Item ID: 7817 Lüting zhi jian chuan ben shu mu 郘亭知見傳本書目 [List of Surviving Editions Known to & Seen by Me]. Youzhi 莫友芝 MO.

A “Significant Achievement”

Lüting zhi jian chuan ben shu mu 郘亭知見傳本書目 [List of Surviving Editions Known to & Seen by Me].

16 juan in six vols. 8vo, orig. wrappers, stitched as issued. [Shanghai]: from the pillar: “Guo xue fu lun she,” n.d. [but ca. 1912-30].

So-called “enumerative bibliography” (mulu xue 目錄學) had existed in China since ancient times, with the “treatise on literature” (yiwen zhi 藝文志) in the Book of Han forming the canonical example. In late imperial China, with its advanced print culture and traditions of book collecting and scholarship, enumerative bibliography was widely practiced. Our book is a work in this genre.

Mo (1811-71), was a bibliographer, bibliophile, poet, and calligrapher. His affiliation with the publishing house Jinling Shuju (later Jiangnan Shuju) caused him to travel widely in southeast China, where he visited many libraries and collectors and did much bibliographical research.

He wrote three notable bibliographies: the present work is a classified list of the books Mo saw during his travels, with notes on the authors, contents, and editions. The first edition was published in Beijing in 1909. Lianbin Dai, in his “China’s Bibliographic Tradition and the History of the Book” in Book History, Vol. 17 (2014), considers this work to be a “significant achievement” (p. 21); it concentrates on editions printed before 1800 included in the Siku Quanshu zongmu tiyao [Annotated Catalogue of the Complete Imperial Library], the largest pre-modern Chinese book catalogue.

The contents of our bibliography are arranged by subject. Entries include titles, number of volumes, authorship, editors, publishers, dates of publication, editions, references and comments, etc.

Fine set, preserved in a hantao. Minor browning throughout.

Price: $3,950.00

Item ID: 7817