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Our household copy of Handbooks and Anthologies for Officials in Imperial China: A Descriptive and Critical Bibliography https://brill.com/view/title/38448 has arrived. It's very relevant to my partner's work - less so mine. 1/
To say that this thing is important, does not do it justice. Teams worked on generating thousands of descriptions over decades. Basically everything telling someone how to do government work in Late Imperial China is now more or less located and described. Super big deal 2/
But of course, I'm most excited about anything called "A Descriptive and Critical Bibliography." So let's look at entry and see how it engages with bibliography: Image one below gives a pretty good sense about what this is doing: 3/
So the first thing to note, is that the descriptions of books are heavy on summaries of contents and bios of authors. This is great - and standard for Chinese descriptive bibs, as this example from Shen Jin's catalog of the Harvard collection shows: 4/
They also do a good job, given the existing (and not great state) of union catalogs of Chinese materials in tracking down where copies live. For scholars, this is useful because at least we can find the stuff 5/
That said, anyone looking at Shen Jin will see a whole bevy of stuff - standard to all rare book cataloging - they was needlessly omitted: block size, character counts, columns per page, order of para-texts, number of volumes (distinct from juan count) 6/
There are likely many reasons this information was omitted -maybe they had a start and couldn't afford to go back - but it leads to really interesting moments, as in this entry on missing 4 pages. I mean, which pages? Out of how many? 7/
None of this is at all to condemn or detract from the work. Rather, it's interesting for me to consider how this particular bibliography really doesn't tell us all that much about the materiality of these things.
And now that I have completed this thread for twitter, I will not have to subject my partner to another meaningless ramble about how books are objects - and that maybe it would be interesting if sinologist thought about that more proactively.
