrich, 272 Amsterdam, 77, 154, 156, 162, 168, 172, 252, 264 amulets, 21–22 Antwerp, 74–77, 87–88, 154, 158, 169, 178, 264, 325 Arabic printing, 21–22, 28 Arakida Rei, 303, 315 Arendt, Carl, 46 Ascham, Roger, 299, 303 astronomy, 35, 41 Atkin, Alexander, 265 atlases, see maps Ban Zhao, 285, 304 Barker, Nicolas, 133, 148 Barnard, John, 94 Barrett, Timothy, 17, 24–25, 115 Barros, João de, 47 Bashō, 314 Basset, Jean, 39 Bayle, Pierre, 254, 273 Beijing, 10, 31, 34–35, 39, 44, 48–49, 59, 195–98, 210, 214, 216, 252; see also Liulichang Berlin, 34 Bernard, Henri, 34 Berry, Mary Elizabeth, 235 Bertin, Henri-Léonard-Jean-Baptiste, 48–49 Beyerlinck, Laurentius, 267 Bi Sheng, 26, 31 bibliographies, 65–104, 260–62

Blaeu family, 264–65 Blair, Ann, 238 Blussé, Leonard, 52 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 285, 298 Boffey, Julia, 299 book collections, dispersal, 149; see also libraries book culture: local, 207, 234; popular, 165–67, 183, 219–29, 233–35, 253 book distribution, 147–79, 197–98, 214–18; agency and agents, 149, 153–54; book boats, 197; centralization, 156, 168, 175; China vs. Europe, 210–14; closed vs. open circuits, 149; commercial vs. noncommercial, 148, 149, 153; geographical and social range, 149, 195–202; infrastructure, 163–65, 170, 173–75; manuscripts, 147, 167; markets, 197–99, 203–4; networks, 165–70, 172, 214–18; obstacles, 161–71, 177, 198; Polish case, 167–68, 177–78; regulations, 161–63, 175, 177, 229–33; shipments, 158–60, 197; transport by steam engine, 148, 170–71, 173; transport costs, 164; see also book exports, book peddlers book exports, 177–78; from China to elsewhere in East Asia, 287; see also book distribution book history, 1–4, 73n; conceptual problems: nation-state, 74, 76–77, 151–52, measuring problems, 74–80 book knowledge transfer, 32–55, 246–47, 281; religion, 38–39, science, 39–46; see also translations

336 book peddlers, 9, 109, 111, 149, 165–67, 171, 176, 206 book prices, 13–14, 30–32, 68, 70, 72, 75, 93, 97, 100, 103, 113, 132, 156, 164, 171, 173, 182, 200, 211–13, 218, 232–33, 253 book production, British, 94–96; Chinese, 100–103; counting methods, 91–93; databases, 81–85; edition sizes, 67, 86–92; European, 65–104, passim; growth, 93–96, 173; Japanese, 102–3; manuscripts, 74–75, 116–17; number of presses, 96; subscription, 110, 172–73; see also printing, woodblock, and printing technologies book production sites, 27, 154–58, 195, 210–12; in Ming, 7, 196, 198, 234; in Qing, 8, 202–10, 235, in Song, Jin, and Yuan, 6, 195; impact, 198, 213–14, 234 book publishers, 14, 29, 36, 77, 105–45, 187–94; commercial, 105, 111–14, 117, 130, 144–45; definition, 109, 149, 174; East Asian and European categories, 105–6; government, 106–119, 123, 125–27, 289; lineages, 128–30; noncommercial private, 105–45; organization, 174; self-publishing, 131, 135; social background, 14, 203 book world, concept of, 7, 9; traditional features in contemporary book world, 321–25 books, Chinese, in European libraries, 34 books, demand for, 28, 29, 32, 68, 70–73, 80, 90, 96, 116, 121, 139, 150, 153, 159, 163, 165, 168, 170, 177–79, 195, 198, 200–202, 211, 212, 219, 226, 237, 241 books, for reference, 222–25, 237–81; bibliographies, 260–62; Chinese, 142–47; common features in Europe and East Asia, 237–38, 240, 242, 246–47, 278–79; differences, 239, 279–82; expansion in Europe, 247–50; forgotten genres, 266; indices, alphabetical, 273; information surfeit, 240–42; knowledge order, 238; Latin, use of, 250; nationalization of reference knowledge, 250; popularization, 251–53; presentation methods,

