I remember that one day in March 2003, I was transferred to Sanlian Bookstore for less than three months, so I asked Wu Bin, the editor of "Reading", to talk about the manuscript. At that time, I planned the "Detail Reading Series", hoping to enlarge the parts of things, tell the reasoning behind them, guide the interests of authors and readers, and avoid the impetuousness of the academic community. I listed several hypothetical titles: "Two Christian Churches", "Twelve Chairs of the Ming Dynasty", "Twenty Witnesses of Human nature"... The ancient famous objects made by Yang Zhishui are also started from the subtleties, which is very much in line with this meaning. Soon, Sanlian Bookstore organized a seminar for this series of books, and the participants included Lou Qingxi, Yang Hong, Yin Jinan, Bao Kun, Meng Hui, Zhang Lin, etc., and Yang Zhishui also participated.
At that time, the real name of Yang Zhishui was Zhao Liya, and later it was learned that she also had a name of Zhao Yonghui. People of similar ages know that the name "Liya" comes from the Soviet novel "The Road of Guria". "Yang Zhishui" comes from the Book of Poetry, and it is not clear what allusions "Zhao Yonghui" has.
The first book in the "DetailEd Reading Series" is Meng Hui's "Sixteen Voices of The Flower Room", which examines the sixteen ancient aristocratic women's objects involved in the "Flower Collection" in prose style, which is very popular with readers and is still being reprinted. A variety of series of books have been published, but there is no Yang Zhishui, because her manuscript is very sought-after, and it does not have to be placed in a set of books, such as her "Sanqi Three Towers" was given to Sanlian Bookstore at my appointment and published as a single book. Maybe it was a fate.
In April 2011, I transferred to the People's Fine Arts Publishing House, and soon talked with Yang Zhishui, wanting to produce a collection of her manuscripts on famous objects for more than twenty years, a set of the best editions. Fast forward a year, during which time she published three volumes of "Ten Years" and then made time to organize other book manuscripts. On May 23, 2012, I went to her house to make a preliminary agreement on the thirteen volumes of the "Persimmon Lou Collection". She listed a catalog, including "New Evidence of Famous Objects in poetry", "Tang and Song Dynasty Furniture Microscopy", "Song Dynasty Vase", "Two Song Dynasty Tea Events", "Looking at Paintings in Things", "Customs and Stories of Hiding in Things" and so on. I was very excited, and I had a phone call with Mr. Ning Chengchun on the same day and asked him to be a designer. This set of books is very suitable for his design, and he is very much in need of design. Out of his consistent support for me, Teacher Ning agreed. Told Yang Zhishui that she was also satisfied.
The so-called "Persimmon Building" is because there is a persimmon tree and an acacia tree in the yard of the Yangzhishui family, and the acacia tree is also known as the acacia tree. In 1991, when Yang Zhishui published "Reading The Secretary of the Persimmon Building", he asked Mr. Qi Gong to write the title of the book, and Mr. Qi also inscribed three large character horizontal plaques of "Persimmon Building", which can be used on the title of the series of books. After many negotiations, it was finally decided to publish twelve volumes, the first ten volumes have ready-made manuscripts (with the rigor of Yang Zhishui as a scholar, it also needs to be revised one by one, and it is not easy to find high-quality pictures); eleven and twelve volumes of "Ancient Chinese Gold and Silver Jewelry" and "Ancient Chinese Gold and Silverware" She still has to work hard to write from the beginning, but it is not delayed in the final production. On August 30 of that year, Chen Cuiling, general manager of Hong Kong Zhonghe Publishing House (former editor-in-chief of Hong Kong Sanlian Bookstore) and Lu Aijun, director of the editorial department, agreed with Yang Zhishui in my office that at the same time as the Renmei edition was published, they would publish the traditional Chinese version. On December 5, the three parties signed a publishing contract. The editor-in-charge is Wang Tieying, a graduate student of Professor Lin Meicun of Peking University who has been with Renmeisha for many years.
