CHAPTER 5
Dubious Books and Definitive Editions
The volume and diversity of sixteenth-century book editions, both legitimate and forged, called upon individuals to exercise powers of discrimination analogous to those required for judging the value and authenticity of money and spoken words. In urban centers across late sixteenth-century China and Europe, literacy and print culture were on the rise.1 As early as 1522, one Ming scholar commented that “books [have become] as numerous as the sea is vast.”2 And four years later, Erasmus wondered whether there was “anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books.”3 For his part, the Spanish skeptic Francisco Sanchez (ca. 1550–ca. 1623) estimated that “ten million years would not suffice to read all the books there were.”4 A comical image from 1511 illustrates the situation. Visually comparing the manufacture of books to the baking of bread, the German artist Albrecht Dürer suggested that by the early sixteenth century, printed books had become as widely available as loaves of bread—a staple of early modern intellectual life (Figure 5.01). The technologies of book printing, as well as the means for ensuring the literal accuracy of texts—to say nothing of the doctrinal purity of their contents—differed in China and Europe. Matters of ideological orthodoxy and deviancy and their effects upon readers will be discussed in the following chapter; this chapter focuses on book editions as material objects that may be printed with or without the consent of the author, pirated, forged, augmented, expurgated, or misattributed. More specifically, I examine questions that arose as readers, editors, and book collectors attempted to sift through the jumble of contending book editions and differentiate between reliable and spurious texts.
As Ming dynasty printers and book sellers knew well, the trenchant style and scandalous opinions associated with Li Zhi meant that any work bearing his name would surely attract a buyer. Eager to cash in on his reputation, they freely borrowed his name and appended it to works by other authors, hoping thereby to increase sales. The deliberate misattribution of books and commentaries to Li Zhi began during our author’s lifetime and grew more flagrant after his death.5 While forgery and piracy of Li’s works were particularly widespread, due in large part to his national notoriety, these phenomena were scarcely unique; in both Europe and China, a great many early modern authors’ books appeared in editions both legitimate and unsanctioned.
What is striking is that the material falsification of books in this period—an era in which the very notion of intellectual property rights was in its infancy in both China and the West—mirrored the themes of counterfeited identity characteristic of many early modern texts. As we have seen, Li’s writings repeatedly denounce the discrepancies between surface appearances and underlying realities and exhort readers to beware of hypocrisy and lurking deception. Yet when Li discussed his own practice of reading, to which he dedicated his retirement, he rarely if ever voiced concern that the book editions to which he had access may have been faulty. Neither did he decry the unauthorized printing of his own works. Indeed it is uncertain whether he was even aware that the books he had authored were appearing in spurious editions. His genuine writings and personal opinions therefore play a secondary role in this chapter; my primary concern is the question of authenticity that vexed readers and collectors struggling to differentiate between reliable and fraudulent editions. When hack writers and unscrupulous printers meddled with Li’s texts by adding to them, subtracting from them, imitating Li’s style, or printing works under his name without his permission, they created a situation in which, ironically, books that deplored deception may themselves have been fakes. And books that extolled the virtues of clear judgment required readers to exercise their own judgment to determine whether these very editions were accurate or inauthentic.
The growing role of books and printing in everyday life in China and Europe in this period is well documented, as are the frequent abuses of this medium of textual transmission. In both regions, ineffective checks on authors’ control over the dissemination of their works generated unease among authors and readers alike. And contemporary scholars and book collectors registered their suspicion that they or others might lack the ability to identify incomplete, forged, or misleading volumes. The prefaces to Li’s posthumously published Another Book to Burn attempt to quell such concerns. As personal friends and disciples of the author, the preface writers sought to overcome readers’ anxieties by discrediting earlier, illegitimate editions and elevating their own edition as the single, true, authentic one. I analyze the rhetorical bids for authenticity made in these several prefaces and compare them to techniques used by Montaigne’s female disciple, Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565–1645), in her posthumous prefaces to the French author’s Essays, published in 1595, 1598, 1600, 1602, 1604, 1617, 1625, and 1635.6 These case studies exemplify Chinese and European editors’ efforts to establish the credibility of their own editions and to allay readers’ fears about the mutability of texts.
Figure 5.01. Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528). Satirical subject; study of three laborers. 1551. Pen and ink drawing, 20.4 x 29.8 cm. NI 1288; AI1517. Art Resource. Photo credit: René-Gabriel Ojéda.
PROLIFERATION OF EDITIONS AND FAULTY, UNRELIABLE BOOKS
By the turn of the seventeenth century, more than ever before in either China or Europe, books had become an indispensable part of everyday life. Sold at increasingly affordable rates, especially in China, books were small and portable, and they addressed every subject imaginable.7 There were merchants’ manuals, travel guidebooks, materia medica, almanacs, encyclopedias, poetry and essay anthologies, collections of epistolary correspondence and adages, political pamphlets, religious tracts, songbooks, erotic albums, narratives of voyages to exotic lands complete with accounts of foreign costumes and customs, morality books, study guides, handbooks on refined taste, editions of classical literature, Bibles, and, of course, books on how to distinguish genuine books from fakes!
