The Development of Traditional Chinese Book Forms

The Development of Traditional Chinese Book Forms

China is an ancient civilization with a long history and culture. Since the invention of characters, the development of books has never stopped. Books in any form are the essence of historical deposits. The process of historical development is also a process of continuous development of production technology. The development of productive forces drives the development of various aspects of society, forming different characteristics of each period and endowing books with different forms.

At the same time, books of different forms record the history of human civilization and also document people's wisdom. Roughly speaking, the form of a book refers to its appearance, a three-dimensional, multi-level, multi-faceted, and multi factor form of information transmission.

The premise for the emergence of books was writing, but it was not until the 8th century BC, long after the appearance of writing, that the earliest formal and relatively complete form of books, known as "bamboo slips", emerged. The ancient Western Jin Confucian scholar Du Yu said in his preface to the collection of the Spring and Autumn Annals:

People cut bamboo and wood into narrow strips, scrape and tidy them up, and write on them. The individual bamboo and wood pieces are called "Jian", and when several bamboo and wood strips are combined, they are called "Ce". Therefore, it is also known as "Jian Ce", which is one of the early forms of books in China. 'Book' is a pictographic character, resembling one long and one short, with two parts in the middle. A single summary cannot accommodate many words, and long articles must be compiled into strategies using many summaries. At that time, an article was like a volume, and the term 'article' was the unit of measurement at that time. This type of bamboo slips, written on bamboo and wood and linked together into volumes, was the main form of Chinese books for a long time before the invention of paper.

Many ancient Chinese classics were written in the form of bamboo slips, such as the Book of Documents and the Book of Songs, as well as works such as the Zuo Family Biography of the Spring and Autumn Period, the Guoyu, and the Records of the Grand Historian. The most typical books unearthed during the Western Jin Dynasty, such as the Bamboo Annals, and the recently unearthed Sun Tzu's Art of War in Linyi, Shandong, were all written in bamboo and wood. With the improvement and rapid development of modern production technology, people began to use silk to record things. In Mozi, there is a record of 'writing on silk and carving on gold and stone'. Documents written on silk in ancient China have been unearthed, including Chu and Han silk books. Silk book, also known as Zengshu. A silk book refers to the text written on silk. The original meaning of silk is white silk fabric, which is the primary silk fabric in its natural color.

In the Eastern Han Dynasty, Cai Lun, after careful research and drawing on the experience of his predecessors, invented paper. Later, he improved it and named it "Cai Hou Paper" after him. Since then, paper has been recognized by people and has become the most important writing material. The improvement of paper and the development of modern science have provided better materials for books, making paper lighter, more favorable for people's writing methods, and more affordable. The change in paper design has also promoted the development of books and entered a new stage.

Scrolls are the longest used form of books and the earliest form of books made of paper. Later on, it evolved into a spiral wind pack, which is a type of paper that is written page by page and pasted on a scroll paper with a distance of one centimeter between each sheet in order, increasing the capacity of the book. The difference between it and a scroll can only be reflected when unfolded for reading. Afterwards, it is called folding binding, which repeatedly folds the pre written paper into a fold, and then attaches a cover to the front and back of the fold to protect the book. This binding form has completely separated from scrolls and is widely used today.

The format of the album is the mature form of books, and the early album design was butterfly design, abbreviated as butterfly design, which emerged with the development of woodblock printing technology. It is a book form in which a printed paper page is folded inward and then bound into a book shape with the middle seam as the standard. The pages are unfolded to both sides, like a butterfly spreading its wings and flying, hence the name "Butterfly Pack". The folding method for back packaging and butterfly packaging is exactly the opposite. It folds the pages with words upright, with the center of the page facing outward and one opening facing inward. The paper is twisted and bound with perforations, covered with a cover, and wrapped around the spine of the book. Its emergence marks the increasingly mature form of Chinese books

Line bound books are the most mature binding form of ancient Chinese books, closest to modern paperback books. It has no difference in folding compared to back packaging, but the main difference lies in the cover and binding method. It separates the front and back of the book cover into a cover and a back cover, without wrapping the spine. The paper twisting and perforation binding is changed to cotton thread or silk thread binding. Its emergence has formed a unique book binding form in China, and its strong national style still enjoys a high reputation internationally, making it a symbol of Chinese books

The Development of Traditional Chinese Book Forms