The Peerless 100-Year Chinese-English Calendar 1849-1948 . . .
San Francisco, Calif. Calmar Printing Company, 1924. 8¼” x 5¼”. Printed wrappers, cloth tape to spine. Pp. [6], 100, [1, appendix]. Very good: wrappers lightly scuffed with a corner crease to rear; spine tips frayed; chips to edges of a few leaves, not affecting any content; penciled date to top edge of title; the rare faint crease or spot; lightly toned.
This is a bilingual tabular guide to converting between the Gregorian and the traditional Chinese sexagenary calendar, published at a time of rising relations between China and the United States.
The book's compiler, John Endicott Gardner, was born in 1863 in Canton, China to a white American man and a half-Chinese woman. In 1882 he moved to San Francisco, where he served as an interpreter and immigration inspector at Angel Island and as a professor of Chinese language at the University of California.
Per this book's preface, Gardner had responded to an “urgent request” for a conversion reference for use by immigration agents, first compiling 50- and 77-year guides, which soon proved their commercial worth. He expanded his work into this 100-year guide to aid American and European merchants, “court officials,” students “and in fact Chinese of every profession who may have occasion to convert any date in their calendar into the corresponding American date or vice versa.” Gardner shared that “great pains” had been taken to ensure “a vast improvement upon its predecessors, especially in that it is printed in the two languages, distinguished by as many colors,” and vowed that “the work is sent out to the world without a single error.”
OCLC shows only two holdings. Very good. Item #8424
Price: $250.00