Index 254; publicization of private knowledge, 257; specialization, 250–51, 275; statistical tables, 254–55; textualization of knowledge, 257; up-to-date-ness, 253; see also alphabetical order, chronologies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps books, noncommercial, 132–38; debate, 137–42; knowledge dissemination, 133; secret recording, 132–34; vanity publication, 135 books, religious, 38–39, 297–98, 317–18 books, survival of, 67–68, 69, 77–80, 83, 85, 101, 322–23 books, Western, in China, 34–36; see also translations botany, 42, 52 Botrel, Jean-François, 165 Bray, Francesca, 47 Brazil, 27 Brockhaus, Friedrich Arnold, 275 Brook, Timothy, 230–31 Buchan, William, 277 Buddhism, 40, 115, 127, 192, 288, 297–98, 318 Buringh, Eltjo, 70, 72–74, 80–84, 86, 93–96, 98–100 Burke, Edmund, 58 Bussotti, Michela, 124, 126, 128 Calcutta, 29 Calvin, Jean, 241 Cambridge University Press, 86, 88–90 capital, 30, 163, 186, 209, 212 Carlitz, Katherine, 291, 294 Carter, Thomas, 1, 4–5, 9, 16–17, 19 Castiglione, Giuseppe, 47 Cavalca, Domenico, 298 Caxton, William, 67, 76, 78 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 109 censorship, 137–39, 161–62, 203, 229–32, 323; see also destruction Chambers, Ephraim, 242–43, 253, 273–74 Chartier, Roger, 2, 238 Chen Hongmou, 297 Chen Nianzu, 224 Chen Zhensun, 242–45 Chen Zilong, 142

Index Cheng Minzheng, 126–27 Cheng Rong, 131–32 Cheng Tong, 141 Chengdu, 117, 131, 189–91, 195, 215–16 Chia, Lucille, 112, 197 Chongde Academy, 231 Chongqing, 189–90, 215–16 Chow Kai-wing, 114 chronologies, 254, 258–60 Cologne, 67 Colombo, 29 communication circuits, 132–33, 148–49 comparison, 4–5, 13, 62, 143, 147, 175–76, 182, 210–14, 218; cautions, 150–58; problem of absences, 239 conduct books, 284, 312; in China, 284, 285–87, 289, 290–92, 294, 295, 296–97; in Japan, 288, 291–94; in Korea, 286–89, 295–96, 299–301; in Vietnam, 288 connectivity, 5, 62, 322 Copenhagen, 154 Copernicus, Nicholas, 41 copyright, 195, 201, 272 Cornaro, Elena, 303 Cracow, 167 Darnton, Robert, 132, 148, 163 De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas, 53–55; see also Ricci, Matteo De mulieribus claris, 285 de Pizan, Christine 297 De Vinne, Theodore, 23 De Weerdt, Hilde, 246 Defoe, Daniel, 277 Den Sute, 308 Dennis, Joseph R., 191 destruction, of libraries, 101–2; of books, 133; see also censorship; books, survival of dictionaries, 222, 258, 262–64 Diderot, Denis, 47, 143–44, 257, 272, 276 Dominicans, 36, 51 Donglin faction, 141–43 Doni, Anton Francesco, 241 Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), 313 Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste, 20