While the majority of the population in China and Europe remained illiterate during this period, the number of readers increased substantially, especially in China.8 As early as the fifteenth century, the Chinese literatus Ye Sheng (1420–1474) averred that in his day the consumers of books included farmers, workers, merchants, peddlers, and women.9 In 1488, a Korean visitor to China remarked that south of the Yangzi River even “village children, ferrymen, and sailors” could read.10 While these descriptions are likely exaggerated, by the end of the sixteenth century in China, semiliterate commoners, so-called “ignorant men and women” (yu fu yu fu), constituted an emerging class of readers for genres such as vernacular fiction and encyclopedias for everyday use.11 Reading publics in Europe were also on the rise, albeit more slowly, as literacy gradually spread beyond the ranks of scholars and clerics, to include jurists, doctors, and a growing number of shopkeepers. In 1516 Erasmus already imagined a society in which “even the lowliest women [could] read the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles . . . [and] as a result, the farmer [could] sing some portion of them at the plow, the weaver hum some parts of them to the movement of his shuttle.”12
As scholars have shown, the quantity of volumes produced, the speed at which books were manufactured, and the numbers of individuals engaged in making them all rose significantly in this period. These developments led to similar problems of quality control, even though the structures of the book printing and selling industries differed in China and Europe. Because European movable type technology required a considerable initial outlay of capital, printing in Europe was concentrated in urban centers. By 1470 nineteen European cities had invested in printing presses, and by 1500 this number had grown to 255.13 According to one estimate, the business of printing in Europe expanded sevenfold over the course of the sixteenth century, and during this span Venice, one of Europe’s premier printing centers, was home to an estimated 453 individuals working as printers, publishers, booksellers, and bookbinders.14 To maximize efficiency, teams of workers simultaneously set type, proofread, and operated the printing presses. This piecemeal production style often generated editions marred by copious errors.15
In China, the relatively low cost and minimal equipment required for woodblock printing allowed printing to take place throughout the empire. Although in the late Ming the large-scale commercial printing industry was concentrated in Li Zhi’s native Fujian province, craftsmen could be employed wherever was convenient—in urban workshops such as those of Hangzhou and Suzhou, in government offices, even in private residences.16 These artisans carved entire texts onto wooden blocks that could be printed and reprinted at will. The economic incentives for commercial publishers to print books swiftly were arguably even more intense in China than in Europe, although economic pressures afflicted European publishing too. Fujian printers were notorious for hiring careless craftsmen who valued the volume of their output over accuracy.17 Using cheap ink that smudged or bled through gossamer-thin sheets of paper, these workers produced volumes littered with typos, misprints, and indecipherable passages, which Li’s contemporaries deplored.18 Xie Zhaozhe (1567–1624), for instance, griped that printers from the urban printing center of Jianyang in Fujian “produced the greatest number of books, but used the lowest quality wood blocks and paper.”19 And the playwright Shen Zijin (1583–1665) railed against “absurd printer’s typos” like accidentally replacing the character 亥 (hai) with 豕 (shi).20 In subsequent centuries, Qing scholars judged the shoddy craftsmanship of Ming volumes even more harshly, claiming, “When people of the Ming dynasty produced a book, they killed it.”21 These remarks all find corollaries in statements by European contemporaries, including Jean Bouchet (1476–ca. 1558), Clément Marot (1496–1554), Robert Burton (1577–1640), and Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585), the last of whom protested that the number of typos in contemporary editions was so high that even “the many eyes of Argos would not see clearly enough” to detect them all.22
The confusion generated by errors and misprints was compounded by the fact that the same texts could often be found in discrepant versions. Whether in China or Europe, few early modern authors viewed printing as the culmination of their literary labors; rather, they continued to revise their writings long after the initial publication. Perhaps inspired by the etymology of the word “author,” derived from the Latin augeo, “I augment,” countless European authors, including Erasmus, Bodin, Ronsard, Bacon, and Montaigne, continually added to their texts. Citing the fact that he was perpetually accruing new experiences, Montaigne swore to amend his essays “for as long as there [were] paper and ink in the world.”23 The covers and title pages of the resultant second and third editions typically celebrated the books’ “updated,” “improved,” or “expanded” status. For example, the title page of the third (1625) edition of Bacon’s Essays boasts that it is “newly enlarged.”24 And the title page of the 1588 edition of Montaigne’s Essays reads, “Fifth edition, expanded by a third book and six hundred additions more than the first two.”25 The 1595 edition of the same work further proclaims its status as a “new edition, taken from the one found after the author’s death, revised and expanded by a third more than the previous impressions.”26
The decision to bring out these subsequent editions rested on more than the authors’ accretionary practice of writing. Practical, financial factors also played a part. In most European countries, censorship laws required that prior to issuing any title, printing houses had to obtain official permission, generally in the form of a royal privilege bestowing exclusive printing rights upon a particular publisher for a delimited period of time. It is no accident, then, that second editions often appeared precisely when the first royal printing privilege was slated to expire. By collaborating with authors to publish revised editions, European printers sought to renew their printing privileges and thereby secure future profits.
