Seals

27 March 2012

I need help with reading seals.

The internet has made the process a little quicker, in two ways.

Firstly, it is usually possible to read some of the characters on a seal, and if there are sufficient consecutive ones, a phrase-search in Google or Baidu will sometimes produce the answer – usually in an auction site, where another book bears the seal in question.

Secondly, I’m soliciting the help of interested parties by drawing their attention to my embryonic list of all the seals to be found in the books in our collections, starting with Backhouse:

http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/users/djh/seals/

I believe the fashionable term for this process is “crowd sourcing”.

I hope it works – I’ve wasted enough time with seal-script dictionaries.

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