Martin Heijdra studied Sinology and Japanology at Leiden, Beijing, and Kyōto before receiving a Ph.D. in Ming History at Princeton, partly published in the Cambridge History of China. From 1988, he was the Chinese Bibliographer at the East Asian Library at Princeton; he became its Director in 2015. In those capacities, he published on various aspects of the history of the East Asian book and non-Western typography, such as “Technology, Culture, and Economics: Movable Type Versus Woodblock Printing in East Asia” (in: Isobe Akira, ed., Higashi Ajia Shuppan Bunka Kenkyū: Niwatazumi, Tōkyō, 2004, pp. 223–40), and “The Development of Modern Typography in East Asia, 1850–2000,” East Asian Library Journal XI:2 (2004), pp. 100–68. More recently, he oversaw the publication of the updated catalog of pre-1796 Chinese rare books at Princeton, Pulinsidun daxue tushuguan cang Zhongwen shanben shumu, Beijing, 2017, 2 volumes. He is the Book Review Editor for the journal East Asian Publishing and Society, Treasurer of the Society for Ming Studies, and Advisory Board Member for the Bibliography of Asian Studies. For 20 years, he was a Board Member of the Geiss Hsu Foundation, which has become a major sponsor for activities in the field of Late Imperial China.

He BIAN (Ch. 邊和) is Associate Professor in History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University in 2014. Her first book, Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China, was published by Princeton University Press in spring 2020 and won Honorable Mention for the Joseph Levenson Prize in Chinese studies (Pre-1900). Book history is central to her research, and she is currently at work on two more projects related to the changing knowledge landscape in China’s early modern era, on natural history and medical recipes, respectively. She has also published articles related to various aspects of book history in Late Imperial China, Early Science and Medicine, and the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies.

James Soren Edgren was Editorial Director of the Chinese Rare Books Project, an online international union catalogue of Chinese rare books, based at Princeton University from 1991 to 2011. The project currently is being transferred to the National Library of China in Beijing, where the new International Union Catalogue of Chinese Rare Books database has been established. Edgren received his Ph.D. in Sinology from the University of Stockholm, and has worked as East Asian cataloguer and bibliographer in the Royal Library (National Library of Sweden) in Stockholm and has been active in the antiquarian book trade. In addition to dozens of scholarly articles, he has written the Catalogue of the Nordenskiöld Collection of Japanese Books in the Royal Library (Stockholm, 1980) and Chinese Rare Books in American Collections (New York, 1984). He delivered the inaugural Delisle lectures on the history of the book at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1997, and served as Associate Editor for The Oxford Companion to the Book (Oxford, 2010). In the fall semester of 2012, he began teaching a graduate seminar on “The History of the Book in China” at Princeton University.