Article:

Confucius advocated the practice of ancestor worship cults, and for some Chinese families the edition of traditional genealogies, tracing back to the 13th century, continues to be one of the responses to remembering and honoring ancestors. This article focuses on a specific printing technique that uses wooden movable-type for the editions of genealogies. It is a de-tailed description of the various steps involved in the printing process: type carving, layout / composition of pages, and printing as seen practiced in Dongyuancun, a village in Rui’an township in Zhejiang province, mainland China. Additionally, the examination of past geneal-ogies kept at the Gushan and Zhejiang libraries in Hangzhou shed light on the artistic and ty-pographic value of these editions. However, the making of a genealogy book, its format, pa-per, layout, and kind of characters used, cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of the cultural, social, historical, and religious traditions associated with it.