In late Ming China the government did not exercise prepublication censorship, although it had attempted to do so in the Song dynasty and, by some accounts, even into the early Ming.27 In 1009 the Song emperor Zhenzong issued an edict requiring private individuals to submit their manuscripts to local officials prior to publication. However, these regulations were difficult to enforce, and by the late Ming censorship primarily occurred after a work was published, as in the case of Li Zhi’s writings.28 The Ming state did reserve for itself the authority to print certain types of material, including astronomical texts, natural histories, and calendars, and it established standard, orthodox editions of the Confucian classics. But these exclusive rights were not always respected, and even when they were, they affected only a minority of texts, leaving printers at liberty to print or reprint other works. Consequently multiple and inconsistent editions of essays, novels, epistolary anthologies, poetry, and drama flourished unchecked, and printers freely festooned the covers and title pages of updated editions with the phrases “revised,” “re-carved,” and “corrected.” Like their European counterparts, early modern Chinese authors generally regarded printing as a provisional step in the process of a book’s development. Li’s peers thought nothing of publishing and republishing—or adding to—versions of their own and their friends’ writings.29
While the extant evidence does not allow us to conclude decisively that Li Zhi augmented his works between the publication of successive editions, comments culled from his letters suggest that, like his peers, he was continually revising, editing, and supplementing his works. In one letter, written in 1588 to his friend Jiao Hong, who would later compose a preface for Another Book to Burn, Li confides, “A Book to Burn is already more than a hundred pages long. I do not know how much more I shall add to it.”30 Elsewhere he writes, “I’m seventy-five years old. I’ll die any day now, but I still dwell among books; my brush is always moist, and my ink stone always wet.”31 More tellingly he declares, “My hand writes down whatever crosses my mind, and as I write, I publish; this process cannot be stopped.”32 Together these remarks imply that like many of his contemporaries in Europe, Li did not view publication as the culminating stage in a book’s production but rather as a moment in the long and complex process of creating a text.33
Another factor contributing to the coexistence of contending editions of individual titles was that in an era before the notion of intellectual property had fully matured, it was not uncommon for Chinese printers to produce unauthorized editions of popular works. Having obtained a copy of a text, they could have a set of wood blocks carved, print copies, and profit from the proceeds, even if they had taken no part in the intellectual labor of authoring the text. In an effort to thwart such “promiscuous reprinting” and protect their products, certain printers added to the covers and front matter menacing phrases like “Book pirates will be prosecuted.”34 But these warnings were rarely enforced and ultimately served little more than a rhetorical function. As a statement by Li’s patron Ma Jinglun (1562–1605) attests, a large number of editions of Li’s works were printed under such shady circumstances:
The books that circulate as Li Zhi’s in the world today, such as the Shaanxi edition of Nanxun lu, the Changlu edition of Longxi ji, the Huizhou edition of Sanjiao pin, the Jining edition of Daoxue chao, the Yongping edition of Dao gu lu, and the Shanxi edition of Ming deng lu, are all works by people who did not know the gentleman; they simply enjoyed reading his books and took delight in printing them. The gentleman had no knowledge of this. What’s more, booksellers, greedy for profit, saw that by printing his books they could make a killing. So whenever they could get their hands on one of the gentleman’s manuscripts, there was nothing they would not bring out in print.35
Unsurprisingly, the textual accuracy of these pirated editions was dubious. Yet remarkably certain authors not only tolerated but even championed the production of such works. The seventeenth-century Chinese publisher Zhang Chao (1650–ca. 1711), for instance, claimed that many authors were so delighted to have their works reprinted that they didn’t care who printed them.36 In Europe, Erasmus, whose books were also notoriously pirated, is known to have turned a blind eye toward the unsanctioned reproduction of his writings. His actions suggest that no matter how many errors these illegitimate editions contained, he believed they would further the broad dissemination of his ideas.37 Montaigne even proudly took credit for the five editions of the Essays that appeared during his lifetime, although only four of them were printed legally.38 According to Ma Jinglun, Li Zhi remained ignorant of the unauthorized reproduction of his writings. Yet one wonders whether, had he been aware of these rogue editions, he would have self-righteously denounced their fraudulence or, like Montaigne, endorsed them. One can even imagine Li mischievously titling a volume A Book to Pirate.
