Book boxes

Unsurprisingly, when talking about pre-modern East Asian book bindings, covers, slip-cases, and storage, there’s a dizzying amount of material. Regrettably, compared to other areas of research, these external aspects of the Chinese book are understudied. This is probably due in part to the primary goal of Chinese bibliography (版本學), which was to identify and date editions. The edition lived inside of the covers. Everything outside, while clearly important to owners, has mattered less to scholars.

Given that there’s so much to say on this topic, I’ll begin by focusing on boxes, usually called xiang 箱 and he 盒 in Chinese. These differ from tao/hantao 套/函套, which are usually called slip-cases in English. (Most rare Chinese books have some form of slipcase, and since they’re so common, I need to think of better ways for presenting them). Below, is a small gallery of some nice examples of boxes. As time allows, I’ll add more, as well as some thoughts (I have pictures of a number of them somewhere!).

Things You Can Do with Woodblocks (2)

You don’t often get the chance to work with woodblocks, but last week, as I was planning a class trip to the UCLA special collections to look at Manchu materials, Heather Briston, the wonderful University Archivist, and Octavio Olvera, Visual Arts Specialist, put four boxes of woodblocks onto my request. (A sign of a great librarian! I’ve been meaning to call them up, but couldn’t find them. They must have telepathically sensed my intentions.)

I’ve been thinking about blocks, and their absence in research on Chinese books, quite a bit since last year. At the Chinese books workshop I organized, Li Ren-yuan 李仁淵, at Academia Sinica, recommended  that we take a look at Kaneko Takaaki’s superb Study of Early Modern Woodblocks 近世出版の板木研究. Kaneko and a team at Ritsumei have been cataloging and processing woodblocks for several years now. Their work is some of the finest research on bibliography for xylographic books that I’ve ever read (I will probably summarize it later). They’ve also built a fantastic database. I’m convinced that without a careful study of the form and variety of Chinese woodblocks, we’ll never be able to properly understand East Asian books. Unfortunately, they’re quite hard to track down.

So, when Heather appeared with these boxes, preparing for the special collections visit suddenly became less important. Here they were, in inky gloriousness, almost uncatalogued, and with delightful images (all of my photographs have been reversed to make the text legible):

Continue reading “Things You Can Do with Woodblocks (2)”