Between reading and collecting books

Author: Xin Deyong
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2005-11-01
Features: The author is not only an avid collector and enthusiast of ancient books but also a scholar engaged in historical and textual research. Therefore, he possesses a unique insight in appraising old books and a distinctive style in collecting them. The twenty-four articles collected in this book record the author's recent experiences in searching for various ancient books in bookstores both domestically and internationally. They reflect the author's achievements in examining and researching the ancient books he has encountered and collected from the perspectives of textual criticism, bibliography, history, and culture. The book is equally enjoyable, informative, and academically rigorous, serving as a reference for those engaged in textual research and teaching, as well as providing pleasure and valuable information for readers who love, buy, and collect books.
[Preface] I am a person who makes a living from dusty old books. Not by dealing in secondhand books, but by finding articles in the gaps of books written by the ancients. Since I read books, I need to buy them. In the past decade or so, my reason for buying old books has often led me to meet some book collectors. In their eyes, I am mostly considered a professional "scholar," and the books I buy are also the "hard work" required by scholars, which is fundamentally different from book collecting. However, to some scholars, my haphazard buying of old books seems entirely unrelated to academia. Polite people might say it's book collecting, while those who are less polite might call it the cliché "playing with trifles leads to distraction." Neither horse nor donkey, I am regarded by everyone on the "right path" as a bat. It is clear that although both reading and book collecting revolve around books, there is a significant gap between them. My ancestral home is in the land of Donghu, and if we borrow the term from the Donghu people of the Western Han Dynasty, this intermediate zone can also be called the "outerly abandoned land of Wudu" [1]. However, it is not easy to give precise definitions of reading and book collecting. For example, you can say that readers buy books only for convenience, without considering differences in condition or edition. But if you place two books with identical content and printing formats side by side—one stained with oil and water, looking disheveled, and the other fresh to the touch, with a lingering scent of ink—almost all "readers" would choose the latter.
Another example is that many self-proclaimed "readers" believe that book collectors merely treat books as antiques and artworks to decorate their homes. But in reality, there has never been a book collector who does not read. The fact that book collectors have varying preferences for the content of books clearly demonstrates this point. —It’s just that you have your way of reading, and he has his. He might simply browse and appreciate the books after meals, carefully savoring their cultural content and aesthetic form, unlike those who make a living from reading, who must read to write, earn a living, and so on.
Thus, between the two realms of reading and book collecting, there must be a very broad transitional zone. Not only me, but many who need to read books all year round are in different positions within this zone. In recent years, the Jinan Qilu Book Society published a journal on book collecting called Book Collectors. In reality, most of the contributors were both readers and collectors, or collectors who collected because of their reading, or collectors who collected after reading. True book collectors accounted for only a very small fraction of the authors. I have never aspired to be a book collector, and I certainly won’t have that thought in the future. Strictly speaking, buying books is only for reading, to read more conveniently, to read more, and to make reading more enjoyable and comfortable.
Going to school and getting an education, as the older generation would say, is "reading books"; in more formal terms, it is "reading." In primary and secondary school, when one should lay a solid foundation, I happened to be in the so-called "Cultural Revolution." In school, I couldn’t take "regular" classes and education as now, but I often had to substitute for teachers who had family matters, giving lectures to classmates. This is how I developed the habit of reading by myself. Reading freely, choosing the books I wanted to read, naturally led to a fondness for buying books from bookstores. Of course, like most children of that era, my pocket money was limited, so the books I could afford were also very limited. The books I bought in my youth have long disappeared after several relocations, but I remember reading the most were a few revolutionary poetry collections by Li Ying. Although Li Ying’s poems also used line breaks to illustrate the political imagery of that era, they seemed to pay great attention to rhythm and rhyme. Even now, when I read new poetry, I still value these aspects. Another memorable book was an ancient textual work called He Dian. It left a deep impression because of its unique and memorable title, but I still haven’t read it properly even today. This reflects that I may have already shown a tendency to collect without reading.
