Global printing

printing in Asia

pre-Gutenberg

1610 English book with note in Japanese ink: https://blogs.princeton.edu/notabilia/2020/03/13/east-meets-west-in-an-early-seventeenth-century-book-from-oxford/

post-Gutenberg

East/West encounters, described by Jonathan Spence in his NEH talk "“When Minds Met: China and the West in the Seventeenth Century” https://web.archive.org/web/20110615010107/http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/Spence/lecture.html

• discusses Shen Fuzong, letter of introduction from Thomas Hyde to Robert Boyle
  • Hyde was working on a history of chess, wanted Shen's help with it, and also with cataloguing Chinese books in Bodleian
• translated volume of Confucius's sayings, to be published by Daniel Horthemels in Paris; Shen was going to insert relevant Chinese characters but funding ran out (numbers still visible in printed volume)
• John Webb, 1660s, book describing Chinese characters as universal pre-Adamic language
• "a flurry of books appeared in the late 1680s, extolling the complexity and efficiency of China’s government, and finding the roots of its success in a patriarchal system linked to Confucian antecedents"