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There is an old man who has been associated with books all his life: The work I do is very ordinary, and in the final analysis, there are only six words: collecting books, compiling books, and printing books.
He is the old director of the Shanghai Library - Gu Tinglong.
This year is the 120th anniversary of his birth, and it is the reading day, and the story of Gu Lao is worth telling.
In 1940, a small building was built at the intersection of Fumin Road, Changle Road, which stands today. But few people know that this is one of the predecessors of the Shanghai Library, a private library that has only existed for 14 years but has great significance - the United Private Library. Although it is not open to the public, on the side of its building, you can still see a plaque: Gu Tinglong Memorial Hall.
Hezhong, taking the meaning of "easy to do", means that everyone works together to do one thing, and things become simpler. This "many" also happened to be three people at the beginning. At that time, Shanghai was in the "isolated island" period, the Oriental Library and the Commercial Press were bombed by the Japanese army, Mr. Zhang Yuanji was heartbroken, and he must find a hiding place for the historical documents displaced under the war, so he joined patriots Ye Jingkui and Chen Taoyi, and the three of them founded the United Library.
And the best candidate for this curator was Gu Tinglong, who was still working at Yenching University in Beijing at that time.
So when Gu's family went south in 1939, the United Library not only became his workplace, but also the family's residence. According to his son, Mr. Gu Yifen, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the designer of Jianba, recalled that the United States at that time was not open to the public in order to protect the literature, and only familiar people could introduce them through the small gate of Fumin Road, and the person who came the most at that time was Qian Zhongshu.
From its preparation in 1939, to its donation to the state in 1953, and finally to its merger into the Shanghai Library, Hezhong has existed as a private library for only 14 years, but it has accumulated 240,000-250,000 volumes of historical documents during the most turbulent period of society.
The process of collecting, sorting, and revealing more than 200,000 precious documents has become a discipline for Gu Lao himself, so much so that he has become a editionist, a bibliographer, and later the above people called him a librarian. He famously said, "Every word of paper is historical data." "Some very inconspicuous things, such as genealogies, scrolls, Dengke records, township test records, gentry records, and even movie manuals, obituaries, etc., he has a unique eye and collects all these things. The current genealogical collection in the picture above can be called half of the country, which is thanks to the foundation laid by Gu Lao.
Another very important collection is the literature of the revolution. According to the teacher of the Historical Documentation Center in the picture above, "For example, we have a very precious book in the picture above, which is the "Communist Manifesto" published in 1920 translated by Mr. Chen Wangdao, as well as some early works of the peasant movement and trade union organizations...... After 1949, some propaganda departments searched for revolutionary literature everywhere, but found it in a private library. Gu Tinglong also recorded in his diary: "I heard that there is a batch of revolutionary documents in the library of Guizhou University, and they are worried about how to dispose of these books. So he exchanged them and kept them secretly at the top of the shelves, in conjunction with the ceiling, so that they would not be easily discovered.
Now, the United Library is about to be renovated, and according to the picture above, it may become a genealogy museum in the future to commemorate the spirit of Gu Lao and reopen this meaningful building to the outside world.
Take a look at the journalist: Zhou Yu
Editor: Zhou Yu
Editor-in-charge: Hu Shengfeng