"I saw that your decorations were well-furnished, so I came here to take a look. [No pop-up novel website]...Zhou Dongtian speaks a weird Cantonese Mandarin. Fortunately, the Mandarin in this time and space is not much different from the Nanjing dialect. The shopkeeper speaks slowly. I can still understand it.
The environment here is indeed good. Pan Jianyuan's bookstore has a small courtyard between the pavement house and the backyard door. There are some bamboos planted beside the stone path and various pots of flowers are displayed on the ground. It is full of sunshine in the spring. A colorful scene.
A blue mottled sword hangs in the blank space on the wall. Below it is a rosewood table with piano tiles and a guqin. A Wanli-year imitation Xuande furnace is curling up with green smoke, and a fragrant and fragrant aroma is faintly floating in the air.
"The master is so impressed." The shopkeeper said with a smile, "Looking at the master's appearance, he must have a distinguished academic background."
Of course, there is no department name. Zhou Dongtian is not a foreign intelligence agent, so there is no need to specially come up with a department name. However, in ancient times, there was no nationwide networked academic qualification query system, and Guangdong was thousands of miles away, so it was not difficult to make up a fake identity and fake academic qualifications. Zhou Dongtian did not dare to brag that he was a candidate for promotion. The number of candidates in each province was still limited. Nanjing was the capital of the capital, and there were people from all provinces in the country. Bragging might be exposed, and it would not be a matter of losing face.
Therefore, he claims to be a scholar, and there are many more tricks in it than a scholar.
"Oh, oh, look at me, my face is full of joy, I will definitely win the provincial examination. Congratulations in advance, congratulations in advance!"
"Thank you. "Don't write essays in the field". It just depends on luck."
"Mr. Zhou is coming to Jinling for a study tour. Do you want to choose a few new subjects of Wei Mo?" The bookstore shop owner speculated and recommended, "Xiao Lao, here are several books of Wei Mo compiled and selected by Mr. Qi Shan. They are all rich in flowers." Good writing..."
Mr. Qi Shan is Zhang Zilie. Not many people knew this person in the old days. But Zhou Dongtian knew that when he was in the printing house, he used modern printing equipment to print some books, including the "Kangxi Dictionary". One of the blueprints of "Kangxi Dictionary", "Zhengzi Tong", is the work of Mr. Qi Shan.
Zhou Dongtian knew that Zhang Zilie was a student at the Imperial College in Nanjing at that time and had never been awarded a Jinshi. Judging from the tone of the bookstore owner, it is obvious that Mr. Qishan has a high level of attainment in eight-part essays, so much so that the Wei Mo he is responsible for compiling has become a kind of call to action.
He waved his hand: "No need. Do you have some new and interesting books here?"
"Why not?" The shopkeeper looked at Zhou Dongtian and Mei Lin. They were probably the children of wealthy businessmen in Guangdong. They had a lot of fame and they probably had their joints opened long ago in the examination room. For such a person, the first thing to read is novelty. He thought for a moment and took a new book from the bookshelf. "I wonder if Mr. Zhou has read this book? It is a work by a Thai Westerner."
When Zhou Dongtian took a look, it turned out to be "Elements of Geometry" written by Xu Guangqi. This book should have been published in January. You can still buy it in Nanjing now, but it seems that the sales of the book are not very good. [China] Mathematics in ancient China was very knowledgeable in algebra, but geometry was relatively lagging behind. Such a book full of brand-new concepts and nouns has nothing to do with extremes. Apart from the few people who are interested in this, I am afraid that very few people are willing to ask.
"This book is really novel. It was compiled by Xu Shanghai, the Minister of Rites, and it is said to be an original work by a Westerner. Xu Shangshu translated it himself. But few people can understand it."
Zhou Dongtian opened it and looked at it. The printing of the book was very exquisite. Some chapters had pictures. He saw that "right angles", "obtuse angles" and "similar triangles" were mentioned from time to time.
Zhou Dongtian suddenly returned to his junior high school days. It turns out that these terms existed back then!
He did not know that these geometric terms, including the word geometry, were all translated by Xu Guangqi.
Seeing that he was very interested, the shopkeeper quickly fetched other basic books and put them in a pile on the desk. Zhou Dongtian looked at them. Most of them were works by Xu Guangqi and some were by missionaries who had turned over the river: there was "Sweet Potato Shu" , "Miscellaneous Agricultural Relics", "Draft of Agricultural Books", "Taishi Water Law",
"Hungai Tongxian Tu Shuo" and many other kinds. The types are quite diverse, including agricultural books such as several works by Xu Guangqi, mathematics books such as "Tongwen Zhizhi" and "Measurement Methods", astronomy and hydraulic works, and finally Matteo Ricci's " A collection of aphorisms like "On Friendship".
Zhou Dongya looked through them one by one. He was actually not interested in the content of the books. These books were not technically superior to those in the big library. He was interested in the binding and printing of the books.
The characteristic of ancient books is that the characters are very large. The font size of these books is at least one size according to modern standards. Zhou Dongtian has always considered this question: why did ancient printed books use such large fonts? Some say this is a problem with printing technology, while others say it is because ancient lighting was poor and larger fonts had to be used for easier reading.