337 Du Xinfu, 119, 121–22, 126, 128–29, 130 Dudbridge, Glen, 240 Durey de Noinville, Jacques-Bernard, 278 Dutch, 10, 29, 46, 52, 59, 61, 73, 76 “Dutch Learning,” 46 Dürer, Albrecht, 66 EDIT 16 (Edizioni italiane del xvi secolo), 82 edition sheets, 93 Egypt, 21 Elman, Benjamin, 43–45, 246 Elsevier, 323 Elucidarius, 248, 267, 280 Elzevier, Daniel, 77 Ema Saikō, 316 encyclopedias, 242, 246–47, 250, 253, 257–58, 268–78, 281; Chinese, 268–72; European, 272–78 Encyclopaedia Britannica, in Japan, 281 Encyclopédie, 47, 99, 144, 257, 272–73, 276, 278, 330 ESTC (English Short-Title Catalogue), 66, 68, 81, 84–85, 91, 94–95 examination system, 223, 228, 280 Febvre, Lucien, 4, 75, 105 female literacy, 283, 288, 295–97, 300–301, 302, 303, 305, 310, 313; see also women readers Feng Congwu, 141 Ferro, Marco, 250 Formey, Samuel, 261 Fortune, Robert, 52 Foshan, Guangdong, 209 France, 48–49 Frankfurt, 84, 154, 156, 161, 164, 168, 177, 229 French Revolution, 58, 60–61 Fronius, Helen, 317 Fryer, John, 281 Fu Jinduo, 215–16 Fu Jinquan, 227 Fujiwara no Sukeyo, 286 Gabain, Anne-Marie von, 26 Gao Panlong, 141 Garin, Eugenio, 179

338 Germany, 2, 15–16, 26, 48, 56, 81, 93, 97, 164, 275, 277, 316–17 Gernet, Jacques, 41 Gessner, Conrad, 260, 273 Giovio, Paolo, 20–21 Girard, Frédéric, 37 Goa, 28–29 Golvers, Noël, 34–36 grammars, 248, 250, 257–58 Grassis, Paris de, 256 Green, Jonathan, 69 Grimm, Melchior, 277–78 Gu Xiancheng, 141 Gu Yanwu, 198 Guang’an factory, 189 Guangdong, 198 Guérin, Eugénie de, 317 Guy, R. Kent, 230–31 Guyot, Joseph, 250 Hachette, Louis, 170 Hall, David, 75 Hangzhou, 117, 131, 196–97 Hanna, Nelly, 3 Harris, John, 273 Hatoyama Haruko, 308 Havard, Gilles, 158–59 Hayashi Razan 54 He Xinyin, 140 Hedde, Isidore, 52 histoire croisée, 5, 62 Hǒ Ch’ohǔi, 312 Ho Nansǒrhǒn, 288, 312 Hȏ Xuȃn Huong, 312 Hofmeyr, Isabel, 158 Houston, Rab A., 98 “how-to-do-it” books, 271, 275–78, 295, 298 HPBD (Heritage of the Printed Book Database), 81, 83–84 Hu Shi, 235 Hu Wenhuan, 131 Hu Yinglin, 196 Huang Yuji, 242, 245 Huang Zongxi, 141 Hübner, Johann, 275, 281 Huizhou region, 15, 113, 123–31; commercial publication, 130, 135; genealogies,

