Publishing and pulping the ancient classics

In this house there are many Mansions.

Visit the classics section of a Chinese bookstore looking for one of the Four Classic Novels and your eyes might glaze over as you survey the choices before you. Critical editions, photo-reproductions, illustrated abridgements, and graphic novel versions line the shelves.

Recent GAPP data cited in a Mirror article last month revealed that between 1950 and 2005, more than 230 different editions of Dream of the Red Mansions were published, along with over 210 editions of Romance of the Three Kingdoms and over 190 versions each of Outlaws of the Marsh and Journey to the West. A survey of the current inventory of the Beijing Book Building found 94 separate Red Mansions editions issued by 66 different publishers.

Not all of these books are selling, however. GAPP numbers have nearly 50 billion yuan worth of books warehoused every year (based on cover price). The Mirror calculates that since reprinted classics make up around 40% of a given year’s titles, they must make up the same percentage of warehoused books, though the paper’s figures are used somewhat haphazardly. At any rate, it makes for a stunning headline: “20 billion yuan worth of reprinted classics get pulped every year.”

What attracts publishers to the classics? Money, for one thing. Of those 94 editions, 56 were literary editions and 38 were children’s books. The literary editions had an average price of 60 yuan; the Mirror estimates the cost per book at one-third of the cover price, or around 20 yuan. For many resource-poor publishing houses, issuing new editions of classics is a moneymaking shortcut.

On the other hand, not all classics are in oversupply. Writing in The Beijing News last week, Wang Dong discussed the difficulties that book lovers have in tracking down the only editions of classics that have long been out of print:

Is it so hard for classics to be reissued?

One of the most annoying things for readers is that there are always a few classic works that disappear for years after their first edition and rarely have multiple printings; a nagging itch that never finds relief. For example, the edition of New Anecdotes of Social Talk annotated by Mr. Yu Jiaxi is a gem among annotated editions of Social Talk, but after the China Books edition of 1983, there has been nothing else for 25 years, leaving many enthusiasts waiting in anticipation. There’s Wang Chuanshan’s acclaimed On Reading the “Comprehensive Mirror”, which is included in the Collected Works of Wang Chuanshan, but a standalone volume is practically nonexistent on the marketplace. Then there’s the bible of all things Liang Qichao, the Chronological Biography of Liang Qichao, which also was not reissued following a first edition in 1983. In today’s used book markets, it’s hard to find even at 300 yuan a copy…there are countless other books like these, leaving us perplexed: is it so hard to reissue classic works?

I personally believe that the surface reason that classics do not get reprinted is because they are too hard to sell. That is, there is little market demand and profits are small. For example, On Reading the “Comprehensive Mirror” had a true print run of a few thousand and it still took a long while to sell out. It can’t compare to the seduction of the hundreds of thousands of copies that Guo Jingming can sell in a short time. Publishers are participants in the market economy, where sales volume is everything, so it’s not strange that they should ignore the classics. However, why is there so little demand for classics? To answer this question, we must get down to the deeper reason why classics do not get reprinted: the public lacks the ability to read, or should I say consume, classics. They are wary of the profundity of classics, or else they think them useless. They would rather spend their time reading Guo Jingming and Annie Baobei. Hence classics are confined to a minority of scholars and demand is tiny. Classics are spiritual treasures of a people; it is a great loss to let them lie fallow for so long. Therefore, the main task now is to popularize the classics and raise the public’s ability to absorb them.

The imbalance doesn’t have to go on forever. Huang Song, office director for leadership team of the National Plan to Reorganize Ancient Book Publication, says that the wide range of choices will be reduced in the future to a small number of quality editions:

We are currently undertaking a general investigation into the nation’s ancient books. Following the investigation, we will put forth a standard edition of each work, and that edition will be authoritative….From now on, unless substantial new material is discovered related to a particular ancient book, publishers will not put out new editions. This means that editors will not need to duplicate their efforts, publishers can save on resources, and readers will have more effective choices.

It doesn’t seem all that likely for something like Red Mansions, when thorny issues of authorship have yet to be resolved. But when they do decide on a standard, authoritative text, maybe the Cao Xueqin museums will finally have settled on a standard image of the author that can go on the cover.