Inside page of "Incense Knowledge"
Thus began the publication of a set of imperial masterpieces. The order of publication is not in order of volume, but in which volume is completed, which volume is produced first. The earliest publications were the third volume of "Xiangzhi" and the fourth volume of "Song Dynasty Vases". "Incense Knowledge" talks about the ancient people's story of burning incense and incense, and the articles include "Lotus Incense Burner and Baozi", "Xianghe (Box)", "The Source Of the Two Song Incense Burners", "The Agarwood of the Song People" and other seven articles, the article is only 100,000 words, but the pictures are 200 or 300, and the index is full of 20 pages. The author believes: "Middle-earth incense has a long tradition, one is the use of sacrifice in the ceremonial system, and the other is the burning of incense in daily life. During the Wei and Jin dynasties, the various incense that spread with Buddhism to the east were only integrated into the local customs, rather than the creation of a new system. As for the prosperity and development of the two Song Dynasty, it is closely related to the maturity of the high seat. At that time, the burning of incense by the scholars was originally a real daily life, and later generations saw it as elegant, but on that day, it can be said that the elegance is ordinary everywhere. ”
"Song Dynasty Vase" also consists of seven articles, the content is slightly more open, in addition to talking about vases, but also talking about the vase-related "Pen Holder, Poetry Tube and Incense Tube", "Winter and Summer in the Song People's Living Room", "Famous Thorns, Prayers and Prayer Boxes" and so on.
The number of compilations after that is roughly these two styles, or more specialized, or open; there are many pictures, numerous annotations, and long indexes. Looking at this set of books, the biggest feature is to see the micro-knowledge, starting from the details, examining and explaining the lifestyle and cultural pursuits of the ancients, and drawing conclusions that have not been touched upon before. Yang Zhishui especially likes the word "microscopic" and uses it several times, probably because it is more appropriate to describe her method and direction of learning. Her "search" is more casual on the surface, with the premise of attracting her interest, in fact, as she herself said, keeping in mind the teacher's teachings, "tying trivial examinations to the main line of historical development", when writing articles, "almost all have a presupposition of a big topic behind it", and on the other hand, because she is interested in the selected topic, she can be patient, little by little, and combing, and sometimes have unexpected discoveries (for example, she finds warmth from the so-called "fierce" shapes and ornaments of today's people. Gentle stuff), which was the underpinnings of her insistence on her own research.
On the surface, this set of books looks a bit "miscellaneous", there is literature ("New Evidence of Poetry and Famous Things"), there is art ("Looking at Paintings in Things"), there is life ("Two Song Dynasty Tea"), there is religion ("Sanchi Three Pagodas"), but it is not chaotic, it seems to be miscellaneous and unified, in the final analysis, it is to restore the life of the ancients through the examination of famous objects. She said, "The ethos of an era is mostly embedded in the details of daily life. Her research is not the appreciation of antiques, not the identification of cultural relics, but from the staggered delicacy, she collects a two-traced scene of life and stitches together one or two pages of damaged historical pictures. It is this "miscellaneous" that supports the academic building of Yang Zhishui. From Yang Zhishui, I clearly saw the tradition of Mr. Wang Shixiang entering the field of research from an "unpopular" topic, and she did more specialized and in-depth than Wang Shixiang.
Because the research objects are relatively "cold" and more "miscellaneous", they are more "dangerous" in the process of argumentation, so she pays special attention to the role of visual materials that have been handed down to this day or unearthed in the new and old, and these ancient paintings and antiquities are one of the prerequisites for her research. Sometimes thousands of kilometers are traveled for a picture, to museums, to archaeological sites, and this picture sometimes determines the success or failure of a subject. In addition to researching based on visual data, she also frequently uses multiple examination methods to find clues from ancient texts, ancient poems, folk proverbs, slang, etc. These studies are themselves interesting. When she examined the "Children's Poems" and "Hundred Zi Tu", she found that "in classical Chinese literature, it is the least work that expresses this type of emotion", "in a vast classical literary kingdom, 'childlike fun' is a rare thing." A mature civilization does not leave enough room for the childlike heart and the fairy tales created with the childlike heart." So her research has the meaning of the empty valley foot sound.