Index 128–33; lineage involvement, 128–35; publication of Western texts, 131 Huxley, Aldous, 238 India, 28–29 Infelise, Mario, 75 Inoue Tsū, 303 Insǒn, Queen, 300 investment, see capital Iseki Takako, 307 Islam, 28 ISTC (Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue), 66–68, 81, 91 Jami, Catherine, 44 Japan, 10, 29–30, 33, 37, 46, 54, 58–62, 102–3, 107, 143, 153, 235, 247, 252, 263, 278, 281 Jeffrey, Francis, 242 Jesuits, 13, 20, 28–30, 33–40, 43–45, 48, 51–54, 245, 261, 263, 265 Ji Yun, 278 Jiang Yuanqing, 124 Jianyang region, 117, 196–97, 213 Jin Dexuan, 126 job-work, 152–53, 165, 175–76 Johnson, Samuel, 262 Kaga no Chiyo, 314 Kaibara Ekiken, 292 Kamo Mabuchi, 307 Kaoku Gyokuei, 300 Katsuyama Minoru, 119–22, 129; assessment, 122–25, 130 kezidian, 114, 190–92, 193 Kiev, 165 Kim Samǔidang, 288 Kimura Kōichi, 53 Kishida Toshiko, 294, 311 Kitamura Kigin, 308 Ko, Dorothy, 304 Koberger family, 154 Konkola, Kari, 69 Korea, 24, 29, 286–90, 295–96, 299–300, 303–4, 312 Kornicki, Peter, 115 Kubō Noritada, 325

Index Labata, Francisco, 275 Lach, Donald, 32, 59 Lamb, Charles, 238 Larousse, 273 Larpent, Anna, 304, 318 Lasswell, Harold, 148 Leclerc, Jean, 250 Legros, Hélène, 303 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 43 Leipzig, 156, 161, 177 leishu, 268, 270–72, 279 Li ji, 285 Li Shangyin, 267 Li Shizhen, 42 Li Xixiong, 278 Li Yu, 305, 310 Li Zhi, 138–40 libraries, 20, 34–35, 39, 101–2, 150, 213, 260–61, 325; Beijing, 118, 121; Beitang (Nantang), 54; Chetham, 159; Jiaye tang, 325; Macao, 34; Seikadō, 118, 121, 325; Taipei, 118, 121; Tōyō Bunko, 325; Vatican, 20, 150; Xitang, 35 Lienü zhuan, 284–85, 286, 288, 290, 291 lithography, 31–32 Liulichang, 198, 204, 214, 217, 232n, see also Beijing London, 26, 77–79, 83, 86–88, 95–97, 156, 158–59, 164, 168, 175, 210–11, 251–52, 279, 322; see also Stationers’ Company Love, Harold, 75 Lü Kun, 291, 305 Ludolf, Job, 263 Luo Rufang, 141 Lyon, 26, 83, 156 Ma Cuizhong, 205 Ma Dingbang, 205 Ma Quanheng, 204–5, 223 Macao, 30, 34–35 MacCulloch, Diarmid, 69–70 Maclean, Ian, 148 Magang, 194, 199, 209 Mainz, 31, 77, 154 manuscript, see book production, book distribution Mao Jin, 143–44, 189

339 maps, 131, 251–52, 258, 264–66, 278, Chinese 265–66; European, 264–65 Marcello, Cristoforo, 256 Marco Polo, 18–20 Martin, Henri-Jean, 4, 75, 83, 105 Martini, Martino, 59, 259, 265 mathematics, 35, 40 McKenzie, Don, 2 McKillop, Beth, 24, 30, 54 Meale, Carol, 299 Medhurst, Walter H., 212, 232 medical knowledge, 35, 36, 52, 224, 245, 277, 309 Mexico, 27 Milan, 67 missionaries, 50–51, see also Dominicans, Jesuits Miyazaki Ichisada, 45 Mollier, Jean-Yves, 170 Mongols, 19 Moréri, Louis, 250 Morhof, Daniel, 261 Moscow, 26, 28, 168, 252, see also Russia Motoori Norinaga, 307 Motoori Ōhira, 307 Moureau, François, 75 museums of printing, 31 Naehun, 287, 295 Nagatomi Seiji, 139–40 NAIP (North American Imprints Program), 94 Nam Wǒn’yun, 300 Nanjing, 59, 113, 142, 196–97, 199, 213, 252 Naples, 39, 153, 251–52 Napoleon, 60, 62 Nebrija, Antonio, 258 Neddermeyer, Uwe, 69, 86 Needham, Joseph, 9, 32, 40–43, 281 Needham, Paul, 69, 78 Nemeitz, Joachim Christoph, 251 Netherlands, see Dutch New England, 27 news, 56–63, 256; in China on Europe, 59–60, in Europe on China, 58–59; in Japan on Europe, 59–60 newspapers, 8, 10, 55–63, 97

