After Chen Muwu finished saying those words that did not follow common sense, he began to pretend to be mysterious, and played Xu Shu into Cao Ying, without saying a word.

Zhang Yuanji didn't ask, he didn't ask, fortunately, the manuscript was in his hand, and depending on the meaning of the other party, most of them also wanted to discuss it after he finished reading the book.

The documentary "The Rise of a Great Power" was shown to everyone by Chen Muwu's Chinese teacher in high school in class, mainly talking about the process of the rise of nine countries one after another, and also summarizing the historical law of the rise of the country.

But because this documentary was filmed 80 years later in 2006, there are many things that were considered historical at the time, and have not yet happened.

However, because Chen Muwu only started to try to write after returning home, he was unable to finish all the things in nine countries in just a few days.

But the first three countries that appeared in historical order, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands, all had infinite scenery from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century.

Therefore, these three countries are still relatively easy to write, and there is no need to make any changes to the content in the original documentary.

The manuscripts that Chen Muwu handed over to Zhang Yuanji also have parts about these three countries.

Because the creators behind the script of this documentary are all professors from the history department of Shao University.

Behind them are all kinds of materials in the collections of libraries at home and abroad to be cited, and the historical materials are detailed and accurate, and there is no problem in the correctness of the contents.

But most of them were superficial and did not go any further.

Therefore, "The Rise of Great Powers" can be regarded as an enlightenment in the modern history of the world, which makes readers and audiences interested in this matter.

But it must not be regarded as a professional book on modern world history, if Chen Muwu wants to copy a professional book, why not simply copy a copy of the "General History of the World"?

It's just that professional books are cumbersome to write, and in today's China, the number of potential readers is not very large.

Thankless things, Chen Muwu is unwilling to do.

Zhang Yuanji has been immersed in the publishing industry for many years, and the Commercial Press has been able to become bigger and stronger under his hands, and it is by no means relying on luck.

Although Chen Muwu, who has been used to typing English on a typewriter for several years abroad, the handwriting of Chinese characters is not so good-looking, and there are many simplified characters mixed in it.

But Zhang Yuanji was able to judge from his keen publishing instinct that if this book was printed, not to mention reaching the point where children could interpret and Hu Er could sing, it would at least set off a wave in the upper intellectual circles.

It is not uncommon for the Commercial Press to find those popular readings, such as Saturday Mandarin Duck and Butterfly Literature, and the kind of things that ruin the reputation, and leave them to the world bookstores to handle them themselves.

Zhang Yuanji felt that Chen Muwu had found the right person that morning, and such a good book must be matched with the best publishing company in the country.

However, what does Chen Muwu mean when he says that this book does not need to be paid?

And he said that the book had to be published by the Commercial Press.

So what does this young man mean?

Could it be that he wants a stake in the Commercial Press?

The quality of this book is indeed good, but it is really a bit whimsical to think of taking shares from here without knowing the height of the sky with just one book.

Zhang Yuanji has already set a good price for this book in his heart, and no one on both sides will suffer.

But before that, he still asked Chen Muwu what he meant and why he said such inexplicable words.

Zhang Yuanji didn't expect that Chen Muwu's reply was even more inexplicable.

He said that he didn't want money for this book, and he didn't want shares, but he needed the Commercial Press to exchange it for the book.

What does it mean to exchange a book?

Does he not want to be a shareholder this time, but also a distributor?

Take a book from the marketing department of the Business Movement Printing House, and then open your own bookstore on Sima Road to sell books to make money?

Chen Muwu's brainless words, Zhang Yuanji thought about it for a long time, and could only find such a "reasonable" explanation.

Chen Muwu has been eyeing the Commercial Press, and it has not been a day or two.

The mystery in his words led to an error in Zhang Yuanji's understanding.

The so-called exchange of books does not mean that for every ten or 100 copies of "The Rise of Great Powers" sold, he takes a copy of "Wang Yun's Five Great Dictionaries" from the Commercial Press.

Besides, what's the use of him asking for so many dictionaries?

If Chen Muwu is in a good mood one day, he can get the Chinese pinyin out and grab business with Minister Wang.

