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THE ONGOING LIVES OF BOOKS AND THEIR LIBRARIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2016

Joseph P. McDermott
Joseph P. McDermott*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge E-mail jpm1001@hermes.cam.ac.uk
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Extract

One early spring afternoon in 1982 I happened to find myself ambling along Fuzhou Road in Shanghai and coming by chance upon a small unattractive bookstore. The brown paint on its outer doors was peeling, the stucco surface of its exterior needed a good scrubbing, and more than a few tiles on its floor were broken. If then no different in appearance from the other bookstores I had earlier visited along this famous Shanghai book street, this store nonetheless boasted a strikingly different kind of stock: it specialized in selling second-hand Western books. While novels abounded on its shelves, the pre-war variety in hardback and the more recent in paperback, one thick non-fiction volume caught my eye. Entitled Domesday Book and Beyond, this classic 1887 treatment of early English history by the great English legal historian Frederic W. Maitland had long been on my reading list. Somehow a copy of it had ended up in this unpromising bookshop. When I opened the virtually virgin pages of this copy and noticed that it could be bought for a proverbial song, I readily leapt to the temptation and acquired it with delight.

Keywords

Eurasian book historyBeitang LibraryJesuit libraries in Chinaprinting pressTibetan Buddhismlibrary formation
Type
Review Article
Information
International Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , July 2016 , pp. 229 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 One particularly elegant and strong-minded critique of Eisenstein's claims about the printing press's impact is the insightful review by Grafton, Anthony J., “The Importance of Being Printed,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11 (1980), pp. 265–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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

3 Stephan Füssel, Gutenberg and the Impact of Printing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 59–70.

4 Geoffrey Roper, “The History of the Book in the Muslim World,” in Oxford Companion to the Book, eds. Michael Suarez and Woudhuysen (Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 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 (Thomas Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 184, acutely observes that in the Arab world Rashīd al-Dīn was alone in lauding the great benefits of printing). Although the matter appears not to have been deeply researched, one cannot but 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.

5 Geoffrey Roper, “Early Arabic Printing in Europe,” in Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution, eds. Eva Hanebutt-Benz, Dagmar Glass, and Geoffrey Roper (Westhofen: WVA-Verlag Skulima, 2002), p. 131; and Hartmut Bobzin, “From Venice to Cairo: On the History of Arabic Editions of the Koran (16th–early 20th century),” in ibid., pp. 153–54.

6 Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 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.

7 Graham Shaw, Printing in Calcutta to 1800 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1981), pp. x and 52; and Dennis E. Rhodes, The Spread of Printing, Eastern Hemisphere, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma, and Thailand (Amsterdam: van Gendt, 1969), pp. 11–19, and Illustration 1. Note that the earlier presses published only intermittently.

8 J. Mangamma, Book Printing in India, with Special Reference to the Contribution of European Scholars to Telegu (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.

9 Shaw 1981, pp. x and 52; and Mangamma 1975. 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 Oxford Companion to the Book, pp. 343–44). Even so, virtually all materials and equipment had to be imported from Europe.

10 India (or rather certain people in India) had 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), p. 9; and Sheldon Pollock, “Literary Culture and Manuscript Culture in Precolonial India,” pp. 86–87, in History of the Book and Literary Cultures, eds. Simon Eliot, Andrew Nash, and Ian Willison (London: British Library, 2006).

11 Donald S. Shively, “Popular Culture,” in Cambridge History of Japan, Volume 4, Early Modern Japan, eds. John W. Hall and James McLain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 726.

12 van Der Loon, Piet, “The Manila Incunabula and Early Hokkien Studies,” Asia Major 12 (1966), pp. 1–43Google Scholar, and 13 (1967), pp. 95–186.

13 Joseph P. McDermott, A Social History of the Chinese Book (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006), pp. 99–103.

14 J. M. Braga, “The Beginnings of Printing in Macao” (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1963), p. 3.

15 Van Der Loon, “Manila Incunabula,” pp. 25–27; Salmon, C., “L'edition chinoise dans le monde insulindien (fin du XIXe s.–debut du XXe s.),” Revue Française d'Histoire du Livre 42 (1984), pp. 111–34Google Scholar, esp. 112.

16 Braga 1963. pp. 2–9. The first printing press had reached Macao in the 1560s, but the Jesuits soon realized that the traditional Chinese woodblock-printing method suited the Chinese language better than did their printing press and its European font. In fact, the first book in Chinese to be published by a European, the catechism entitled Tianzhu shilu zhengwen 天主實錄正文 by Michele Ruggieri, S.J., was published in Macau by woodblock in 1584 (ibid., p. 5).

17 Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004).

18 Fu Xuancong 傅璇琮 and Xie Zhuohua 谢灼华, Zhongguo cangshu tongshi 中國藏書通史 (Ningbo: Ningbo Publishers, 2001), vol. 2, p. 1051.

19 Fang Hao 方豪, Fang Hao liushi ziding gao 方豪六十自定稿 (Taipei: Taiwan Xuesheng Shuju zong jing xiao, 1969), xia, pp. 1833–48, esp. 1839.

20 We still await a thorough study of the texts that entered the Chinese book world from Inner Asia at this time. These texts might have often concerned religion (Buddhism, Islam), but doubtless others, thanks to the Qing troops' incursions into this area, dealt with geography and military matters. Thomas Allsen has dealt with this sort of textual transfer most interestingly for the Mongol era in his “Mongols as Vectors for Cultural Transmission,” pp. 135–54, in The Cambridge History of Inner Asia, the Chinggisid Age, eds. Nicolas Di Cosmo, Allen J. Frank, and Peter B. Golden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). We await a similar treatment for the Qing, so that we can see what other than territory China might have gained by exploring “the west” by land rather than by sea.

21 Yongdan, Lobsang, “The Translation of European Astronomical Works into Tibetan in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Inner Asia 17 (2015), pp. 175–98Google Scholar; and his doctoral dissertation, “Geographical Conceptualizations in a Nineteenth-century Tibetan Text: The Creation of and Responses to the ‘Dzam gling rgyas bshad’ (‘The Detailed Description of the World’)” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2014), pp. 135–38.