Merchants who buy old items, and sometimes those who collect trash from rural households, gather together the unwanted written materials they find and sell them to a network of used booksellers. The materials I seek are often found in small bundles because that is how they are acquired by the urban booksellers. Happily, for me, one or two of the booksellers had small piles of old-fashioned books, sometimes bundled together in plastic bags. Under a cold, cloudy, and threatening sky, the temple grounds were filled with rows of long tables covered with old books and magazines, rolled-up posters, stamp albums, and how-to books on cooking and travel. 1 Middlebrow novels, biographies of emperors or classical heroes, and translations into modern Chinese of classical stories published since the 1980s constituted a majority of the works on sale. Publications from the Cultural Revolution era seem to sell well in Shanghai and Beijing because they evoke nostalgia for a simpler time, especially among people who do not remember the period very well. The majority of books for sale were produced in China after liberation in 1949, especially in the late 1970s and 1980s, when book publishing expanded after the Cultural Revolution concluded.
Every Sunday, the Confucius temple in Shanghai holds a book fair in the main courtyard of the temple grounds, so that was an obvious place for me to explore. In January 2012, I was in Shanghai and naturally sought out several markets where I hoped to find research materials like those I have been collecting since 2004.
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