(A) the origin and history of silk books
Silk books are books or articles written on silk and other silk fabrics, which appeared later than simplified books. Although simplified edition is the earliest book form in China, it has been widely used for a long time, but there are many defects. In addition to the broken braided rope, it is easy to cause "simplification" and "false simplification"; Books are also heavy and inconvenient to read. For example, Hui Shi, a scholar in the Warring States Period, carried a heavy book (Zhuangzi World) in five cars; Qin Shihuang read official documents every day, and "measured books with a balance stone (120 Jin)" (Historical Records of Qin Shihuang). Dong Fangshuo wrote a letter in the Western Han Dynasty, in which three thousand letters were typed. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty asked the two strong men to try their best to hold their hands and read "The End of February" from above (Historical Records and Funny Biography). Compared with this simplified book, the silk book made of silk has many advantages: silk is flexible in texture, strong in ink absorption, easy to write, easy to roll at will, and convenient to read and collect; Silk books are light in weight and easy to carry; The length of the silk book is wide and long, so it can be cut according to the length of the book content when writing, and there will be no confusion in the simplified book. So in ancient China, people used silk to write books long ago, and used it with bamboo slips and bamboo slips for a long time.
When did silk books first appear? It's still very difficult to take the exam. However, it was described from time to time in the literature from the end of the Spring and Autumn Period to the Warring States Period. "The Analects of Confucius Wei Linggong" said: "Yu Shu Shen." The Gentry and Shuowen are said to be "big belts", while Duan Yucai's Notes on Shuowen Jiezi in Qing Dynasty are said to be drooping belts. In short, it is a kind of silk. "Mozi Ming Ghost" said: "The bamboo and silk of books will be passed on to future generations"; The article "Everything is Safe" also said: "The late king entrusted the reason to bamboo and silk." The seventh chapter of the Spring and Autumn Annals of Yan Zi is even more clear: "In the past, my former monarch, Huan Gong, gave Guanzhong Fox Valley, whose county was seventeen, based on silk, and applied it as a policy to spread it to the princes." If his words are to be believed, there were silk books in Qi Huangong's time in the 7th century BC. However, silk is more perishable than bamboo and wood. At present, most of the silk books discovered by archaeology are from the Han dynasty, but few from the pre-Qin period.
Since Qin and Han Dynasties, silk has been widely used for writing. There are quite a few books in Hanshu Yiwenzhi, which are counted by volumes, and other documents often reflect them. For example, Liu Bang, the great-grandfather of the Western Han Dynasty, once wrote a letter to the Silk City (Biography of the Great-grandfather in Historical Records); Yang Xiong replied to Liu Xinshu that when he compiled dialects, he "often put three inches of weak words and four feet of oil (a smooth white silk) to ask about its variant, and then cited it as inferior to the manuscript" (Volume 52 of All Chinese). At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Dong Zhuo made an insurrection, forcing Xian Di to move westward to Chang 'an, and plundering the silk books collected by Dongguan, Lantai and Shishi in Luoyang. "The great ones are covered with curtains, and the small ones are made of rattan" (The Scholars in the Later Han Dynasty), "It has been collected in the west for more than 70 years" (Sui Shu's Annals of Classics). It can be seen that the silk books collected by the court in Han Dynasty are very rich. 1973 ~1At the end of 974, a large number of silk books from the early Western Han Dynasty were unearthed from the No.3 Han Tomb in Mawangdui, Changsha, including Lao Heyi's and Warring States' letters, Zhouyi's, Spring and Autumn Stories and classic decrees. More than 20 books and articles, such as Ten Classics, Weighing, Daoyuan, and Three Ancient Pictures, have made this issue clear.
Generally speaking, silk was used to write books and draw pictures from the Spring and Autumn Period, and was widely used in the Western Han Dynasty, and it was still used after the Wei and Jin Dynasties. However, because silk fabrics are expensive and cannot be widely used like bamboo and paper, silk books have never been used independently. In the early stage, bamboo slips and wooden slips rose with the popularity, and in the later stage, they declined with the rise of paper books, which lasted for nearly a thousand years from the fourth and fifth centuries BC to the third and fourth centuries AD.
(B) the form of silk books
Silk varies in length. Generally speaking, the standard size is 40 feet, and there is no need to sew within 40 feet. However, when copying books, it is necessary to cut or sew according to the length of the content. Xu Jian, a scholar in the Tang Dynasty, said in Volume 21: "The ancients used silk and cut it according to the length of the book." Therefore, the length of silk books is as short as one foot, as long as several feet. So the officers and men of Dong Zhuo in the Eastern Han Dynasty used it to make rattan bags and curtains. Archaeological discoveries of silk books vary in length, such as the silk book of Twelve Gods in Changsha Ammunition Depot, which is 38.7 cm long and the silk painting is 37.5 cm long; Chenjiadashan silk painting is 3 1 cm long; Mawangdui's silk book Letters of the Warring States Period is about 192 cm long and so on.
