Chinese Periodicals in the Library of Congress: A Bibliography

I found a finding aid. But this book, for me, is all about its setting. I discovered it sitting on a counter-top some months ago, and there it has sat, all day, every day, since then. This is a huge book to leave lying around:

The counter-top in question is in the Library of Congress, at one end of a vast reading room now repurposed with cubicles for librarians to do their bibliological thang. The two compilers (as they call themselves on the cover page) are Han-Chu Huang and David H.G. Hsu, who brought out the book in 1988. In Huang’s case, the first hits on a Google search of his name refer to this very bibliography—but just looking at the thing, we don’t exactly need Google to recognize it as a substantial project. David H.G. Hsu, for his part, is not to be confused with the Wharton Business School professor by the same name. Different guy. Like so many of the strangest books, this one does what it promises. We get 814 carefully wrought pages of Chinese periodicals in the Library of Congress:

Given this book’s sheer inertia, I had thought it safe to assume it never got much play. After all, here it was: a book apparently produced by two employees of the Library of Congress, published with funding from the Library of Congress, whose sole purpose was to list certain holdings of the Library of Congress, sitting in perhaps the only room in the entire world where people might have regular occasion to use it—a room, that is, in the Library of Congress where other employees of the Library of Congress spend their days sorting and stacking and listing and distributing the holdings of the Library of Congress—and yet it had sat apparently untouched for weeks. One would have expected it to get passed around like the cup at a one-cup kegger. Imagine my delight, then, to see the Internet positively brimming with references to this reference. You can even buy onefor yourself, for not that much money, should you become so inclined.