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[Tibet Libre]

http://plos.deepdyve...ical-DvbPEt1L0k

The author writes "Liu Hsin's catalog contained 603 titles in 13,219 chüan (volumes)". But what exactly are chüan in this context, single scrolls? I can understand that books were made up in these early times of a number of scrolls, but what puzzles me is that the author continues to use the term unchangingly into the age of codices, for instance here: "Mao Chin (1599-1659 A.D.) printed approximately six hundred works - of over 84,000 chüan at his library". Is one chüan to be understood now as one book?

Edited by Tibet Libre, 23 August 2011 - 03:08 AM.

[JohnD]

Yeah, 卷 [juan] is volume, a single book or scroll in a larger collection or series.

[mohistManiac]

http://plos.deepdyve...ical-DvbPEt1L0k

The author writes "Liu Hsin's catalog contained 603 titles in 13,219 chüan (volumes)". But what exactly are chüan in this context, single scrolls? I can understand that books were made up in these early times of a number of scrolls, but what puzzles me is that the author continues to use the term unchangingly into the age of codices, for instance here: "Mao Chin (1599-1659 A.D.) printed approximately six hundred works - of over 84,000 chüan at his library". Is one chüan to be understood now as one book?

I would venture that the titles might individuate independent works based on different authors or creators such as Confucius and Mozi would be two separate titles. There cannot be as many authors as the actual works that have been accomplished under their names. If you divide evenly it would be about 22 chuan per title in the first instance. In the age of codices it would not be convenient to make volumes very big as they are no longer scrolls and the pages would be too many to keep track of conveniently. There would be 140 chuan to a similar number of titles in the second instance. On this you can infer that scroll volumes could have been containing about seven times worth more in words per scroll when compared to the volumes in the form of codices. Perhaps even used seven times more paper until the advent of codices which dispersed them into more chapters.

[Tibet Libre]

So you would say that books were produced in multiple volumens even in the days of the codices? Seems unnecessary because one of the great advantages of the codex over the scroll is that it can contain more contents without becoming impractical (=overlong).

[mohistManiac]

So you would say that books were produced in multiple volumens even in the days of the codices? Seems unnecessary because one of the great advantages of the codex over the scroll is that it can contain more contents without becoming impractical (=overlong).

I sort of remember images of medieval codices being these very large volumes that you can't even carry around.

[JohnD]

So you would say that books were produced in multiple volumens even in the days of the codices? Seems unnecessary because one of the great advantages of the codex over the scroll is that it can contain more contents without becoming impractical (=overlong).

Yes, but many works were really big. Take the Taiping guangji, for example. This was a collection of short stories compiled by Li Fang during the early Song dynasty. It consisted of 500 juan, over 7,000 stories. Maybe some of those juan could have been combined into a single book, I don't know. I suspect preference was an issue as well as practicality. Even today books are published in multiple volumes. Here in Taiwan, and I've seen it in Japan as well, books that aren't all that long, maybe 500 or 600 pages, are split into two volumes instead of having it in just book. Smaller books are easier to carry around and read.