世界日報
- Books Sold on Consignment by This Paper's Publication Department
- Bound Volumes of the World Daily Supplement
This partial reading of the 2 October 1926 World Daily (Shijie ribao) of Beijing covers two notices from the paper's own advertising columns. The first announced that the paper's publication department sold worthwhile Chinese books and magazines on consignment and introduced a digest of titles recently entrusted to it; in the scan its opening runs on from the tail of a clinic advertisement offering pediatric and internal-medicine injections, including German and French "914". The second promoted monthly bound volumes of the paper's supplement, stressing that Peking University professor Dr. Liu Bannong edited it, that its contributors were accomplished scholars, and that its printing and binding far surpassed ordinary bound-up old newspapers. The individual book titles and prices are not legible in this reading.
Partial reading of an advertising page. The OCR merges unrelated vertical columns and garbles many titles, names and prices; heavy ink especially affects the medicine advertisements along the right edge. The first excerpt's opening lines belong to an adjoining clinic advertisement that runs into the consignment notice, and the catalogue of titles that follows it is not legible. [?] marks passages that could not be read. Only visually legible passages are translated.
Translation
Books Sold on Consignment by This Paper's Publication Department
Specializing in pediatrics and internal medicine; injections of German and French 914 and all kinds of the newest injectable medicines for strengthening the body, invigorating the lungs, tonifying the brain and nourishing the kidneys. Address: West City, Nongshangbu Street, that is, No. 13 at the west entrance of Fenzi Hutong. Telephone: West Exchange 1312.
Books Sold on Consignment by This Paper's Publication Department
This paper's publication department sells on consignment valuable books and magazines of every kind published in China. The titles entrusted to this paper for consignment sale over recent days are recorded below in summary. [?]
Bound Volumes of the World Daily Supplement
[?] The World Daily supplement is edited by Dr. Liu Bannong, professor at Peking University, and those who write for it are likewise mostly among the most accomplished scholars of the day. The bound volume gathers a month's contents into a single book; its printing and binding are both exceedingly fine, entirely different from those ordinarily bound up from old newspapers, crude in form. [?]
Context
Cheng Shewo's World Daily and a newspaper business built by expansion
The "publication department" advertising itself here belonged to the World Daily, which Cheng Shewo founded in Beijing in February 1925, serving as its own president. He had started with the World Evening News a year earlier and then used that evening paper as capital to grow step by step, so that by 1925 the evening paper had separate business and editorial departments. In September 1925 he also spun the World Daily's fifth-page pictorial off as a separate World Pictorial edited by Lin Fengmian. A consignment desk for books and magazines, and bound reprints of the supplement, fit this pattern of a small newspaper group turning its sections and its readership into further products. Accounts of Cheng's career concentrate on the papers themselves and do not mention the publication department, so this notice is itself a trace of that side of the business.
Why "Peking University professor Dr. Liu Bannong" was a selling point
The advertisement stacks two titles on Liu Bannong. Liu had been a prominent figure of the New Culture era since his work appeared in New Youth in 1916; he then studied in Europe and earned his doctorate at the University of Paris in 1925. Returning that year, he became a professor in Peking University's Chinese department in the autumn and wrote for both Yusi and the World Daily. The doctorate and the professorship were thus both barely a year old when this notice ran, and calling him "Dr." and "Peking University professor" traded on a new foreign degree and a prestigious post. The ad goes further and presents him as the supplement's editor; biographical accounts record that he wrote for the paper, and the editorship stands in this issue as the newspaper's own claim.
Selling a newspaper supplement as a book
The second notice's central argument is physical: a month of the supplement bound as one finely printed volume, explicitly contrasted with crude bindings of old newsprint. That pitch treated the supplement's literary content as something worth keeping on a shelf, like a book. It matched the standing of the man the ad named: in 1926 Liu Bannong published two poetry collections, Wafu ji and Yangbian ji, so readers could see his name on actual books that year. The World Daily had already shown a willingness to repackage parts of the paper as stand-alone products when it turned its pictorial page into the separate World Pictorial in 1925. The bound supplement volumes and the consignment catalogue on the same page both point to a paper trying to earn from its print output beyond the daily sale.
Original
本報出版股代售書目
專門小兒科內科注射德法九一四及强身健肺補腦滋腎各等種最新針藥地址西城農商部街卽粉子胡同西口十三號電話西局一三一二本報出版股代售書目本報出版股。 代售國內各種有價値之圖書雜誌。 茲將連日委託本報代售之書目。 摘要錄左。 [?]
世界日報副刊合訂本
[?] 世界日報副刊， 爲北大教授劉半農博士主編， 担任撰述者， 亦多一時績學之士， 合訂本乃彙集一月所載， 裝爲一册， 印刷裝潢， 均極精美， 與尋常以舊報裝訂， 形式粗劣者， 完全不同， [?]