The width of silk books is recorded as one foot in ancient books, but according to archaeological objects, it is actually inconsistent. Mawangdui silk book, one is written with whole silk, about 48 cm wide, such as Laozi; The other is to use half a silk book, about 24 cm wide, such as Zhouyi and Letters of the Warring States. The silk script and silk painting of the magazine are 47 cm and 28 cm wide respectively; The silk painting of Chenjiadashan is 22.5 cm wide. At the beginning of this century, silk books of the early Eastern Han Dynasty were discovered in Dunhuang, one of which was about 9 cm square and the other was 15 cm long and 6.5 cm wide. It can be seen that the width of silk books is often cut according to needs.
The writing format of silk books is often modeled after simplified books. Opening a book usually leaves a blank, just like "redundancy". Silk books are also written from top to bottom, and the number of words per line is not necessarily. In order to make each line write neatly, some silk books are marked with red pen or ink pen, imitating simplified books. For example, in Mawangdui's silk book Laozi, there are red lines painted by vermilion between the lines. Most of the borders of early silk books were hand-painted. When silk books became popular, some people used red or black silk to weave boundaries on silk in advance, just like today's manuscript paper, which was specially used for writing. Later people called it "Zhu" and "Wu Si Lan".
Silk is flexible and can be folded or rolled up at will, so the early collection method is to fold and roll together. For example, the silk script of Twelve Gods in the ammunition depot is folded eight times and then put into a bamboo box (Shang Chengzuo's Silk Script of Chu Ci in the Warring States Period, Cultural Relics No.9,1964); Mawangdui silk, with a whole piece of silk, is also folded into a rectangle, and then placed in the lower compartment of a lacquer box; With half a piece of silk and rectangular wood chips as the axis, it is rolled into a volume (Han Xiao's Overview of Silk Books in Mawangdui Han Tomb in Changsha, Cultural Relics 1974 9). Folding and collecting silk books will inevitably be damaged over time, so most of the later silk books are rolled up for collection. A book can be rolled into one volume or several volumes, so "volume" has become a unit for calculating the length of books, which has been used until today. But the "volume" in ancient times first refers to a volume, which is still in use today, such as the Complete Works of Marx and Engels. Complete Works of Lenin and Selected Works of Mao Zedong. , is a book. But in old printed books, the volume is often smaller than the volume, and there are often several volumes in one volume.
This bundle of silk books is different from the simplified version in form. Silk books and later paper rolls are soft and thin, so they need a shaft when they are rolled. The shaft is attached to the end of the paper and rolls from left to right around it. Bamboo slips and wooden slips are hard and thick, and the last wooden slip acts as a shaft, so there is no need to use another shaft. This is one of the reasons why scroll-shaped books do not include simplified Chinese characters. The shaft used to make books is slightly longer than the width of the paper, and the two ends are outside after being rolled up. Its materials were only bamboo and sawdust in the early days, and then lacquer wood was widely used. Emperors and nobles often used expensive materials to make shafts, such as stained glass, ivory, tortoise shell, coral and gold. In addition to scrolls and scrolls, according to ancient records, silk books and scrolls made of scrolls also have naked bodies (wraps), belts (book clothes), toothpicks and other accessories. In order to protect books or facilitate reference. However, such articles are rarely found in the silk books of Qin and Han dynasties discovered today. They probably originated from silk scrolls, but they are mostly made of paper books, so we will explain them together in the following "The shape of paper rolls".
(3) the shape of the paper roll
In the early days, the shape of the paper roll followed the silk scroll, which was proved by ancient documents and Dunhuang paper records. In the later period, when the album system was transformed, it evolved into a unique shape, namely folding and whirlwind.
The paper roll is like a silk scroll, winding from left to right around the axis. A paper roll usually consists of several sheets of paper. The length of connecting paper is usually 9 to 10 meters, or even tens of meters. Each volume is a unit, and a book can be composed of one volume or several volumes.
In order to make the font neat and beautiful, border columns are usually drawn on writing paper. The periphery is called "edge" or "hole" (also written as "column"), and the straight line between lines is called "boundary". The Tang people called it "border quasi" and the Song people called it "Xiexing". Later generations also used the names in silk books, calling them "Wu Si Bar" and "Zhusi Bar". The number of words in each line of the paper roll is also not fixed. Physically, there are dozens of words to dozens of crosses. Papers are generally written on one side and on both sides. For example, Dunhuang manuscripts often copy classic notes and omissions on the back, which is called "endorsement".
The notes of some books are not written on the back. Written on the front of the sky, it is called "eyebrow approval"; Some are written between the lines of the text, which is called "double note". Notes written between lines of the text can have different forms; You can also write in two fonts: single-line large font to write the text; Write notes in two lines of small font; Or the text is written on it and the notes are written below; Or the notes are single line, but the font is slightly smaller and written at the bottom of the text. The latter method, if the copywriter is not careful, will often confuse the words and notes of ancient books, resulting in a mistake similar to "typo simplification". Since the Six Dynasties, paper written in two colors, Zhu and Mo, appeared. The text is written in Zhu and the notes are written in ink, which is the pioneer of color printing in later generations.
