History of the Book in East Asia

Cynthia Brokaw is Professor of History at Brown University, USA and Peter Kornicki is Professor of Japanese Studies in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, UK.

• Contents: Introduction; Part I China: The making of an imprint in China, 1000-1800, Joseph McDermott; Tu and Shu: illustrated manuscripts in the great age of song printing, Maggie Bickford; Byways in the Imperial Chinese information order: the dissemination and commercial publication of state documents, Hilde de Weerdt; Mashaben: commercial publishing in Jianyang from the Song to the Ming, Lucille Chia; Ming audiences and vernacular hermeneutics: the uses of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Anne E. McLaren; Writing for success: printing, examinations, and intellectual change in late Ming China, Kai-wing Chow; The Huanduzhai of Hangzhou and Suzhou: a study in 17th-century publishing, Ellen Widmer; Visual hermeneutics and the act of turning the leaf: a genealogy of Liu Yuan’s Lingyan ge, Anne Burkus-Chasson; Commercial publishing in late Imperial China: the Zou and Ma family businesses of Sibao, Fujian, Cynthia J. Brokaw. Part II Korea: Propagating female virtues in Choson Korea, Martina Deuchler; Literary production, circulating libraries, and private publishing: the popular reception of vernacular fiction texts in the late Choson dynasty, Michael Kim. Part III Japan: Centres of printing in medieval Japan: late Heian to early Edo period, K.B. Gardner; Provincial publishing in the Tokugawa period, P.F. Kornicki; Manuscript, not print: scribal culture in the Edo Period, P.F. Kornicki; The transfer of learning: the import of Chinese and Dutch books in Tokugawa Japan, W.J. Boot; The Daiso lending library of Nagoya, 1767-1899, Andrew Markus; Books and book illustrations in early modern Japan, Ekkehard May; The history of the book in Edo and Paris, Henry D. Smith II; Entrepreneurship and culture: the Hakubunkan publishing empire in Meiji Japan, Giles Richter; Name index.

’Brokaw and Kornicki clearly present in their volume some general features of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese book cultures which, put together, roughly outline the historical landscape of the printed book in East Asia. Their book is the first step towards a transnational history of the book in East Asia...Its reprinted inclusions are worth reading for historians of the book in East Asia and students interested in transnational and comparative studies.’ Library and Information History