If Li himself was ignorant of or unfazed by the widespread phenomenon of book piracy, others of his era were not. The illegitimate reproduction of books brought with it a host of complications, for woodblock printing and movable type each endowed printers with the ability to tamper with, alter, and expurgate texts for their own ends. And commercial printers on both continents, eager to boost revenue, took great liberties with the texts they produced: they removed, inserted, and rearranged passages at whim. Li’s senior contemporary Lang Ying (1487– ca. 1566) was among the many who decried this practice: “Bookshops have only profit as their aim, and every time they chance on the good books printed in various provinces, should these books be expensive, the Fujian bookshops will immediately reprint them. The number of fascicles and the table of contents will be exactly the same, but the contents [of the books] will be greatly diminished without anyone knowing, thus one book can be sold for the price of half a book, and people fight to buy it.”39 According one of the prefaces to Another Book to Burn, studied below, Li’s books were “counterfeited and muddled” in precisely this manner.40 Li’s friend Yuan Zhongdao (1570–1623) testified that editions of Li’s works were also “regrettably augmented” by miscellaneous materials.41
The liberties Chinese publishers took with texts were in no way unusual. European printers routinely disregarded the royal privileges that, in theory, protected rival shops’ exclusive printing rights. Instead printers would obtain books manufactured by their competitors, have the type reset, and run off editions or partial editions of their own. If they reduced the typeface or deleted portions of text, these volumes could sometimes be sold for a fraction of the book’s original price.42 Textual manipulations of this kind were widespread throughout seventeenth-century Europe and are recorded in the comments of the Englishman Richard Head (ca. 1637–ca. 1686): “If one Bookseller printed a book that sold, another would get it printed in a lesser Character, and so the book being less in bulk, although the same in matter, would sell it for a great deal less in price, and so undersel [sic] one another: and of late there hath been hardly a book but it is epitomized, and for the most part spoiled, only for a little gain: so that few books that are good, are now printed, only Collections and patches out of several books.”43 While infringements of this sort were exceedingly common in China as well as Europe and clearly affected Li’s writings, the abuse most strongly associated with our author was forgery—that is, the production of new texts deliberately misattributed to Li Zhi. Knowing that books bearing Li’s name could turn an enormous profit, printers habitually affixed his name to works blatantly written by other people in imitation Li’s style. So frequently was Li’s name co-opted for such commercial purposes that the phenomenon was well documented soon after Li’s death. As his friend and admirer Yuan Zhongdao confirms, “Li Zhi’s books have been sold under the names of other people and adulterated.”44 Concerns about the forgery of Li’s texts also feature prominently in the prefaces to Another Book to Burn.
The works most commonly attributed spuriously to Li Zhi were fiction and drama commentaries. One modern scholar has identified at least eleven editions of fiction and drama that list Li’s name as commentator, even though there is no strong evidence that he actually authored any of the remarks in these books.45 In at least one case, two discrepant sets of commentaries sold under Li’s name seem to undermine one another’s authenticity: in 1614, Li Zhi’s name was appended to a 120-chapter edition of the contemporary novel Outlaws of the Marsh, although it had already been listed four years earlier in association with the 100-chapter version of the same book. The substance of these two sets of comments was entirely different, which suggests that one or both texts was likely a fake.46 These works and the uncertainty surrounding their authorship generated doubt about the authenticity of editions bearing Li Zhi’s name.
Li was unquestionably among the late Ming authors whose works were most frequently forged. Yet it was common practice for Chinese book merchants to affix the names of best-selling authors to less alluring texts. Some near contemporaries whose works were also frequently forged for commercial purposes were Chen Jiru (1558–1639), Yuan Hongdao, Feng Menglong (1574–1646), and Zhong Xing (1574–1625).47 The renowned editor and publisher Yu Xiangdou (fl. 1596) is known to have reprinted and sold the same historical treatise under the names of no fewer than three different well-known contemporary authors within a ten-year span. Perhaps he was trying to test empirically which “brand name” would sell the greatest number of copies.48 The names and reputations of famous authors were also used to sell various other products. By one account, Chen Jiru’s name appeared on a certain delicious kind of bean cake, and his portrait was found adorning the signs hanging from wine shops and teahouses with which he had scarcely any connection. Apparently the mere association with a well-known man of letters, no matter how tenuous or even invented the connection may have been, lent these establishments an air of refinement.49
Problems of mislabeling and misattribution pervaded the early modern world and affected all spheres of cultural activity. In China, paintings, calligraphy, antiques, and collectibles as well as ancient and modern books were all routinely forged, copied, and misattributed. The notorious book forger Feng Fang (1493–1566) used ancient-style characters to fabricate editions of canonical works such as the Book of Changes, the Book of Documents, the Classic of Poetry, and the Spring and Autumn Annals, which he then attempted to pass off as earlier, more authentic versions of the classics than the copies widely in circulation at the time. Feng’s forgeries took their place alongside similar hoaxes by Yang Shen (1488–1559) and Wang Shizhen, who also produced editions of “lost, ancient” books.50 Antique objects and both ancient and contemporary artwork were also often objects of forgery.51 One biographer of the artist Chen Hongshou declared that his prints had been forged by thousands of hands.52 Although this number is obviously inflated for dramatic effect, these accounts help to situate the counterfeiting and piracy of Li Zhi’s works in their cultural context. These acts of falsification were not isolated phenomena; such illicit reproduction formed an inescapable part of the early modern cultural landscape.
