1 option
Commerce in Culture : The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods / Cynthia J. Brokaw.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Brokaw, Cynthia J., author.
- Series:
- Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 280.
- Harvard East Asian Monographs ; 280
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Book industries and trade--China--Sibao--History.
- Book industries and trade.
- Booksellers and bookselling.
- Sibao (China)--Imprints.
- Sibao (China).
- China--Intellectual life--1644-1912.
- China.
- China--Intellectual life--1912-1949.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource.
- Edition:
- 1st ed.
- Distribution:
- Leiden; Boston : BRILL, 2007.
- Other Title:
- The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods
- Place of Publication:
- Boston : Harvard University Asia Center, 2007.
- Summary:
- "Sibao today is a cluster of impoverished villages in the mountains of western Fujian. Yet from the late seventeenth through the early twentieth century, it was home to a flourishing publishing industry. Through itinerant booksellers and branch bookshops managed by Sibao natives, this industry supplied much of south China with cheap educational texts, household guides, medical handbooks, and fortune-telling manuals. It is precisely the ordinariness of Sibao imprints that make them valuable for the study of commercial publishing, the text-production process, and the geographical and social expansion of book culture in Chinese society. In a study with important implications for cultural and economic history, Cynthia Brokaw describes rural, lower-level publishing and bookselling operations at the end of the imperial period. Commerce in Culture traces how the poverty and isolation of Sibao necessitated a bare-bones approach to publishing and bookselling and how the Hakka identity of the Sibao publishers shaped the configuration of their distribution networks and even the nature of their publications. Sibao's industry reveals two major trends in print culture: the geographical extension of commercial woodblock publishing to hinterlands previously untouched by commercial book culture and the related social penetration of texts to lower-status levels of the population.".
- Contents:
- Preliminary Material
- The Sibao Book Trade and Qing Society
- The Setting: Minxi and Sibao
- The Origins of Publishing and the Production of Books in Sibao
- The Structure of the Sibao Publishing Industry
- "We are all brothers": Household Division, the Proliferation of Publishing Houses, and the Management of Competition
- Sibao Bookselling Routes
- Sojourning Bookselling and the Operation of the Branch Shops
- Sibao's "Confucian Merchants" in Minxi Society and the Late Imperial Economy
- The Nature and Sources of Sibao Imprints
- Educational Works
- Guides to Good Manners, Good Health, and Good Fortune
- Fiction and Belles-Lettres
- Sibao's Customers and Popular Textual Culture in the Qing
- The Diffusion of Print Culture in Qing China
- Transport Routes Within the Min-Gan-Yue Region
- Value of Woodblocks from the Juxian tang and Dawen tang, 1897
- Genealogical Charts
- Works Cited
- Index.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages [603]-636) and index.
- Description based on print version record.
- Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.
- ISBN:
- 9781684174508
- 1684174503
- OCLC:
- 989852559
- Publisher Number:
- 10.1163/9781684174508 DOI
The Penn Libraries is committed to describing library materials using current, accurate, and responsible language. If you discover outdated or inaccurate language, please fill out this feedback form to report it and suggest alternative language.