Zhou Dongtian had no time to read the contents carefully, so he asked Cai Yibang to buy them all and returned home with a full load. When paying, he found that the books were quite expensive. According to the price level at that time, it was difficult for ordinary people to afford it. Even if a poor person wants to buy the Four Books and Five Classics, it is not an easy task. It is not surprising that scholars in this time and space can enjoy various privileges. The money and time required to gain a reputation are destined to monopolize knowledge.
The owner of the bookshop made a good deal and was very happy. Zhou Dongtian took advantage of the situation and proposed that he wanted to see the workshop that printed books.
"The workshop is full of black ink, I'm afraid it has stained the clothes of the two prime ministers..." The shopkeeper was a little surprised by this request. There were many scholars who came to him to buy books, and their personalities were all different, but there was never any People have been interested in book printing workshops.
"No problem, these two are both good readers and are extremely curious about how books are printed.
Please also ask the shopkeeper to be accommodating. "Cai Yibang also helped to speak.
The shopkeeper thought for a moment and found that there was no unknown person in the workshop, and besides, there was no "secret skill" that could be kept secret about engraving and printing books. Just find a few engraving, printing and binding masters and you would know everything. It doesn't matter if these two gentlemen are curious and want to take a look.
If it’s bad, let Xiao Lao lead the way. "The shopkeeper stood up and paid some attention to the waiter.
He immediately led them to the backyard.
The group of people walked through the backyard gate and walked along the aisle. They were faced with a wall that had been weathered by wind and rain for a long time. The gate tower stood tall and the cornices were raised. This is the printing workshop. The main forms of houses are blue bricks, white walls and black tiles.
Pushing the door open, there is a large courtyard paved with bluestone slabs. The plane is in the shape of a Chinese character, with a central axis that is symmetrical, with the main hall as the main body. The upper, middle and lower halls are connected, with one to three rows of wing rooms on both sides of the hall. It serves as dormitories and workshops for workers. There is a pond to collect rainwater in the yard, and there is a sunbathing floor paved with rows of shelves.
Zhou Dongtian noticed that the halls here were very elevated, and there were high wind and fire walls between the courtyards. Printing books requires storing a large amount of wood, paper and books, all of which are flammable. The water reservoir in the courtyard and the wind and fire walls that isolate each courtyard play a role in fire prevention.
There were people busy in the hall and wing rooms, and there were people moving around carrying materials in the yard from time to time. In one of the houses someone was writing a book prototype based on a selected blueprint. Choosing a good substrate is the first step to printing a good book. In addition to collecting manuscripts from authors, basket books also use rare books from the past - a concept in ancient times where there was no copyright. Works by modern and ancient people can be published as long as the bookstore owner thinks they are suitable.
Because good manuscripts are crucial, bookstore owners are often discerning copyists themselves, and are good at searching for useful manuscripts from old paper piles in second-hand bookstores. Some bookshop owners make friends with famous bibliophiles to obtain their collections of rare and rare books. There are also a group of so-called calligraphers in Nanjing, Suzhou and Hangzhou who are literati and book collectors. Most of them are well-educated people and they are wealthy and powerful gentry themselves: for example, the Nanjing Book Collection that once published the "Compendium of Materia Medica" Hu Yinglong.
There are always more than a dozen copyists in Pan Jianyuan's bookstore. Contrary to Zhou Dongtian's imagination, they are all real "booksmiths." Although they can read and write beautiful regular scripts and reverse scripts, they cannot Not much culture. It's a completely mechanical job. Therefore, typos, omissions, typos, and even illiteracy in grammar often occur in ordinary books. Therefore, the bookstore owner also has to hire a few scribes, usually with the word "invitation", to serve as editors and editors. Some less particular bookstores will save this fee.
In the main hall, engraving workers were working at their desks.
Blank book boards cut out to size were stacked under the eaves of the corridor waiting to be used. The well-engraved book boards are stacked on the other side. Under the eaves of the corridor, various book boards are piled up like mountains. The shopkeeper said that pear wood and jujube wood are the better materials for engraving. Fruit trees are hard, fine-grained and inexpensive, making them the best material for engraving boards. This is where the idiom "disaster for pears and disaster for jujubes" comes from.
The engraving workers pasted the "writing sample" of the transcriber's handwriting on the board, and then the engraver used different types of carving knives to carve the reversed ink on the board into raised characters, and at the same time carved the remaining blank parts of the wood board. Remove it and dent it. The words engraved on the board should protrude one to two millimeters from the printed surface.
The carved book boards were sent to the yard, and casual workers brought buckets of hot water to wash the carved boards and wash away the wood chips and ink marks. The stereotyping process is complete.
A page of a book is a board. If a book has three hundred pages, it must have three hundred boards.
The waste of manpower and material resources is immeasurable. Therefore, it is difficult for a manuscript with unknown market prospects to be published unless it is financed by the author himself. It’s no surprise that books are rare and expensive. @.
