ABSTRACT
This homogenization was not complete, of course. Some types of publi cations, such as the albums of ink-cake illustrations of Huizhou, continued to be produced in their traditional locations or, in the case of costly works like superior color imprints, near their customers, to avoid the hazards of transport. Nor did the growing unification of the book trade mean that dif ferences in book prices, production costs, and general economic and cultural conditions among the printing centers were eliminated. For example, the Jianyang area, whose publishers probably produced more books than any other location in China, remained in most other respects an economic and cultural backwater. In a different vein, the homogenization of the book trade increased rather than decreased the propagation of literature in regional dialects. But the extent to which the homogenization occurred demonstrates that we are considering a book trade covering a single, complex, and farflung network that spread over much of central and southern China. Indeed, we can further argue that the tremendous growth in the quantity and variety of commercial publications in the late Ming was one sign of the maturation of the woodblock-printed book in China. That is, the technical aspects of woodblock printing, as well as the production and distribution methods, had reached a stage beyond which there would be few further changes.
