With the recent addition of Matt Wills – specialist in the history of the book in China – to the team at Peter Harrington, we are pleased to present a series of curated selections focusing on Chinese books, which will showcase our rapidly expanding acquisitions in this area.
Matt came to Peter Harrington from the University of California, San Diego, where he recently finished a PhD in History, specialising in the history of the book in China. Matt spent much of his graduate school career assembling a sizeable collection of modern Chinese propaganda which won both the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest in 2019 and the inaugural California Young Book Collector’s Prize. He has also published in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America and is currently writing a chapter on reading in modern China for the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature.
This selection exhibits the range of material available to the prospective collector of China-related materials. Earlier editions of Mao’s Little Red Book are probably the most well-known collectable Chinese book out there at the moment, and the historian in me relishes every chance I get to hold one.
However, collecting Chinese books has always been a joy because of the range and depth of rarities out there for collectors of any persuasion. In this list you will find materials as different as the first Chinese translation of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, an album exhibiting the early work of the renowned painter Zhang Daqian, and a collection of the Four Books of Confucianism inscribed by the prominent Republican intellectual Jiang Kanghu. For those looking for something a little unusual, there is this collection of postcards of Mount Everest issued following a successful Chinese expedition to the summit in 1975.
In addition to this range of subjects, one of the exciting things about working with Chinese books is the range of languages you encounter. For example, the arresting set of French-language propaganda posters we acquired recently were composed by a state publisher in Beijing to spread Maoism abroad during the Cultural Revolution. Go further back to the 17th and 18th centuries and you will find that China was a plurilingual empire; officials working at different levels of the government could look to books like this Chinese-Manchu dictionary to help them navigate the ins-and-outs of the Qing’s paper-based bureaucracy. Once foreign powers had established a foothold in China in the 19th century there was a proliferation of works in English, like this bilingual translation of Aesop’s Fables published in Canton in 1840.
Another element that makes Chinese books such interesting items for any bibliophile is their innate visuality. China’s great Mao-era propaganda publishers excelled in producing bright and eye-catching books and posters to spread the gospel of socialism, and some of the posters of Mao we currently have in stock hold your gaze rather like looking at the Mona Lisa. Older Chinese books were nearly always printed as string-bound volumes, often in blue folding cases, and these provide a marvellous aesthetic for the bookshelf. Since the shift to more Westernized hardback and paperback publishing in China, publishers have kept alive older book-binding techniques though special and limited editions, with the Zhang Daqian album (complete with silk brocade case and rich blue paper wrappers) being a perfect example.
I hope this has given you a window into the world of Chinese book collecting and all of its possibilities, and we trust that you will enjoy browsing the full range of materials in our first selection. Watch out for further announcements of new acquisitions, and I will be posting another blog entry soon. In the meantime I would be delighted to hear from you by email.
