In Home and the World, Yuming He describes the ways in which Ming books called into being a “complex and lively world of descriptions, opinions and fantasies of the outside world and its inhabitants in early modern China” (p. 202). The book's six chapters elaborate the techniques of quotation, recycling, and modeling texts and pictures on existing formats, highlighting the eye-catching formats printers and editors used. The author offers a bold thesis: the relations between canonical text and popularizations and one category of text and another are fluid. In relation to this, literate and illiterate readers alike were “conversant” with books. For this reason, she sets aside the task of differentiating levels of edition, and suggests certain books were influential due to the range of readerships they touched (pp. 33–35).

The book is expansive, highlighting the playful, ironic, and oppositional modes of borrowing, recycling, and recombining texts. This comprises a cultural dynamic that He would localize in the Wanli era, 1573–1619. The introduction characterizes the hybrid form of knowledge with one foot in the marketplace and the other in the field of classical learning as “pulp scholarship” (p. 5). Chapter 1 reviews how the miscellany Boxiao zhuji guided readers to mix and match a constellation of texts for writing drinking songs. It places the Pearls in a textual family that is indebted to the influential anthology Guwen zhenbao (Treasures of ancient-style prose), which crossed the divide between commercial and official imprints and reached the emperor himself. This textual history reveals, however, that the strategies for reprinting anthologies to show the everyman “what to do with books” began to take shape by at the latest the thirteenth century and persisted long after. The notion of textual families thus opens an avenue for revisiting the periodization of an “early modern” moment in China. Chapter 2 introduces drama miscellanies with three-tiered page formats and suggests the ability to scan the registers on the page unfolds an “alternative geography” (pp. 87–99). The center register featured popular songs, local argot, and inside jokes (qiaoyu, translated as “winsome sayings”), which bespoke the charms of courtesans across the empire. Chapter 3 describes the appeal of variant editions of these drama anthologies. Chapter 4 traces how the popular Luochong lu (Survey of naked creatures) recycled the fifteenth-century Record of foreign lands by quoting familiar and stock phrases, rather than theorize the relations between exotic and strange creatures (p. 238). The conclusion finds that the heated debates over the veracity of the Naked creatures in the 1520s spurred production of new records and prompted bureaucrats to evaluate the progress of the primitive peoples in distant lands.

The book's forte is the explication of pictures, such as the fan-seller who brings goods circulated empire-wide for customers to use in their homes. The author draws a parallel between the peddler who draws an inscribed poem-fan from his basket for women to admire, as they compare his wares in the courtyard of a home, and book producers who made descriptions of the globalized world available for readers to use (pp. 246–54). Printers and editors reused texts and images in order to cut costs, but these strategies also generated meaning. As other studies have shown, editors and illustrators migrated between publishing firms and lent prestige to low-end imprints (pp. 85–87). Appendix one lists other known titles by the editors, illustrators, and printers of miscellanies to suggest the scope of their activity. Appendix two translates a guide to whoring and suggests that its “uneven mix of the bookish and the vulgar” was a signature of the age (p. 272).

There was no easy alliance between home and the world, as He suggests. Writings on foreign peoples and lands frame this study, which hint that controversies over veracity and centrality shifted in shape from 1487 to 1782. The book considers disparate genres, including literary anthologies, dramas, woodblock illustrations, and histories, sketching the techniques that situated the home within the empire and linked it to the world beyond. These aspects pave the way for dedicated close readings that might reveal conceptions of the nexus between home and the world. He's lively translations and exposition of pictures open our eyes to how commerce and displacement generated the textual record. By drawing our attention to the productive space of books, Home and the World makes an important contribution to scholarship on Ming and Qing history and literature. In the meantime, by tracing objective patterns of print reproduction in the exuberant Ming, it invites scholars to revisit and rethink the periodization of an early modern moment in China.