Illustration:
ill. 6.43 a (set: 6.43)
Date:
1976
Genre:
calendar, photograph
Material:
internet file, colour, original source: print on paper, colour
Source:
DACHS 2009 Propaganda Posters, Maopost.com (edited by Pierre-Loic Lavigne and Pierre Budestschu):C00632, Heidelberg catalogue entry
Courtesy:
Pierre Lavigne
Inscription:
图书车来了
Keywords:
reading, lending library, children, calendar, popularity of comics, small bookstall, comic

The wheeled library (Tushuche lai le 图书车来了)

It would be difficult to figure out whether the popularity of comics during the Cultural Revolution matches that of earlier and later times: because they are exchanged among friends and lent out quite frequently, comics usually have a much larger market than what the publishing statistics based on actual sales suggest. Indeed, according to Seifert, in the 1930s, the larger part of all comics produced was given to lending libraries and not sold. This practice seems to have continued into the years after 1949 (Seifert 2008, 49). In 1952, for example, in Shanghai alone, 350,000 small bookstalls are said to have rented out comics to between 200,000 and 400,000 people each day (Farquhar 1999, 202). Such figures are unreliable as well as few and far between, however. Memories of reading comics at such stalls, which often held several hundred titles on average (Seifert 2008, 85), however, can be found frequently among those who lived through the early decades of the PRC (and have been added in memory blogs as well).

"We went to this rental stall that had the comic books. My relative had rented some space out to the owner of the stall and so he was really nice to me. I could simply read all those comic books [xiaorenshu] for free. So I read the Romance of Three Kingdoms and the Journey to the West. Many of these comic books were very well painted. I really liked them, and now, I still have some of them, reprints from the 1980s when they came out again." (Journalist, 1946–)

Illustrations that show these bookstalls renting out comics can be found throughout the twentieth century. In this 1976 depiction, a little girl, her arms full of comic books, stands in front of a pushcart stall and next to a set of chairs, shouting out loud to attract an audience. Behind her, a boy is already starting to flip through some of the comics displayed on the pushcart. Images like these suggest an unabated fascination with the comic form, and this fascination probably did not stop during the Cultural Revolution.