A few weeks ago, I gave a brief talk at the workshop “Asian Papers” at Dartmouth College, organized in part by my colleague and co-Mellon Fellow in Critical Bibliography, Holly Shaffer. The workshop was a welcome opportunity to start organizing some of my thoughts on the difficulty of applying Western descriptive bibliographic standards to the bibliography of the East Asian book. In line with the workshop topic, my presentation focused on the sorts of bibliographic information available from a close examination of paper.

One of the major bibliographic differences between European and East Asian paper in the early modern period is the presence of watermarks in the former. Watermarks are present in most pre-modern western paper. The earliest recorded reference to watermarks comes from the Perugia based jurist Bartolo da Sassoferrato (1314-57). He wrote:

Here there are many paper mills, and some of them produce better paper, although even here the skill of the worker is of considerable importance. And here each sheet of paper has its own watermark by which one can recognize the paper mill. Therefore, in this case the watermark should belong to the one to whom the mills itself belongs, no matter whether it remains in his possession by right of ownership or lease, or by any other title, wholly or in part, or even in bad faith. During the entire time in which he has possession of the mill, he cannot be prohibited from using the watermark…(source)

According to Sassoferrato, these watermarks allowed mills to trademark their products.

The production of watermarks is a simple process. Essentially, every piece of hand-made paper is marked with an impression of the screen which removed its wet pulp from water. Early European watermarks came from wire designs  tied onto wire screens. When the screen, with the deckle on top, was dipped into a vat of pulp, the resulting paper would have the impression of both the screen wires and the design. I had a chance to see this process last year, when visiting the last wind-powered paper mill in the Netherlands, De Schoolmeester in Westzaan. (The field-trip was part of a great conference organized by Megan Williams at the University of Groningen)

Continue reading “Chinese Paper Stamps”

Lately, I’ve been toying with the idea of eventually trying to write an annotated bibliography of every edition of The Four Books that appeared in print before the year 1912. There are several reasons for this, but the one that looms largest in my mind is rather straight-forward. I have no idea how people read the four books.

Here’s why (click images to enlarge):

This image of A New Carving of the Collected Commentaries from the Imperial Library to the Four Books by Msr. Xiang Zhongzhao 新鐫項仲昭先生四書嫏嬛集註 from the National Archives of Japan overwhelms the reader with information. The main text of The Great Learning below is accompanied by Zhu Xi’s explanation. The text above, which discusses the text below, consists of comments from famous scholars or reference works. Surrounding the printed text there’s yet another layer of annotation done by an unknown reader.

The impenetrable layout of this text is not unique, but seems to have been rather common in the seventeenth century. Another interesting edition to consider is a Kangxi period re-print of Zhang Juzheng’s commentary for the emperor, The Collected Engraving of the Direct Explanation of the Four Books Given as Mat Lectures for Imperial Perusal 彙鐫経筵進講監本四書直解, held in the Waseda University Library. This copy of the text has annotations by Nankaku Hattori 服部南郭, a famous Tokugawa Sinophile, and likewise knocks the reader over with information overload.
Continue reading “The Four Books”