ON BOOK COLLECTING AND THE PROBLEM OF FINDING RELIABLE EDITIONS
Did anyone care? Were contemporaries perturbed by the abundance of unreliable editions? Or were early modern readers content to consume whatever editions were close to hand, regardless of their accuracy? Art historian Craig Clunas, who has meticulously studied late Ming manuals of taste, avers that his sources rarely mention books as objects of connoisseurship, even though these texts devote considerable space to detailing the criteria by which to discriminate between genuine and false antique ink stones, incense burners, and other material objects.53 Ming readers certainly displayed remarkably catholic taste in the subjects about which they chose to read, and a great many readers, including Li Zhi himself, were also unperturbed by the poor quality or inaccuracy of the book editions they may have consulted or owned. But despite this indifference on the part of some, certain discriminating book collectors did take care to distinguish rigorously among credible and questionable editions of books. Moreover, regardless of readers’ actual behavior, authors and editors strove to promote readers’ awareness of the discrepancies among editions and to establish their own editions as unassailably authoritative.
The late Ming dynasty saw a spike in the numbers of individuals involved in collecting books as well as in the size of the collections they amassed. Whereas in the Northern Song dynasty, a collection of 50,000 fascicles would have been impressively large, Ming book collectors amassed collections exceeding 80,000 fascicles.54 And although Li Zhi was likely exaggerating, he boasted that even in his remote mountain retreat at the Cloister of the Flourishing Buddha he had access to “thousands of fascicles.”55 In urban pockets across Europe, book collections also grew as members of the increasingly literate bourgeoisie sought to improve or affirm their cultural standing. By the mid-seventeenth century it was not unusual for European doctors and lawyers to possess over a thousand volumes, and some, including the Spanish author Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), owned as many as 5,000 tomes.56 Li Zhi’s contemporary Hu Yinglin (1551–1602), drawing upon a distinction first made by the Song dynasty painter Mi Fu (1051–1107) with regard to collectors of paintings, classified the growing numbers of Chinese book collectors into two types. True connoisseurs (jianshangzhe) possessed genuine aesthetic or scholarly appreciation of the objects in their collections, while mere enthusiasts (haoshizhe) used collecting instrumentally as a means to exhibit their social status.57 In early modern China, the latter category was sharply on the ascent, its numbers swelled by upwardly mobile merchants seeking to flaunt their newly acquired affluence and leverage it to obtain positions of cultural prestige.58 Yet individuals of both kinds had a strong incentive to avoid purchasing phony publications: true scholars eschewed them out of concern that faulty texts might distort their understanding of the content and meaning of the texts at hand, and mere enthusiasts shunned these volumes because, by doing so, they demonstrated their refinement and discriminating taste.
On both continents consumers with social pretentions were as eager to avoid laying out great sums for spurious or incomplete texts as they were to avoid paying dearly for false objects such as bogus antiques and counterfeited coins. As early as 1522, the Italian jurist Giovanni Nevizzano of Asti (d. 1540) complained of the difficulty of distinguishing between reliable and spurious volumes: “The great number of books makes it difficult to find individual ones. . . . Take care which books you should buy; and you, bookseller, take thought about which list to give to your customer, in what order the books should be printed, and how the fascicles gathered.”59 Remarks like these also resounded throughout sixteenth-century China. An author who referred to himself as The Old Man of Five Lakes (Wuhu laoren) wrote, “Between heaven and earth, it is difficult to find an authentic man, and it is also rare to encounter an authentic book.”60
In both regions, savvy readers began to develop sophisticated strategies for negotiating among conflicting editions, as well as methods for identifying forgeries. So sustained and meticulous were European collectors’ efforts to differentiate between authentic and bogus texts and to catalogue them comprehensively, that the European historian Anthony Grafton has observed, “In the Renaissance . . . forger and critic marched in lockstep.”61 European bibliophiles were assisted in their efforts by the relatively strict regulation of book publication there. Although this system was imperfectly enforced, the fact that, at least in theory, books had to be cleared with the authorities prior to publication enabled European collectors to assemble comprehensive (or allegedly comprehensive) bibliographies of all the books circulating within a certain jurisdiction. These lists could then be annotated with researched or anecdotal evidence of which volumes had been pirated.
Early in the sixteenth century, Renaissance humanists pioneered elaborate philological methods of textual comparison in an effort to establish standard editions of classical texts, both pagan and Christian. Building upon this foundation, the great Swiss bibliographer Konrad Gesner undertook the monumental task of assembling his Bibliotheca Universalis, a comprehensive catalogue of all extant works in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. In the preface to his magnum opus, Gesner outlined the purpose of his project: “I have prepared this list not for learned persons alone, but for everyone, so that even persons with little education might be informed as by a mute teacher, about the reliability and usefulness of every book, or the lack thereof.”62 Gesner envisioned a reading public deeply concerned with not only the textual accuracy but also the material authenticity of books. More striking, for him the problem of verifying texts’ authenticity extended beyond elite circles of readers; it affected all individuals’ interactions with books.
