The Distant Sound of Book Boats: The Itinerant Book Trade in Jiangnan from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries

The morning arrival of book boats was a welcome sight to Chen Zhan, a distinguished scholar and book collector. As he notes in the comment accompanying his poem, there were no book stores in Xiashi, the town in central Haining county northeast of Hangzhou where he was born and lived for many years: these itinerant peddlers were his only commercial source for books. His remark is of interest to book historians on two counts.2 First, it suggests that even in the economically prosperous