Gu tao wen ni lu 古匋文孴錄 [Assembled Records of Ancient Pottery Inscriptions].
8vo, orig. blue wrappers, orig. title slip on upper wrappers, new stitching. [Beijing]: Guo li Beiping yan jiu yuan 國立北平研究院, 1936.
First edition of this work of Chinese paleography. The Chinese script has a very long documented history, from the ancient “big and small seal scripts” that yielded to the Han dynasty “clerical script,” which in turn was replaced by the “standard script,” still in use today and written in calligraphic forms called “running script” and “grass script.” Even the character forms used in print differed slightly over the course of the medium’s history with “Song-style characters” achieving... More