340 Nonaka En, 301, 309 Nü jie, 285, 286, 290 Nü sishi, 289, 302 Ogilby, John, 252, 265, 278 Ōgimachi Machiko, 303, 306 Okubu Shibutsu, 305 Oldys, William, 241 Onna daigaku, 292–93 Ortelius, Abraham, 264 paper, 13, 75, 93, 187, 196, 204 paper money, 18–19 Paris, 10, 26, 34, 48, 67, 76, 81, 83, 93, 154, 156, 168, 251–52 Parr, Katherine, 303 Pedersen, Johannes, 3 Pelliot, Paul, 4, 26 periodicals, 97 Peru, 27 Peter of Ravenna, 250 Petrarch, Francesco, 285 Pettegree, Andrew, 82 Philippines, 30, 36 Pietro da Monte, 250 Pilkington, Laetitia, 304 Plantin, Christophe, 77, 87–88, 99, 106, 154 Plantin-Moretus Museum, 325 Playfair, William, 254–55 playing cards, 22 Poland, 167–69 Polo, Marco, 18, 19–20 Portugal, Portuguese, 20, 47 Possevino, Antonio, 261 Praevotius, Johannes, 277 printing, moveable-type, 12–13; in East Asia, 14; labor, 13 printing press, 24–25, 147, 167–68; spread inside Europe, 26–27; to beyond Europe, 28–31 printing technologies, 143, 145, 148, 209; Eurasian transfer, 11–32, 42–43, 52–53; material evidence, 21–23, 25; technology sets, 21–22; textile evidence, 21–22 printing, woodblock, advantages, 11–14, 23, 30–31, 184–87; costs, 30, 131; European knowledge of East Asian methods,

Index 15–16; materials, 187; organization, 187–89; origins, 14; tools and practices, 11–12; workers, 12, 13, 188–92; see also book prices, Sibao, Xuwan, Yuechi Pynson, Richard, 77 Qinding Siku quanshu, 278–79 Qiu family, 112, 130 Rai San’yō, 308, 314 Rai Shizu, 308–9 railways, 170 Ramus, Petrus, 254 Rashīd al-Dīn, 22 Raven, James, 105 Ravisius Textor, Johannes, 267 reading, methods of, 71, 238, 242, 322 Recke, Elise von der, 303–4, 316 Rees, Abraham, 253 Reid, Mrs. H. G., 298 Reisch, Gregor, 272 Ren Zhaolin, 316 Ricci, Matteo, 13, 35, 43, 51, 53–56, 232, 280; see also, De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas Richardson, Brian, 75 Rome, 20, 26, 34, 43, 55, 67 Roper, Geoffrey, 3 Rose, Jonathan, 318 Rose, Karl, 316 Ruan Yuan, 231–32 Rubruck, William of, 18 Rudolph, Richard, 36 Russia, 163; see also Moscow Rymer, Thomas, 275 Salonika, 26 Salter, Thomas, 299 Sancai tuhui, 269 Scandinavia, 154, 162, 168, see also Sweden Schöffer, Peter, 77, 154 science, 39–42 secrets, 52–53, 59, 149, 216–17, 256–57, 270 Shancheng tang, 189, 216, 223, 227 Shanghai, 31–32 Sibao, 204–6, family organization 205 Sin Puyong, 288

