TYPOGRAPHY.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Characters Formed by the Divisible Type Belonging to the Chinese Mission of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. First edition of this catalogue of 22,841 characters, issued in the year of the Presbyterian Mission Press's founding in Macau. Of the 500 copies printed, we have located 5 in institutions (British Library, American Antiquarian Society, Princeton Theological Seminary, Yale, and Rostock).The Presbyterian Mission Press was established in Macau in 1844 by Walter M. Lowrie (1819-1847), the son of the secretary of the American Presbyterian Mission and a future member of the group that produced the Delegates' translation of the Bible into Chinese. Lowrie was aided by Richard Cole, a professional printer sent from the US with presses and matrices. The press used both matrices for whole characters, devised from those invented by Samuel Dyer, and divisible type, where type representing commonly recurring parts of characters could be combined to form complex logograms. The characters in this catalogue are arranged by constituent elements in 214 columns.In 1845, the press moved to Ningbo and then to Shanghai in 1860, where it operated for many years as the Meihua shuguan.

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.