Scholar Luo Shiping believes that Yang Zhishui's study of famous objects is "a concrete and microscopic close observation, a close-to microscopic historical method", and that "to do this well, we must exert both efforts in literature and images, which is both the tradition of famous materials and the character of modern scholarship... In addition to the method, the author presents a position of identifying famous objects, or "the concept of famous things". Yang Zhishui's research does have both a method of independent exploration and a clear personal position, and never follows the current.
Interestingly, Yang Zhishui's readership has greatly exceeded the professional scope of the debate of famous things, and has been loved by ordinary cultural people - in addition to interesting topics, it also has a lot to do with her good writing. Her essays are actually elegant prose, such as the opening chapter of "Song Dynasty Vase":
The appearance of vase flowers was as early as the Wei and Jin Dynasties, but at that time it was mostly associated with Buddhist art. Flower bottles really flourished in the Song Dynasty. Compared with before, one of its major characteristics is daily and popular. The difference is not only in the scale and scope, but also in the difference in weather and taste. A very important material factor that affects the trend of appreciation is the change of furniture, that is, the change of the furniture of the living room to the center of the table and chair. The development and maturity of the high seats, the exquisite elegance has thus settled in. The history of vase flowers and the history of furniture coincide at the right time, so that the flower bottles conform to the needs of the latter and become part of the interior furnishings, and together with the developed study room Qing play at the same time to build a new pattern of living room layout...
The text is clear, clean and plain, and it has the spirit of a book.
When designing the layout, in order not to interrupt the "qi" of the text, and to take into account the correspondence of the same page of pictures, texts and notes, I recommend using a special format: each page of text is arranged in a fixed position on the side of the staple, accounting for two-thirds of the space, the upper third of the position is left for the picture, and the horizontal proximity to the cut is one-third of the position left for the note, so that when the page is opened all the way down, the upper part of the page becomes the exhibition belt of the picture, and the lower part is the complete block of text; if there are pictures that need to be enlarged, or there are too many pictures, more space is needed. I would rather print all the pictures on the whole page, and the text section jumps directly to the next page, which is still coherent.
Song Dynasty Vase inner page
For the design of this set of books, Teacher Ning Chengchun found an ancient painting with a tree, which was outlined and modified as a pattern, and placed on the cover of each book with a thick-grained paper; the spine was wrapped in dark gray cloth, and the words "Persimmon LouJi" were gilded. Some people have commented that this design has a Song Ren Ya rhyme. The picture of the main text has been processed by the design assistant Lu Mingjing one by one, with the personal participation of Yang Zhishui, the color and shape are as close as possible to the original appearance, exquisite and clear, in order to be able to explain that the content of the examination is...
On the copyright page, my identity is "Topic Selection". In the concept of publishing profession, planning is a lofty word, and it is necessary to make a comprehensive plan and plan for a book manuscript. However, I only proposed to produce a set of the best version for Yang Zhishui in the Renmei Society, as for the selection of articles and the arrangement of specific content, it is Yang Zhishui's own efforts, so it can be thoughtful and perfect. Adding a souvenir to the reader at the end of each book is also proposed by Yang Zhishui. She thinks that many of the articles in the collection have been published, and some of the entire book has been published, exactly the same, sorry readers. Therefore, in addition to the additions and deletions of each book, plus a small gift, most of which are imitations of ancient texts and scrolls of ancient poems written by Yang Zhishui with a brush, and elegant small letters are also in line with the nature of this kind of collector's edition of books.
Just after the Spring Festival in 2014, the factory sent sample books of "Xiangzhi" and "Song Dynasty Vase", which look like handicrafts, which are really loveable! The subsequent volumes have taken this as a standard, and this book is careful. Among them, a volume of "Tang and Song Dynasty Furniture Exploration" also won the China Book Review and the CCTV China Good Book Award. The Ten Volumes, the Last Two Volumes of the Ten Volumes, the Last Two Volumes, are arguably the most beautifully done set of books in my publishing career, and the best books to read.
March 12, 2022 Shili fort, Beijing
Author: Wang Jiaming
Editor: Xie Juan
Editor-in-Charge: Shu Ming
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.