After passing the college entrance examination in 1977, I began to systematically seek out books needed for my major. Originally, I had applied for the humanities, but by chance, I was admitted to the sciences. I had to satisfy my desire to read literature and history while adapting to the needs of science. My needs were vast, but the money saved from my living expenses for buying books was still limited, so I could only obtain a few. I spent a lot of time flipping through books in stores but bought very few. However, the constraints of external conditions strengthened my inner desire to buy books. During my undergraduate studies, I noticed that I had begun to adopt a purchasing strategy similar to that of book collectors. This was to buy a series of books without regard to whether I liked them or whether they were useful, aiming to complete the set. For example, the Foreign Classics Series published by the People’s Literature Publishing House, the so-called "grid edition" with green and yellow grid covers that collectors now call "grid edition," I bought one and collected one, basically completing all the published varieties at the time. Another example was old journals, buying each issue one by one to complete the collection of Geographical Knowledge and Geography since their inception. Geographical Knowledge had a large circulation and was not too difficult to collect, but Geography was a mid-level geography journal published for a short time in the 1950s, positioned between the high-end Journal of Geography and the popular Geographical Knowledge. It didn’t fit into either category and was extremely rare in circulation. To complete it, I spent many weekends. However, after graduating from college, the strong temptation of buying essential professional books led me to stop deliberately purchasing books in series, and I thus deviated from the path to becoming a "book collector."
However, it was also from this period that I gradually began to appreciate the joy of searching for books. The joy of searching for books was originally reflected in the special experience of searching for old books and old journals. But in that era when new book distribution channels were not yet well-established, in addition to frequently visiting old book stalls on weekends to find the books and journals I needed, I had another way of searching for books: through subscription catalogs to find newly published books and pre-order them from bookstores. Looking back, I still hold great respect and gratitude for the lady in charge of book pre-orders at the Nangang Branch of Harbin New Bookstore. Over the years, she pre-ordered many books for me, including the China Natural Geography series, which I still use today. What moved me most was that some of these books, because only I had pre-ordered them in the entire city of Harbin, the bookstore even specially ordered the only copy from the publisher to meet my needs. For example, the Proceedings of the National Academic Conference on Climate Change (1978) edited by the Institute of Climate and Weather Research of the China Meteorological Administration, was ordered in this way. After seeing the publication announcement in New Book Catalogue, the bookstore ordered it for me, and I was able to obtain it. Books like this, in addition to Beijing and Shanghai, were very difficult to find elsewhere at the time. After I studied for a master’s degree in historical geography, I have always been proud to own this collection of essays. Later, while wandering through old book stalls in various parts of the country, I never encountered this collection, which only deepened my gratitude for the lady who had pre-ordered books for me.
Every field requires reading, but perhaps history demands more browsing than other fields. Of course, it is more accurate to say that it requires reading more broadly. This is partly because a significant portion of the books read in historical studies are read in a special way—not word by word, but rather skimming to get a general idea, with careful reading or research on useful materials needed later for specialized studies. On the other hand, because the field of history does not discard old knowledge with the emergence of new knowledge or conclusions, no matter how advanced the field becomes, every specific research still needs to be based on original materials, starting from the beginning to read the books that scholars centuries ago had already read. Unlike many other disciplines, where new knowledge replaces old knowledge, and new works render old ones obsolete, historians must retain old books.
These two characteristics of historical research books determine that people in this field often need to stock up on a large number of books in their studies. After graduating from college, I continued my studies for a master’s degree, transitioning from the sciences to the humanities and entering the field of history. With a more specific major, the scope of my reading became very focused, and the quantity of books I bought began to increase significantly based on professional needs. At that time, buying books was almost entirely for practical purposes, with no consideration for combining reading with appreciation. Not that I didn’t have the intention, but I was simply too poor to afford it. I remember in the mid-1980s, my mentor, Professor Huang Yongnian, bought a batch of ancient books for our institution from the Beijing Liulichang Ancient Books Store. Among them was a Ming Dynasty edition of the Shui Jing Zhu (Commentary on the Waterways Classic) annotated by Zhong Xing and Tan Yuanchun, priced at 80 yuan. This is a classic of ancient geography, and since I was studying historical geography, my mentor pointed out that the price was not high and that the store had another identical copy, which could be considered for purchase. But at that time, I was in the stage of greedily expanding my collection, and I didn’t even consider it. Now, the price of such a book is at least 5,000 yuan or more, but the result is still the same—I wouldn’t consider adding it to my collection. At that time, to concentrate on buying professional literary and historical classics, I was not reluctant to give up almost all my modern and foreign literature books, and from then on, I no longer bought such "idle" books.