The East Asian Library Journal, formerly known as the Gest Library Journal, is a semi-annual, scholarly journal published by the Trustees of Princeton University and is an integral part of the East Asian Studies Program at Princeton.
The goal of this juried journal is to provide a lively forum for discussion of book culture and printing history in East Asia and to encourage expansion of this understudied field of inquiry. The journal presents studies on East Asian book and publishing history, manuscripts on book collecting and book collectors, articles on technical and artistic aspects of traditional Asian book production and conservation, reports on new archival finds or innovative approaches to gathering information in seldom used archives of Asian materials, and papers on the transmission of Asian culture through the medium of books. It also includes reports on Asian-book conferences and exhibits, on continuing bibliographic projects, and on new publications on the history of the book in East Asia.
Several recent numbers of our journal have been made up, to a large part, of articles related to China. This lack of balance in coverage of the history of the book in East Asia is not by design but rather represents the predominance of the material submitted to the East Asian Library Journal. The journal is actively seeking manuscripts from scholars who write about the history of the book and printing in Japan and Korea.
The journal always welcomes submissions of manuscripts for review for publication. Please refer to the on-line style sheet and manuscript submission guidelines for the East Asian Library Journal.
This new website for the East Asian Library Journal gives this journal, which is very solidly committed to publishing studies related to the history of printed and written culture in East Asia, its first toehold in what many assert is the inevitable future of print culture—the world of virtual access to print. Hopefully, in turn our site can function, quite literally, as a virtual mode of access by which to draw readers into the world of printed and written materials from China, Japan, and Korea in their many intriguing and tangible—to-be-held-in-the-hands—forms.
On our site you may find lists of the contents of current and up-coming numbers. There is information on how to subscribe and how to order previous issues of the East Asian Library Journal and of its predecessor title the Gest Library Journal. The list of articles in previous issues gives access to the first page of the text and one or more of the figures for each article.
For now the East Asian Library Journal is available in its entirety only in print format. Time and trends may eventually lead to the contents being made fully accessible on line or, as the need arises, to our posting certain supplemental material on line. For example, Andrew Plaks’s article “Research on the Gest Library ‘Cribbing Garment’: A Very Belated Update” published in volume 11, no. 1 (Autumn 2004) is linked to a special site where we have posted enlarged photographic images of all the red-inked “name-tabs,” which identify the author or the source of an essay written on the robe. Publishing all 405 of these images in print did not prove to be practical, however by publishing these on line, we can invite you the readers to view them and to help the author decipher and identify additional names. Click here to see this supplemental site.
Heather Larkin, Princeton Class of 2006, designed the website for the journal. A student of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, her talents and interests extend to graphic design and animation, Japanese language and culture, and animal behavior. She has been the technical assistant to the journal for the past several years. To follow the evolution of Heather’s graphic design work, see her website, www.larkinheather.com.
East Asian Library JournalPublished by the Trustees of Princeton University
US ISSN: 1079-8021
Copyright © 2007 by the East Asian Library Journal
