Barbara Heritage, Rare Book School’s associate director and curator of collections, said, “The Guanhailou Collection provides both a broad and a deep look into the culture of the book in China – not only its technical innovations, which were numerous, but also how the culture of writing, printing and bookmaking largely developed in China, and then spread into Korea and Japan.”
Jack Chen, a UVA professor of Chinese literature, took Edgren’s course several years ago.
“This is a world-class collection, and it would easily catapult UVA into the very top tier of important East Asian rare book holdings,” Chen said. “More important, perhaps, is how this collection makes teaching book and print history of China possible. I would certainly design courses around the collection.”
Chen added the possibilities of holding workshops and conferences around the strengths of the collection, “which includes the Confucian Classics, Buddhist and religious texts, epigraphy, historiography and literary collections.”
In European civilization, Johannes Gutenberg has been credited with inventing the printing press in 15th-century Germany, but Heritage noted that centuries earlier, artists and others in China invented paper and experimented with methods for reproducing texts, including movable type.
Some of the earliest printed books come not from Europe, but from East Asia, and depict Buddhist prayers, or sutras, not the Christian Bible. Some early texts also served as reference documents for scholars covering subjects such as the “I Ching” or “Book of Changes” and certain ceremonies and rituals.
The collection – which spans a millennium from the ninth to the 19th centuries – includes examples of the precursor to printing where copies of texts like those were made by a process of ink rubbings from carved stone or wood blocks. The pages were rolled into scrolls or folded into albums that were transportable – similar to books, Edgren said. In temples and other places, printed texts and woodcuts were hidden in statues and pagodas of small to tall sizes.