Birds and Bats

Sixiang Wang recently asked me to share an introduction to a conference paper comparing Korean and Vietnamese book histories so that he could cite my analogy, on birds and bats. Rather than waiting for it (and me) to slog through peer-review and revision, I’m just going to make the opening section available here. Cheers!

Bats vs. Birds - Bat Conservation International

When I was a child, I was a maniac about bats. I had bat t-shirts, bat books, and bat stuffed animals. I would routinely sit on our deck in the evening twilight to watch little brown bats, the most common species of bat in the Northeastern United States, gobble mosquitos. My adoration did not extend to birds. They were entitled to dry crusts and McDonald fries, but no further consideration. Birds didn’t quite capture the wonder of bats. Flying mammals were something special.

As I was thinking through the history of printing, bats and birds became a useful analogy to think about comparative histories of print. Although birds and bats are superficially similar, they’re comparable only in their ability to fly and being warm blooded. Biologists and material scientists compare their wings and their particular characteristics in flight, but no one ever decries bats as a failure for not living up to the avian potential for laying eggs. Superficial similarities allow for only certain types of comparisons – and bad comparisons can lead scholars on fruitless searches for bat eggs. 

The history of printing, in contrast to work on birds and bats, routinely mistakes superficial similarities in books to ask questions analogous to the rather absurd question just posed. In the case of print history, the comparison often circles around print and movable type, and egg scholars are looking for something leading to a type of modernity associated with the world created by the European printing press. 

Today, rather than looking for eggs, we’re going to consider bats, as I attempt to provoke this audience by thinking through ‘woodblock modernities,’ something I see as a significant factor in contributing to the emergence of East Asian hegemonies in our modern world. Woodblock modernities is proposed in homage to Woodside’s ‘Lost Modernities,’ in which he considers the role of the Sinitic modes of bureaucratic governance as part of an overlooked suite of contributions from autochthonous East Asian traditions to the modern world. Woodside illustrated how the techniques of bureaucratic governance first developed in China and later used in Korea and Vietnam allow us see longue duree continuity, influenced the development of governments in the West, and provide some foundation for understanding an East Asian competitive advantage in state building. The precocious bureaucratic tradition he describes is still alive and well. 

A woodblock modernity, on the other hand, has quite different implications. Except for in the fine arts, woodblock printing no longer play an important part in any modern East Asian information systems. But, we need to remember: neither does movable type. Moreover, we should not forget that movable type, even in the 20th century, was a fleeting phenomenon in much of East Asia. Observing woodblock printing in different contexts with different chronologies allows us to appreciate how distinctly woodblock printing prepared different places for different aspects of modernity…. 

image source

Counter Building for Islamic Studies

When I arrived at UCLA, I discovered things that bothered me. First, our historical emphasis on sixteenth century Italian printing no longer served the needs of our community of scholars and students. Second, our neglected Islamicate manuscripts were treated (if such a word can be applied to a collection that was basically neglected) as entirely separate from out collections of rare printed materials and other manuscript collections. To address these discrepancies, I began pursuing what I now refer to as ‘counter building.’ The driving idea behind counter building is that our collections should exist in dialogue or in a sort of dialectical relationship. I firmly believe that any collections of books should lead researchers to a natural process of entanglement. During the early modern period, book worlds were becoming increasingly entangled, and it should be as easy and as natural at UCLA to encounter the Islamicate as it was in 16th century Rome or Venice. Which is to say, fairly easy, even if many scholars have forgotten this.

The overall purpose of the last few years of counter building was to make it so that scholars interested in Islamicate manuscripts could, if they so desired, cross our imagined geographical boundaries from the world of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Urdu into print in Europe and elsewhere. As an example of how this has proceeded so far, we can consider Arabic language printing in premodern Italy. In 2021, I acquired an Italian primer to train missionaries in Arabic, printed in Rome in the 1630s. I purchased this as a way to expand our collection of Italian books and intertwine them with our existing collections. This primer was interesting for many reasons, but most appealing was the unidentified spoken Arabic used for the translation of the Lord’s Prayer. I tweeted this image out, and it immediately generated a lively discussion among linguists and Islamic studies specialists as they attempted to discern how this printed version compared to manuscript copies they knew about. One thing worth noting is that this book isn’t particularly rare, but because Western print histories never pay much attention to Arabic in print, it was unknown to its real community of researchers.