In the following generations, prominent bibliophiles such as Josias Simler (1531–1576), Jacob Fries (1541–1611), and François Grudé de La Croix du Maine (1552–1592) elaborated upon Gesner’s work. In an authorial preface to la Croix du Maine’s monumental, multivolume Bibliothèque françoise, written in 1584, the Frenchman declared, “Many people usurp and attribute to themselves the labors of others, and this [my] book will uncover [their vices].” He further avowed, “I detest and abhor [book forgers and pirates] as much as anyone else living in my century.”63 With these concerns in mind, he designed his Bibliothèque to empower readers to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate recensions of ancient texts and also to differentiate between accurate and unreliable editions of contemporary texts. He described his project in these words:
I have not contented myself to put in these Latin and French bibliographies [merely] the catalogue of works written by each author, but in addition I have included by whom they were printed, as well as the size of the margins and the dimensions of each book, how many pages it contained, and above all the name of the person to whom it was dedicated. This I have done without omitting any of the books’ qualities. And furthermore, I have noted down the beginning or the first line of each work and composition, and provided some information on when the authors lived, as well as many other minute details, which I will not enumerate here, but which nonetheless I have observed in these Catalogues.64
La Croix du Maine also sternly cautioned readers of the prevalence of fake editions. One entry, for instance, bore the following warning: “[Michel de Nostre-Dame] wrote an infinite number of Almanacs and Prognostications, which were so well received and which sold so well that many people imitated them and borrowed the name of the aforementioned Nostredamus so that they could achieve greater renown and reputation.”65 In China, the absence of laws requiring prepublication censorship would have made it impossible to compile a bibliography as comprehensive as that of la Croix du Maine. However, despite the vast scale on which books were being produced, contemporary Chinese continued valiantly to attempt to catalogue them. Yet the amount of care taken in distinguishing authentic from phony publications differed greatly depending on the genre and cultural status of the works in question. Needless to say, there was much more at stake in securing reliable editions of canonical texts than there was in obtaining the most authoritative edition of a joke book or popular drama. For this reason, the government sponsored lists of authorized editions of classical literature but left the rest unclassified. Some publishing houses printed catalogues of their inventories, and a few dedicated bibliophiles made lists of the books they owned or knew of. For instance, Li’s close friend Jiao Hong, who served as a compiler for the Ming dynastic history, published an extensive bibliography recording the titles of both extant and lost books, and the renowned book collector Huang Yuji (1629–1691), who also served as a compiler for the state history, recorded the titles of over 15,600 works, most of which dated from the Ming dynasty. The quality and type of the information these privately produced catalogues purveyed varied considerably, yet even the most accurate records did not provide such detailed information as did Gesner’s Bibliotheca Universalis. It was not until the eighteenth century, under the influence of evidential scholarship (kaozheng xue), that significant numbers of Chinese bibliographers began to regard information about the editions of contemporary books as worthy of careful documentation.66
The Ming bibliophiles who expressed concern over forgery and piracy seem to have done so in relatively general terms. In his widely read Unofficial Gleanings of the Wanli Era (Wanli yehuo bian), Shen Defu (1578–1642) warned of “cunning rogues who forge texts or print only half of them so as to deceive gullible buyers.” He insisted that “there were hundreds of such volumes,” but unlike la Croix du Maine, Shen did not have the resources necessary to detail their precise dimensions or list their exact publication information.67 Like Shen, the book collector and author Hu Yinglin also alerted readers to the prevalence of book falsification and urged his fellow collectors to act with caution.68 But Hu went one step further; he listed the titles of several contemporary books he believed were falsified. Another late Ming literatus, Qian Xiyan (fl. 1612), entered into greater detail. The “False Books” (Yan shu) chapter of his Playing with Flaws (Xi xia) mentions Li Zhi by name and provides information on which specific works by Li were published illegitimately. He even exposes the identity of the forger, Ye Zhou (fl. 1595–1624), an erudite and often inebriated young playboy who hailed from Liangxi, near Suzhou, and published with the Hangzhou publishing house Rongyutang.69 The text supplies similar, though less detailed information on the unauthorized printing of a work by Yuan Hongdao.70 Qian’s account is considerably more specific than those of Shen and Hu, yet unlike contemporary European bibliographies, which aimed for comprehensiveness, Qian’s text remains selective, unsystematic, and anecdotal.
The thoroughness of Chinese and Europeans’ responses to the onslaught of unreliable editions differed: Europeans produced lengthy and detailed catalogues that aimed to account for works in all genres, while their Chinese contemporaries assembled distinct government-sponsored lists for canonical works and privately assembled lists for noncanonical and contemporary works. Regardless of the genres being classified, Chinese bibliographers tended to pay far less attention to the physical characteristics of volumes than did their European contemporaries. Nonetheless, in both places in the sixteenth century, concerned collectors strove to point out and warn consumers against the proliferation of unauthorized books. The most vociferous critics of book forgery and piracy, however, were not readers or collectors, but authors and editors, who felt that greedy printers were unfairly cashing in on their reputations and profiting from their literary labors.
