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V17 2014 INDEX       E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 17, Number 38, September 14, 2014, Article 7

MORE ON THE RED BOOK KNOCKOFF

Last week's item from Tom Sheehan generated a number of responses about his Chinese counterfeit Redbook. -Editor

Ken Bressett writes:

Chinese Red Book photo 1 Yes, this definitely is a Chinese knockoff copy of the Red Book. I knew about these at the time and think that most of them were stopped at the border. I have never been able to get a copy and have never even seen one. There were also some similar counterfeit copies of the Yeoman Modern World Coins catalog made at that time. I have seen a few of those around.

Authorized translations of Modern World Coins and Coins of the World were made in Japan for a few years.

Ken Berger writes:

Perhaps I can shed some light on the counterfeit Red Book. I lived in Taiwan for five years (1989-1994).

Caves was (is?) a well-known bookstore in Taipei among the ex-pat community. It was basically the only book store of any size in all of Taiwan that carried English-language books. So, I am not surprised that the counterfeit Red Book came from Caves.

Also, when I was in Taiwan, copying books was an accepted practice. It was very hard to get a sufficient number of textbooks for my university courses. Instead, the students would take my original copy of the textbook (or the library copy) and have it reproduced in large enough quantities for the entire class. The quality of these copied books would depend upon how much the individual was willing to pay. But even the least expensive method resulted extremely good copies.

The binding was excellent and could be supplied with a hard or soft cover. If I recall, copies with printed hard covers were more expensive (obviously) than non-printed covers. For this reason, my textbooks were copied with non-printed hard covers. I still have a number of these copied texts. The resultant cost per book was substantially less than an original, even without considering the shipping costs to Taiwan.

Jonque Mayle writes:

I was not surprised to see the counterfeit red book. I remember seeing it in Caves. Caves was/is a well-known bookstore in Taipei. Before the early 1990's, it specialized in knock-off editions. When I lived there I purchased many of them. Print and paper quality was low, but cost of production at the time was extremely cheap making editions of hundreds viable.

When was this printed? There ought to be a Chinese language date of publication, either on the reverse of the title page or the back of the end piece, often enclosed in a rectangle. If you send me a scan I can tell you what it says.

Chinese Red Book photo 4

I didn't publish it last week, but Tom provided an image of the page in question. Here's a closeup of the block. -Editor

Jonque Mayle adds:

Yes, indeed, this is one of the thousands of titles printed by the Caves bookshop. This book was printed on Taiwan (probably in the manufacturing area of Sanchung, where I recall some of the titles were printed) in 1967. The trade in counterfeit foreign language titles moved to China where it thrives to this day.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
QUERY: CHINESE RED BOOK KNOCKOFF INFO SOUGHT (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v17n37a14.html)

Kraljevich esylum ad10


Wayne Homren, Editor

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