Index single-sheet prints, 66 sinology, 46, 47, 48; French, 48–49 Skinner, George William, 218 Smith’s, W. H., 170 Snook, Edith, 309 Sohye, Queen, 287, 295, 312 Spain, 48, 77, 81, 106, 154, 158, 162, 165, 170 Standaert, Nicholas, 39, 50n Stationers’ Company, London, 85–90, 231 STCN (Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands), 81, 151 steam power, 170 Su Jingyuan, 126 Su Shi, 119 Suarez, Michael, 95 subscription editions, 172, 273 Sun Yuxiu, 200 Suzhou, 136, 196–97, 199, 252 Sweden, 26, 150, 231 Swift, Jonathan, 241 Switzerland, 100, 154 Tadano Makuzu, 307, 319 Tagami Kikusha, 314 Tale of Genji, 294–95, 300–303, 307–9, 315 Tales of Ise, 300, 301–2 Tangut, 17 Theobald, John, 277 Thirty Years’ War, 56–57, 150 Thompson, James W., 84 Thomson, Thomas, 253 Tiangong kaiwu, 53 Tokugawa, see Japan Tokyo, 322 Toledo y Osorio, 304 Torrentinus, Hermannus, 267 translation, 33, 36, 38–39, 50–51, 287, 288, 289, 302 Trigault, Nicholas, 53 Tsien Tsuen-hsuin, 17, 21 Tsujihara Genpo, 289 Turfan, 20, 26 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 48–49 Tushu bian, 269 Ueda Kotokaze, 313–14

341 USTC (Universal Short-Title Catalogue), 82, 151–52 Van Kley, Edwin, 59 Venice, 26, 28, 67, 80, 154, 161, 169, 252 vernacularization, 283 Vidal, Cécile, 158–59 Vietnam, 286, 288–89, 303, 312 Vincent of Beauvais, 241, 250 Vives, Juan Luis, 299 Vondel, Joost van den, 59 Walthall, Anne, 315 Wang Duanshu, 305, 313 Wang Ji, 140 Wang Ken, 140 Wang Kentang, 113 Wang Qi, 242 Wang Tingna, 131 Wang Yangming, 140–41, 181 Wang Yinglin, 266 Weber, Max, 239 Wei Dazhong, 141 Wei Xueyi, 141 Wen Zhengming, 136 Wilkinson, Alexander, 82 Wilkinson, Endymion, 102, 238 William of Rubruck, 18 Williams, Samuel Wells, 212–13, 232 Wolf, Christian, 46 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 318 women, reading habits, actual, 303–4; as illustrated, 310–11; in Europe, 306, 318, in Japan, 306, 308–9 women authors, 305, 311–15; in China, 312–13; in Japan, 313–15 women laborers, 188, 194, 209 women readers, 63, 98, 275, 283–319 Wong, R. B., 213–14 Worde, Wynkyn de, 77 Wu Mianxue, 113, 132 Wu Yu, 189 Xavier, Francis, 28 Xiong Yuezhi, 39 Xu, empress, 289 Xu Xiake, 198

342 Xu Xuelin, 124, 128 Xuwan, 199; market town economy, 202–4, 215 Yachio, 308 Yamaga Sokō, 300 Yan Yanfeng, 192 Yangzhou, 199 Yee, Cordell, 265 Yi T’oegye, 299 Yi Tǒksu, 289 Yokota Fuyuhiko, 294 Yǒngjo, King, 289 Yongle dadian, 269, 279 Yosano Akiko, 315 Yuan Mei, 305 Yuechi, 189–91, 206–10; cutters, 190–94, 207, 234; publications, 207; publishers, 191–93

Index Zaman, Mohammed, 55 Zanden, Jan Luiten van, 70, 72–74, 80–84, 86, 93–96, 98–100 Zedler, Johann Heinrich, 275 Zhang Huang, 269 Zhang Xiumin, 4, 18, 199, 202 Zhang Xuecheng, 305–6 Zhejiang, 196–97 Zheng Zhenduo, 199 Zhou Daozhen, 136 Zhou Dasan, 215 Zhou Shuteng, 215 Zhu Xi, 141, 246 Zhu Zongshu, 316 Zou Shouyi, 140 Zwinger, Theodor, 267