ESTABLISHING A DEFINITIVE EDITION
The preface writers to Another Book to Burn, Li Zhi’s friends Jiao Hong, Zhang Nai (jinshi 1604), and Wang Benke, were all deeply troubled by the abundant falsified editions of Li’s works.71 Each of the prefaces argues for the authenticity of this work, a compilation of writings left behind upon Li’s death, lovingly collated by Wang, and published in Wanling, Anhui in 1618. Acknowledging the prevalence of spurious editions of Li’s works, the preface writers exhibit varying degrees of doubt in readers’ ability to distinguish among them. Their bid for the authenticity of their own volume rests primarily on claims of Wang’s personal familiarity with the author and on assertions of the care and meticulousness with which he edited the text.
These criteria for authenticity closely mirror those invoked by Montaigne’s disciple Marie de Gournay in her posthumous prefaces to the French essayist’s magnum opus. Like Li’s preface writers, Gournay compiled the writings Montaigne left behind after his death, in 1592. These consisted of additions to and revisions of the author’s existing essays, not entirely new works, as was the case for Li in 1602. Nonetheless, Gournay’s task resembled that of Li’s preface writers insofar as, like them, she took a keen interest in denouncing spurious editions and establishing the authority of her new edition. Two editions of the Essays had appeared between 1593 and 1595 and omitted whole chapters or retitled them.72 Thus the preface writers to Another Book to Burn and the Essays shared the aspiration to discredit such misleading editions and to inspire readers’ confidence in the reliability of their own editorial work.73
All three preface writers to Another Book to Burn were painfully aware that Li’s works had been widely falsified. While they shared the conviction that their own volume was unassailably authentic, they differed in the degree of confidence they placed in readers’ abilities to recognize its value and to discriminate accurately between false and authentic editions. Jiao was the most optimistic. He proclaimed, “There are many apocryphal editions [but] those in the know scorn them.”74 Wang and Zhang, however, remained slightly more skeptical. In a passage that rings with ambivalence, Wang opined:
Within our four seas there is no one who does not read Li Zhi’s writings, no one who does not aspire to read all of them. They read them without stopping, and even read forgeries. Those who counterfeit Li Zhi’s works, imitate his style, and forge his commentaries want to deceive people. But they cannot deceive people incapable of being deceived. The world does not lack people of insight; undoubtedly they can tell the difference [between authentic and spurious editions]. Yet down to the present day, every play, lewd joke, and fiction commentary that you see in bookstores is marked with the words “By Master Zhuowu.” People gullible enough to believe whatever they hear are enthralled by these editions, which inflict considerable damage on people’s hearts and minds. Li Zhi’s spirit must be in deep anguish. This is what I greatly fear.75
Wang’s uncertainty of readers’ powers of discrimination is unmistakable. On the one hand he ardently hopes and even asserts that readers do indeed possess the perspicacity to distinguish true Li Zhi editions from false ones: forgers “cannot deceive people incapable of being deceived.” But on the other hand, he worries that readers may ultimately lack the necessary judgment to tell Li’s real works from fakes, for he avows that forgers already “inflict considerable damage on people’s hearts and minds.” Zhang’s preface expresses even graver misgivings:
Because Zhuowu’s books are important, both real editions and fake editions circulate in the world. In this world, few people have eyes. For this reason, they are not able to discover the intention behind the real editions; and when they read the fake editions, they are misled. . . . Today commoners surpass Li Zhi’s outrageousness and indulge in wanton acts; they take pleasure in behaving like petty, unscrupulous men. At the slightest provocation, they pick up their brushes and throw into confusion the writings Li Zhi left behind, and they claim that their works are his lost manuscripts. For instance, if reading an ancient book, someone with a solid foundation [in learning] might investigate the evidence and establish a definitive edition. By doing so, he would “dot the eyes of the painted dragon” [i.e., add the crucial touch that would bring the authentic work to life].76 But people who lack this foundation comment at random; they are only “marking the gunwale to show where the oar sank” [i.e., using fruitless and illogical methods].77 Alas! How can I find a person with eyes to read Zhuowu’s book?78
Zhang’s preface seems to register his despair over the lack of readers endowed with sufficient judgment to distinguish between authentic and phony editions of Li’s works. Yet he concludes by asserting that the fake editions are “not worthy of discussion,” praises Wang for attempting to establish definitive editions, and affirms that Wang has succeeded in “preventing the authoritative editions from rotting away.”79 Jiao sees the situation in a more positive light. His comments imply that Wang’s volume is so irrefutably authentic that its publication will ensure that “those who publish false editions will no longer be able to do so.”80
The preface writers anchor the authority of Wang’s editions in two major criteria, both of which find parallels in Gournay’s prefaces to Montaigne’s Essays. In each case, authority rests on the editor’s personal familiarity with the author and on the care the editor took in compiling the manuscript. Wang’s preface opens with a detailed description of his close relationship with Li Zhi. This recital, which is corroborated by Jiao’s preface, functions rhetorically to shore up Wang’s position as uniquely capable of making editorial decisions regarding Li’s work. Implicit in Wang’s and Jiao’s remarks is the observation that since rival compilers and printers did not know Li personally, their editions cannot possibly be as reliable as Wang’s own. Wang writes, “I, [Wang Ben] Ke, followed the late gentleman [Li Zhi] for nine years. Day and night I kept him company and never left his side for even a moment. No one served him for as long as I did, and no one was in a better position to know his true nature than I.”81 Wang’s claim to have produced the authentic edition of Li’s remaining writings draws subtly on the ancient Chinese concept of the soul mate, literally “the one who knows the sound” (zhi yin). This concept derives from the tale of the mythological zither player Bo Ya and his close friend and sympathetic listener Zhong Ziqi, who always uncannily knew just what was on Bo Ya’s mind as he was plucking or strumming his instrument.82 The image of the compassionate friend who “knows the sound” was adapted by the literary critic Liu Xie (ca. 465–ca. 522) in his Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin diaolong) and came to refer to a “singularly understanding reader.” Such a reader would possess prodigious powers of empathy that would enable him to gain access to the author’s intentions, which, although manifested in the structure and wording of the text, may not be fully perceptible to obtuse or novice readers, let alone those with “eyes of flesh.” By allocating to himself the role of Li’s “singularly understanding reader,” Wang rhetorically establishes a pipeline to Li’s authorial intentions and in so doing lays claim to the perfect authenticity of his edition. Yet, as illustrated in the following chapter, Wang’s theory of hermeneutics—his understanding of where meaning resides and how it is to be accessed—accords only partially with Li’s own.
