{"product_id":"commerce-in-culture-cynthia-j-brokaw-9780674024496","title":"Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods","description":"\u003cp\u003eSibao today is a cluster of impoverished villages in the mountains of western Fujian. Yet from the late seventeenth through the early twentieth century, it was home to a flourishing publishing industry. Through itinerant booksellers and branch bookshops managed by Sibao natives, this industry supplied much of south China with cheap educational texts, household guides, medical handbooks, and fortune-telling manuals. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIt is precisely the ordinariness of Sibao imprints that make them valuable for the study of commercial publishing, the text-production process, and the geographical and social expansion of book culture in Chinese society. In a study with important implications for cultural and economic history, Cynthia Brokaw describes rural, lower-level publishing and bookselling operations at the end of the imperial period. \u003ci\u003eCommerce in Culture\u003c\/i\u003e traces how the poverty and isolation of Sibao necessitated a bare-bones approach to publishing and bookselling and how the Hakka identity of the Sibao publishers shaped the configuration of their distribution networks and even the nature of their publications. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eSibao's industry reveals two major trends in print culture: the geographical extension of commercial woodblock publishing to hinterlands previously untouched by commercial book culture and the related social penetration of texts to lower-status levels of the population.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Cynthia J. Brokaw\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0674024494\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780674024496\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Harvard University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 04\/01\/2007\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 673\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 2.43lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.23h x 6.45w x 1.98d","brand":"Cynthia J. Brokaw","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":48086755770623,"sku":"9780674024496","price":44.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_41c3ea84-d056-4667-a6a9-00762883c1f0.jpg?v=1769096392","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/commerce-in-culture-cynthia-j-brokaw-9780674024496","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}