Entangling and counter building at UCLA was about more than just finding books that illustrate printing of Arabic. I tried to find copies that bring this engagement to life – albeit in the ways you would expect for someone who was trained in the Blair-Grafton school. Another book printed in Rome, the Psalms of David in Arabic, shows lively engagement with Arabic in premodern Europe. This book was acquired because its opening pages show an early European reader meticulously annotating and correcting the text. This, and other materials UCLA are small pieces of the the European engagement with the Islamicate world in both manuscript and print.

Counter building hasn’t just been a process of new acquisitions, although I spent a decent part of my annual budget on European Islamic studies. I also took to surveying existing collections for materials that expand our view of the Islamicate world. One book in the collection was a particularly exciting find. In our Chinese collection, we have a copy of the most famous Chinese-Islamic philosophical text The Metaphysics of Islam or The Philosophy of ArabiaTian Fang Xing Li. This book was written in the 18th century by the Chinese Muslim scholar Liu Zhi. Liu read Arabic both Arabic and Persian, and had his book printed by woodblocks. On interesting fact about this book is that it was printing in Cairo at the end of the 19th century in translation as Šarḥ al-laṭā’if (شرح اللطائف) by Ma Lianyuan (馬聯元) 1841-1903.

Other materials in our collection are also being used actively in teaching. The Walton Polyglot Bible, printed in London in the 1650s, was compiled by the best ‘Orientalists’ in England at the time. This book was recently used in the California Rare Books School course on the Renaissance Book as part of a broader discussion of the often-overlooked importance of Arabic knowledge in the early modern West.  I also kept a volume in my office to practice languages. It’s as useful now as it has ever been!

In addition to the research returns that will come out of counter-building, there is a second way our Islamicate manuscripts effect how we are thinking about our book collections: entangling our collections of European materials with our Islamicate collections will provide greater opportunities to care for our Islamic manuscript collections. To put it rather bluntly, it is a historical fact that at UCLA (and most other places) our European studies collections have received the most support and funding of any of our bibliographical collections. This is undeniably due to the inherent Eurocentrism and structural racism of Euro-American libraries, as well as a lack of expertise. But it also has to do with how California has imagined itself.

 As already noted, UCLA’s sixteenth century Italian collections are virtually unsurpassed in the United States. This occurred in part because of how UCLA saw its relationship with Southern California and its attempts to establish “Western civilization” on the West Coast. After the Huntington claimed England, we proudly claimed Italy and passively became the center for the Islamic world. Funding endowments exist for Medieval European manuscripts, but not for important Islamicate materials.

That said, I worked to blur all of these boundaries. This manuscript here is European, but it is also the only witness of the Latin translation of Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī’s De unitate, De intellectu, and De somnio et visione ad imperatorum dolium. This was recently acquired for our collection – and it further part of our attempt to show that any attempts to divide Islamic and European civilization require historical forgetting. Unfortunately, UCLA forgot for decades, but over the last several years, and thanks to new efforts, we’re making things messy again.

image 1: Dominicus G. Fabrica; Overo Dittionario Della Lingua Volgare Arabica Et Italiana Copioso De Voci; & Locutioni Con Osseruare La Frase Dell’ Vna & Dell’altra Lingua. Roma: Nella Stampa della Sac. Congreg. de propag. fede; 1636.

image 2: locked out of my old accounts, will get this later!

image 3: https://search.library.ucla.edu/permalink/01UCS_LAL/17p22dp/alma9913324496006531

image 4: https://search.library.ucla.edu/permalink/01UCS_LAL/17p22dp/alma997258293606533

image 5: Thomas Aquinas: Summa contra gentiles. And: Al-Kindi. De unitate, De intellectu, and De somnio et visione ad imperatorum dolium. Probably Burgundy, 1464. Signed and dated by the scribe himself (“Ego Anthonius le bysse de N. gallicus scripsique complevi hec presens opus Anno domini 1464. Vive Bourgogne”, fol. 220v).

