tyfen

There was a time, not so long ago, when scholars used Latin instead of modern languages to write their philosophical, botanical, medical or philological studies. For one work, it was also the case of Franz Bopp, the famous German linguist who did so much for the study of Sanskrit in Europe, in the beginning of [...]

As a librarian, I mainly order brand new books; as a book collector, I chiefly buy old editions. Typically, for Indian reference books (dictionaries, grammars, classics), I prefer carefully printed first editions than cheap, blurred and smelly reprints. Even if they need to be restored or re-bound, 19th century editions are far better than nowadays [...]

About 1660, Pú Sōnglíng (蒲松齡, 1640-1715) started writing his Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (聊齋誌異, Liáozhāi zhìyì), which would become a masterpiece of fiction in classical Chinese. For about fifty years, Pú Sōnglíng didn’t develop a compilation of popular tales, but short stories presenting ghosts, demons and foxes following his own writer’s fantasy. Many [...]