The paper roll is misspelled and can't be scratched like a simplified book. The ancients either used paper paste or powder coating, and the effect was not ideal, so some people invented orpiment to alter it. Orpiment, also known as cockscomb stone, can be used as a painting pigment to scribble typos, which are not only similar in color to yellow paper, but also "disappear as soon as it is scattered, but not for a long time" (Shen Songkuo's Meng Qian Bi Tan, Volume I). This alteration method existed in the Northern and Southern Dynasties at the latest. Following "Dyeing Huang Zhi Shu", Qi Yao Min Shu has another section "Treating Shu with orpiment". In Yan Zhitui's book Evidence of Yan Family Instructions in Northern Qi Dynasty, there is also a record of "changing night from orpiment to night". Later generations ridiculed and misinterpreted ancient books, and those who made comments were called "irresponsible remarks."
The texture of the paper roll is far less flexible and strong than that of silk, and it needs more protection. As a result, some protective measures that have been taken on the silk shaft have gradually formed a complete system in the era of paper roll. The head of the paper roll, in addition to its own blank "redundancy", often needs to add a "Baotou" (hereinafter referred to as "Baotou") to protect the paper roll. The head of the bag is made of strong hard paper, or imitation silk, made of silk and other silk fabrics, which was also called "naked" by the ancients. Tie a belt in the middle of the exposed part to bind the paper, which is called a "belt". Ribbons are usually made of silk, which was also very particular in ancient times. Some people also use tapes of different colors to distinguish different kinds of books. Some big books have many volumes. In order to avoid confusion with other books and protect the volume from friction, it should be wrapped with a "book coat", called a "book" and written as a "book". Said Wen: "Hey, book clothes also. If you are tired, you will get dressed. " For Bao Shu, only the roller is wrapped, and the shaft heads on both sides of the roller are still exposed. On the bookshelf, only the shaft head is seen. If there are many books on the shelf, in order to find them easily, hang a small sign on the head of the book with the title and volume number written on it, which is called "brand". It is made of ivory and is called a toothpick. The four books collected by Jixian Academy in Tang Dynasty were divided into classics, history, books and collections with red, green, blue and white toothpicks. Generally speaking, it is also made of wood, paper or silk. In this way, tapestries, ribbons, labels, scrolls and shafts constitute all the components of the book. This scroll-like form was used until the Tang Dynasty, and then evolved into folding forms such as folding and whirlwind, and then developed into loose-leaf binding, which triggered a revolution in the form of books in China.
(d) Evolution of reel shape-from reel to folding.
The shape of the reel is suitable for the softness of silk and paper, and it later developed into a quite perfect system. However, with the progress of society and the development of culture, its shortcomings are becoming increasingly obvious. Papers are generally long, even tens of feet long. Such a long piece of paper should be opened, rolled while reading, and then rolled back after reading. It is even more inconvenient if you need to consult some chapters temporarily. Especially in the Wei, Jin, Sui and Tang Dynasties, with the great development of economy and culture, many reference books appeared, such as generic books, word books and rhyme books. This kind of reference books are generally not read from beginning to end, but are for people to consult and solve problems at any time. If the information you need is not at the beginning of the paper, but in the middle or even at the end, it will be hard to find. So someone improved the shape of the scroll: instead of rolling a long paper with a shaft, it was folded into rectangular creases one by one, and then harder paper was added at the front and back of the paper to prevent the books from being damaged, thus becoming a pile of books. This folded version is somewhat similar to the binding form of Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures from India, so it is also called "folded in half" or "Sanskrit binding". Folded books don't need to be opened and rolled up, so they can be read at any time, which is much more convenient than scrolls. This is a great progress in the form of books, and it is a transitional form from scrolls to album pages. But the folded book is thick and easy to spread out into long strips when reading, so someone folds a large piece of paper in half as a book cover, and then sticks the first and last pages of the folded book in the book cover, so that it will not spread out when reading. Books packaged in this way can be turned from the first page to the last page, and then turned to the first page one after another, spinning back and forth without interruption; And it's as fast as the wind, so it's called "whirlwind suit", which is an improved version of folding suit.
Impressive and whirlwind clothes appeared in the late Tang Dynasty and remained in use until the Northern Song Dynasty. Because they are all folded, the folded rectangular passbook is a bit like a leaf, so it is also called "leaf" or "leaf"; After folding, it becomes a thick stack, also called "book" or "booklet" (book is also written as "raiders"). Folding books inspired the later loose-leaf binding, and the form was similar, so the picture album form of books began with folding and whirlwind. Terms such as "leaf" and "book" are still used in loose page binding, but the word "leaf" is mostly rewritten as "page", and its meaning changes from leaf to single page or one page.