Illustrated Chinese Fiction

In today’s post, I’ll briefly discuss late imperial fiction (xiao shuo 小說). These are very much ‘notes from the field’ based on my encounters wiht only a handful of these. I have many more questions than answers about vernacular novels.

Images

For historians of the book, one of the notable characteristics of late imperial vernacular fiction is the inclusion of images. Images were part of Chinese books from the inception of Chinese printing, but illustrated books were not nearly as common in Ming and Qing China as they were in other parts of the world.

Literary fiction, however, seems to have been illustrated from the very beginning.

Continue reading “Illustrated Chinese Fiction”

A Quick curriculum for Chinese book history

A quick syllabus with my blogs

Do you want to do an East Asia in print day? Well, I think you can do it with my blog and a few other digital resources:

Here’s how I would begin:

First, read a little bit about paper – this will let you get talking about comparative materiality early on

Then, pop over to this page for an introduction to the earliest printed book

http://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=207

Read about early bindings:

http://idp.bl.uk/education/bookbinding/bookbinding.a4d

Now read about woodblocks after seeing someone in Chengdu printing with one:

Continue reading “A Quick curriculum for Chinese book history”

Online teaching with non-Western Materials (Medieval + color printing)

Medieval book/ Bindings / Printing  

The International Dunhuang Project is a massive digital repository of scanned materials dating to the 4th – 11th centuries. These materials were discovered when a cave was opened by a Daoist priest in the oasis town of Dunuang in West China in 1900. A number of Western and East Asian explorers rushed to Dunhuang to buy materials, despite the protests of the Qing government.

The Dunhuang Project website has several useful introductions to materiality. The link below brings you to an essay on “Bindings” these bindings include images which link to fully scanned texts.

http://idp.bl.uk/education/bookbinding/bookbinding.a4d

I think that this could very easily be used in any courses on the materiality of texts.

If you want to dig deeper, there are lots of things you can do with these Dunhaung materials. I use our two Dunhuang scrolls at UCLA regularly to make points about:

Continue reading “Online teaching with non-Western Materials (Medieval + color printing)”

Things You Can Do with Woodblocks (3): Punctuation/annotation

In this post, inspired by a fun twitter thread by Shannon Supple, Curator of Rare Books at Smith College, on annotation (so many month ago now!), I’m going to introduce some of the basic features of textual annotation/punctuation – sometimes called judou 句讀 (reading marks) or pidian 批點 (comment marks) – in Chinese printed books.1

I first learned classical Chinese with Alvin P. Cohen at UMass, Amherst. This had some influence on my undergraduate social life, because Dr. Cohen, like many a hard-nosed philologist before him, believed in teaching unpunctuated classical Chinese. I spent countless hours before each 50 minute class trying to punctuate texts, look up characters, and pretend I had the faintest idea of what was happening. My notes from those days show it was not a pretty sight. (I’ll add a photo when I am back stateside.)

Because texts without punctuation can be a pain, people began punctuating Chinese early in its history. Consider this 7th century colophon to the Lotus Sutra found by Imre Galambos:

I punctuated this sūtra for beginner students who read it but are unfamiliar with the segmentation of the text. I neither paid attention to larger sections, nor considered their beginning and end. For the most part segments consist of four characters and I started punctuating them when the segments did not comprise four characters. But for four-character segments I added no dots whatsoever….In this manner, I tentatively distinguished them. Let those who see this later not blame me for using red marks and say that the punctuation is flawed. 余為初學讀此經者不識文句,故憑點之。亦不看科段,亦不論起盡,多以四字為句,若有四字外句 者,然始點之;但是四字句者,絕不加點。別為作為(帷委反);別行作行(閑更反)。如此之流,聊 復分別。後之見者,勿怪下朱,言錯點也。2

