Chips off the old block

Notebooks designed by Mofan bookstore. [Photo by Feng Yongbin/China Daily]

Jiang has collected more than 30,000 woodblocks, about one tenth of which date back to the Ming Dynasty (AD 1368-1644), which means he may have the largest woodblock collection of any individual in China.

Between 2009 and 2012 a few of his prints were on display in a branch of the National Library in Wenjin Street, Beijing, the only one of its kind in the capital.

"In a sense, woodblocks are progenitors of the book," says Jiang, who is also renowned in China as a book designer. "All my works are associated with books."

In late 2014 when the Nobel Museum in Stockholm invited him to design a book for the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Mo Yan to present in its exhibition, Jiang decided there was no better way of interpreting Mo than through a traditional Chinese thread-bound book printed using woodblock.

The book is a short story called Gale that Mo chose from his early works that has about 4,000 characters, and Jiang decided to use a font from Caochuang Yunyu, a poetry anthology by the poet Zhou Min in the Song Dynasty (960-1279), for the book.

Jiang says it took him three months to choose the matching characters from Zhou's poems and piece them together for Mo's short story.

Then he needed to prepare the woodblocks for printing, a process in which wood is carved away, leaving the characters to stand out as a relief pattern for inking and printing.

"The process is difficult because it is such a rare font," says Zhao Yishen, 30, who carved pages one to six of Mo's book. "It's like calligraphy, with many elements of handwriting."

Zhao says that with most printing fonts he can carve about 30 or 40 characters a day, but with the font for the Mo book the number was halved.

"As carvers we aimed to make the characters look as natural as the original writing, not too stiff."

With five other carvers, Zhao worked on the book each day for three months from 8 am to 6 pm.

"It needed the utmost concentration. I took breaks whenever my eyes got sore, and whenever I began to lose focus I stopped to avoid making mistakes."