Chinese books on 草書?

[Tomsima]

My studies of 草書 are continuing to go swimmingly this year. I would really like to accompany this with a good book or two to read on or around this area. I was wondering if anyone is able to recommend any good books in Chinese on the topic of 草書? Or perhaps could point me to a good website that I can find more obscure specialist Chinese books? International/Mainland/Taiwan/Japan located bookstores - all recommendations welcome.

[Jim]

I translated some things for Liu Zhengcheng and I seem to remember his complete encyclopaedia of calligraphy has sections on caoshu and on some of the more famous practitioners individually. Did a quick search to see if he had anything dedicated specifically to caoshu and came up with this: https://book.douban.com/subject/1134857/ can't seem to find a description of the contents though. Anyway, I found him a good writer and insightful commentator.

[Tomsima]

That looks like an interesting lead, thanks. Also, you translated for Liu Zhengcheng? that sounds like a great job, did you ever manage to attend any exhibitions or events?

[Jim]

1 hour ago, Tomsima said:

did you ever manage to attend any exhibitions or events?

No, but I lived just round the corner from him so I saw a fair bit of his work at his house and stuff in his office where his editorial staff are working on the books.

[大块头]

Here are some of the recommendations from @OneEye's recent video on reading cursive. (I was pleased to see that the book I scanned made an appearance.?)

• 石梁《草字彙》link
• 李靜《草書字典》link
• 胡紫桂《草书历代书论选》link
• 胡紫桂《草书历代小品文选》link
• 《智永真草千字文》link
• 王羲之《十七帖》link
• 王羲之《草訣歌》link
• 韓道亨《草訣歌》link, online version

For my next project I'm considering making an Anki deck for recognizing 草书. For that I need a character dictionary containing public domain 字帖 arranged in a computer-parsable grid. I think the 《草書字典》 listed above would work, though there may be some 20th century stuff mixed in? As I understand it, copyright protection for both the PRC and Taiwan extends for 50 years past the author's death so I wouldn't be able to use the work of any calligrapher who died after 1971.

 

 

From the product description page on 京东:

 

Quote

《草书字典》是一部书法艺术工具书，与文字工具书有别，故不合正体之异体字亦加以收录。《草书字典》收录历代法书上起先秦，下迄近代，多以影印件直接剪辑。历代法书、碑帖中的单字原迹大小相差悬殊，为使有限的篇幅能容纳尽可能多的内容，收辑多有收缩。