Of the 350 book titles and 21 periodicals listed in that authoritative bibliography, which was compiled by Charles S. Gardner for the American Council of Learned Societies, the university library possessed less than half in 1938, Today the holdings of the library include 292 of the book titles and nineteen of the periodicals, while in addition more than 100 other Western books on China not listed in Gardner's bibliography have been acquired, these latter covering a wide range of subjects including archaeology, art, history, philosophy, literature, music, economies and folklore. Of the newly acquired books in Chinese tHe main one is a copy of the world's largest encyclopedia, the Ku Chin T'u-shu Chi-cheng, or Complete Collection of Illustrations ind Writings of Ancient and Modern Times.
Compiled under Imperial decree by a large group of Chinese. scholars, this work was published first in 1926, in 10,000 books, comprising more than 800,000 pages and containing about 100,000,000 Chinese characters. The copy acquired by the library is a facsimile reprint in 800 volumes. The contents of the work with its 32 main divisions and 6,109 subdivisions, consist of illustrations and of excerpts culled from almost all works of Chinese literature, ancient and modern, and covering the entire field of Chinese learning as it existed in the 18th. century.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.