THE ONGOING LIVES OF BOOKS AND THEIR LIBRARIES

• Published in: International Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 13; no. 2; pp. 229 - 241
• Main Author: McDermott, Joseph P.
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.07.2016
• Subjects: Academic libraries; Asia; Asian studies; Bookstores; Christianity; English language; European culture; Fiction; Language history; Libraries; Library collections; Muslims; Nonfiction; Novels; Printing; Printing machinery; Religious libraries; Review Article; South Asia; South Asian studies; Transnationalism; Asia; South Asia; printing press; Tibetan Buddhism; Beitang Library; Eurasian book history; Jesuit libraries in China; library formation
• ISSN: 1479-5914; 1479-5922
• DOI: 10.1017/S1479591416000048

One early spring afternoon in 1982 I happened to find myself ambling along Fuzhou Road in Shanghai and coming by chance upon a small unattractive bookstore. The brown paint on its outer doors was peeling, the stucco surface of its exterior needed a good scrubbing, and more than a few tiles on its floor were broken. If then no different in appearance from the other bookstores I had earlier visited along this famous Shanghai book street, this store nonetheless boasted a strikingly different kind of stock: it specialized in selling second-hand Western books. While novels abounded on its shelves, the pre-war variety in hardback and the more recent in paperback, one thick non-fiction volume caught my eye. Entitled Domesday Book and Beyond, this classic 1887 treatment of early English history by the great English legal historian Frederic W. Maitland had long been on my reading list. Somehow a copy of it had ended up in this unpromising bookshop. When I opened the virtually virgin pages of this copy and noticed that it could be bought for a proverbial song, I readily leapt to the temptation and acquired it with delight.