Independently of the concept of “the one who knows the sound,” Gournay employed a similar technique: though unrelated to Montaigne by blood or marriage, she repeatedly referred to herself as the essayist’s “daughter” (fille), and alluded to him as her “father” (père).83 Defending her intellectual progenitor against accusations of impiety, Gournay’s preface invokes her special relationship with her “father,” stating, “It is I who have the right to speak in this regard, for I alone was perfectly acquainted with that great soul, and it is I who have the right to be trusted.”84 So close was the spiritual bond she claims to have shared with Montaigne that she even self-aggrandizingly dubbed herself “another himself.”85 This phrase strengthens her claim to privileged access to the author’s thoughts, for its diction echoes the manner in which Montaigne, in his well-known essay “On Friendship” (De l’amitié), described his soul fused to that of his boon companion Estienne de la Boëtie. Through rhetorical techniques designed to accentuate her personal acquaintance with the author and her unique understanding of his character, Gournay, like Wang, angled to solidify her credibility and to strengthen readers’ confidence in the faithfulness of her text to the original.
The second method these editors used to bolster the credibility of their editions was to describe the care they took in collecting and reviewing materials for inclusion. Here again Wang’s remarks are less copious than those of Gournay, though their import is analogous. Wang modestly squeezes the narration of his editorial process into a single sentence: “I collected the unpublished manuscripts of A Book to Burn and On the Four Books, and collated them along with my elder brother Bolun.”86 This terse statement is corroborated by Jiao and Zhang, each of whom remarks upon Wang’s meticulousness as an editor. Jiao writes, “Wang of Xin’an followed [Li Zhi] for ten years and gathered together his scattered writings, leaving none behind.”87 And Zhang lauds Wang for the great service he did Li by “establishing definitive copies of his real books, providing them with tables of contents, and transmitting them to people throughout China.”88
Gournay’s preface accomplishes the same end in significantly more words. Displaying what one critic has characterized as “virtually paranoid anguish” over proving the legitimacy of her edition, she devotes several full pages to denigrating devious or careless printers as “plunderers and filchers of books,” all the while praising her own painstaking editorial efforts.89 Among other virtues, she announces proudly that her edition “follows [Montaigne’s original text] more than exactly.”90 These were no hollow boasts: Gournay’s 1595 edition contains significantly fewer typographical errors than any edition of the Essays appearing during Montaigne’s life.91
By invoking the editor’s intimacy with the author and calling attention to his or her scrupulous attention to detail, these preface writers attempted to shield the works at hand from contamination and to quell readers’ fears that the present editions could be tainted. Yet ironically the editors’ insistence on the accuracy of their texts only highlights the ubiquity of the problem of fraudulence in both cultures. As the European book historian Adrian Johns has noted, “With piracy regarded as an omnipresent hazard, no individual was automatically immune from the label of pirate, and no book too grand to be called a piracy.”92
The editors’ goal of persuading readers of the authenticity of their editions contrasts sharply with the rhetoric of bluff, which I have identified as paradigmatic of the early modern period. Unlike Li Zhi, whose writings assail readers with a variety of paradoxical and incongruous opinions, the preface writers to these texts take on an overtly suasive role vis-à-vis readers. Far from challenging each reader to exercise his own judgment and trusting him to arrive at his own conclusions, the preface writers act as brokers of authenticity; they present readers with ready-made assessments and endeavor to impose upon them an interpretive scheme, which they expect readers to accept uncritically. Yet the passive role these preface writers envisioned for readers accounts for only one facet of Li’s far more complex ideas on the production and location of textual meaning. The following chapter examines Li’s contradictory statements on the relationship between reader and text, his own eccentric interpretive practices, and historical readers’ reactions to his texts. Motivating this inquiry is the desire to find out whether his texts, like their prefaces, encouraged readers to accept authoritative judgments or provoked readers to draw their own boldly idiosyncratic conclusions.