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This particular book seeks to have experts on East Asian and European book history explore issues of mutual interest, to the benefit the main concerns and other issues of book history at the opposite ends of Eurasia. Here the editors concentrate on the book cultures of the two regions of Eurasia, East Asia and Western Europe, which in pre-modern times made the most of publishing books. Just as the most influential Western scholars of the European book have relished researching how the book has shaped the history of European countries other than just their own, so do we now wish to analyze the development of book production, distribution, and consumption of these regions from a consciously comparative perspective. Our hope is that our findings will cast new light on the history of books and book culture within each of these regions.

Brokaw draws upon her field research in China to give an exceptionally rich account of the production practices in ordinary book publishing outfits in market towns and villages in key production sites of south China in late imperial times. She pays particular attention to publishing technology, noting that printing with moveable type, which had been tried in China, was ‘not cost effective’ and that woodblock printing had ‘certain economic advantages over European-style letter-press printing’, since it did not require investment in expensive machinery or the need to estimate in advance the number of copies of a text that would be bought.

McKitterick identifies the pitfalls encountered by historians of the Western book in classifying, counting, and identifying the materials they use in their research and thereby offers clear advice for East Asian bibliographers on European practices to avoid as well as to follow. McDermott identifies a distinctive feature of Chinese and Japanese book production, private non-commercial publishing, and shows how its popularity in East Asia complicates efforts to transfer to its book history the conventional Western historical narratives that identify the rise of printing with the rise of capitalism and the linkage of market expansion with the public expression of private opinion on public matters.

McDermott identifies a distinctive feature of Chinese and Japanese book production, private non-commercial publishing, and shows how its popularity in East Asia complicates efforts to transfer to its book history the conventional Western historical narratives that identify the rise of printing with the rise of capitalism and the linkage of market expansion with the public expression of private opinion on public matters.

James Raven’s essay is concerned with the transmission of books in Europe and its colonies in the period between Gutenberg’s invention of the hand press and the nineteenth century introduction of the steam press. Besides telling a story of market expansion for publishing, he examines the geographical and social range of distribution and considers whether publications circulated within a ‘closed’ or an ‘open’ circuit and whether the sellers remained at home or travelled with the books.

Peter Kornicki discusses consumption, examining both books for women and women readers in early modern East Asia, including Korea, Japan and Vietnam as well as China. He compares the rise of printing in the vernacular and the proliferation of conduct books for women in East Asia with similar trends in Europe, but also notes important differences, notably the ‘lack of anxiety about women’s literacy’ in East Asia and the greater emphasis on religious messages in the West.

The essay by Burke and McDermott is concerned with the production, indeed the proliferation of reference books (defined as books intended to be consulted, rather than read from cover to cover) in both Europe and China. He discusses general reference books such as encyclopaedias, large and small, and calls attention to the increasing number of different kinds of ‘how to do it’ books in both East Asia and Europe in the early modern period, and also to the relative lack of interest in China in the production of dictionaries or translations. The differences between these two traditions of reference works are linked to the types of elite careers available in these societies. Tokugawa Japan is also discussed, if only to highlight how distinctive the Chinese tradition of reference books and encyclopaedias remained throughout the centuries covered by this book.

For important secondary scholarship on specific topics the footnotes in each essay provide expert guidance. But, as readers of these essays may wish to pursue broader book history interests, a list of some of the seminal studies that have over the past half-century made book history so vital a field of scholarship in the West and East Asia may prove of interest.