Доклады Международного конгресса ИИСАА. Т. 1

III. Far East, South and South-East Asia / Дальний Восток, Южная и Юго-Восточная Азия 420 Proceedings of the International Congress on Historiography and Source Studies of Asia and Africa.Vol. I. 2020 6. Wooden type editions and early stage of commercial prints Yi yuan zhi yan and Shi shuo xin yu bu were also reprinted in wooden type. Again without prefaces, publication dates of these editions are not known. Therefore, it is impossible to confirm whether these editions predate or postdate the metal type editions. However, considering the social environment and situations surrounding their publications, it is most likely that the wooden type editions followed the metal type editions. The originals of these two Korean editions are Ming Dynasty books. These books were directly purchased by Korean envoys sent to China and brought to the court after the mission. In the strictly stratified and closed society of Chosŏn, current scholarly and cultural texts were only available to a privileged few. Up-to-date Chinese publications in particular were only accessible to the members of the highest elite. Therefore, it is more logical that these two books were initially targeted to more privileged readers, and thus first published in metal type. Wooden type books of personal interests have been published largely through two paths. First, wooden type sets in regional offices could be privately used with the order or permission of governors and magistrates. In other words, governors or magistrates could publish their own writings or writings of their friends and relatives using wooden type systems of regional offices. For examples, Hŏ Sil 許宲 (1574–1629) printed Su Shi 蘇軾 ’s writing collection, Somunch’o 蘇文抄 , in wooden type when he served as a magistrate of Kohŭng. Also, Yun Hwŏn 尹暄 (1573–1627) printed a wooden type edition of Tangsi hwisŏn 唐詩彙選 (Anthology of Tang Poems) compiled by his close acquaintance, Yi Sugwang 李睟光 (1563–1628) when he was in charge of the Kyŏngju office. The second path is through the wooden type print system in Hullyŏn togam 訓 鍊都監 , the Military Training Directorate. After the Japanese invasion of Korea in the late 16 th century, the government allowed the soldiers of Hullyŏn togam to make profits by craftworks and printmaking as a means of supplementing their low salaries. Subsequently, some soldiers and their family members made their livings by wooden type printing. Most of their projects were commissioned by government offices but some were privately commissioned. Such individual transactions are meaningful as an early aspect of commercial printing. Commissions, however, are different frommarket transactions, in which commodities are produced in advance for non-specific groups of consumers. In this period, there was still no sizable group of consumers for books of personal taste such as Yi yuan zhi yan and Shi shuo xin yu bu . Therefore, movable type printing rather than woodblock printing still remained as a primary method of their production. Finally, it should be mentioned again that there are less wooden type editions of these two books than their metal type editions. This also strongly suggests that wooden type editions were “custom-made” by individual commissions. Private publishing of books in wooden type prints was made in a similar context as in the case of metal type printing. In both cases, publishers selected texts based