 

Continue reading “Things You Can Do with Woodblocks (3): Punctuation/annotation”

  1. A good starting point for learning about this is: David L. Rolston, Traditional Chinese Fiction and Fiction Commentary: Reading and Writing Between the Lines (Stanford University Press, 1997)
  2. Imre Galambos, “Punctuation Marks in Medieval Chinese Manuscripts,” in Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field, ed. Jan-Ulrich Sobisch, Dmitry Bondarev, and Jörg Quenzer (De Gruyter, 2014), 352.

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)”

How to Know What You Don’t Know

In the wake of the fantastic Bibliography Among the Disciplines conference, I’ve decided to consolidate some of my thoughts on a recurring question people ask: “How can I incorporate more of (insert non-western/non-white region/place/thing here), which you study, into my teaching/work?” Here are some preliminary, slightly snarky responses.

  1. The first thing you should do is what you’re trained to do: read some books. Every East Asianist I know has read books in your field. I don’t care what your field is, they’ve probably read something in your area. I saw this quite a bit at the workshop on global book history organized by Rachel Stein, Ben Nourse and Hwisang Cho. Hwisang, from Xavier University, works on 17th century Korean epistolary culture. He was constantly throwing out references to writing and publishing practices in African American communities in the contemporary US, letter writing practices in pre-modern Yemen, and listening seriously to every perspective people brought to the table. Be like Hwisang.
  2. Another way to put point 1 is to remember that Hwisang, like many in “Area studies,” has learned to look beyond her/his field for the justification of her/his work. If you are not doing this, you are in a deeply privileged field. Reject that privilege. Tear it out by its roots. You can do this by becoming a better scholar and reading some damn books. This will also help you sniff out bad scholars in area studies. If they justify their work only in terms of its importance to their area of study, don’t bother with them. The last thing you want is people who base their authority on a ‘unique’ culture or understanding. Leave that to creepy nationalists.
  3. Don’t read randomly. There’s a huge amount of weird stuff in some fields. You don’t want to come out of reading about pre-modern Chinese book history talking about how irrational it was because you’ve accidentally imbibed the racist ideologies of some idiot. Your colleagues should play a role in helping you select readings. I’ve received requests from many of the awesome folks in the Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography for readings on Chinese book history (i.e. Liza Strakhov, Meghan Cook ). This is good for me and good for them.
  4. Listen to and ask questions about the work of colleagues not working in your area. This is a major problem. I’ve seen many Europeanists lose focus as an area studies scholar tries to explain their perspectives. This is demoralizing to me (a white man from Harvard), so imagine what this does to people with less privilege (i.e. basically everyone who is not a white man from Harvard). Continue reading “How to Know What You Don’t Know”

Things you can do with Woodblocks (1)

Things you can do with Woodblocks (1)

Welcome to a new series entitled, “Things you can do with woodblocks.” The purpose of this series is to begin outlining some of the special features of xylographic printing with useful visuals.

Black blocks

Until the 19th century invention of different forms of plate printing (stereotype, elecotrotype), it was rather difficult to keep type “standing.” ABCs for Book Collectors explains ‘standing type’ to mean:

The type from which a book was printed was not always distributed immediately after use. It was sometimes kept and used for a subsequent impression, which is then said to be printed from standing type. (209)

Printers only kept standing type in rare circumstances. For most jobs, when printing was done, type would be redistributed to type-cases to wait for the next project.

Xylographically printed books, on the other hand, lasted far longer. If blocks were properly cared for, you could use them for a few generations (with occasional repairs). This also meant that the same blocks could be used for new ‘editions.’ (Edition is a problematic concept in this case, but we’ll talk about this later) Continue reading “Things you can do with Woodblocks (1)”