It is actually very easy to get Hanyu Pinyin out, and with Chen Muwu's current reputation and status in China, it is also easy to implement Hanyu Pinyin.

But the reason why Chen Muwu didn't do that was because he was afraid that he wouldn't be able to control the consequences of this matter.

Some people in the New Culture Movement overdid it and created a culture that was too new and too advanced, and they were always discussing and agitating for the abolition of Chinese characters and the complete romanization of the alphabet.

Assuming that the proposal succeeds, the future of Chinese may be less like square characters than Ben's kana and South Korea's proverbs, but more like the Vietnamese of its southern neighbor, Vietnam.

He, Chen Muwu, didn't want to be a sinner for the ages at all.

And now that Hanyu Pinyin is being launched, there is another embarrassing thing.

That is, there are learning opportunities in the first place, and people who can read and write are not willing to learn Hanyu Pinyin.

But most people in the country don't even have the opportunity to go to school, let alone get in touch with Hanyu Pinyin.

We will make up our minds to overcome all difficulties and carry out a nationwide literacy campaign.

Anyway, the current Beiyang government will not have this kind of courage, and the future Shenjing government will not have it.

As for those whimsical people who take a lot of money in a small county town and engage in civilian education, it is a joke from beginning to end.

He and Albert Einstein were also called "the top ten great men with the most revolutionary contributions in the modern world", and were selected as "the 100 most important people in the contemporary world" by the American pheasant magazine.

A piece of paper to draw a nose, such a big face!

Let's go back to the Commercial Press.

Chen Muwu is not eyeing the books of the Commercial Press, but the books in the Oriental Library under the Commercial Press.

The Oriental Library, at the beginning, was a library attached to the compilation office of the Commercial Press.

Later, as the business of the Commercial Press expanded, the size of the library gradually increased.

In 1909, a five-story building was even built in Zhabei to store books, and the library was renamed "Hanfen Building".

The readers of the wealthy families in the Jiangnan area seem to have a hobby of collecting books.

The same is true of Zhang Yuanji, a native of Jiang, but he did not collect books for his own personal gain, on the one hand, to expand the database of the Commercial Press, and on the other hand, it was also a lofty ideal of collecting books extensively in order to "preserve the quintessence of the country and continue the culture".

Just last year, in 1925, the Han Fen Building was renamed the Oriental Library, but the rare books in it still retain their original names.

This year, the Oriental Library has begun to open to the public every afternoon, and is no longer limited to the use of the Commercial Press insiders.

At its peak, the private company's library had a collection of more than 460,000 volumes, even more than the National Shaoping Library, not to mention the Chung Hwa Library, a competitor of the Commercial Press, which had a collection of only about 90,000 volumes.

Not to mention being the largest in the country, the Oriental Library was also the largest library in Asia at that time.

It is such a modern large library, but in 1932, in the first Songhu Anti-Japanese War, it was bombed by Xiao Ben's plane.

Except for a few thousand rare copies of the Song and Yuan dynasties, which were stored in the bank's safe, all the rest of the books in the library were wiped out in the artillery fire.

I feel that this bombing has wiped out the culture that has been inherited in China for thousands of years, but I never thought that books are not the way to inherit culture, but talents.

Chen Muwu found the Commercial Press this time because of this incident.

He always wanted to do something about this matter, although he couldn't spoil it, saying that he knew five hundred years before and five hundred years later, and foresaw that he would definitely do something to the Oriental Library.

It is impossible for anyone to believe this statement, especially Zhang Yuanji, the entire Oriental Library is a rare book that he has acquired all over the country, and it is even more like his heart than the Commercial Press.

If a Chen Muwu came out of thin air and told him these filthy words, he would definitely be regarded as a madman.

Since a long, long time ago, Chen Muwu has been thinking about how to deal with this matter better.

He also had all kinds of ideas, the first of which was to find a way to persuade Zhang Yuanji to transfer these rare books that he had painstakingly collected from the primary target of his attack, to inland areas such as Sichuan, Chongqing, and Shaanxi.

However, the headquarters of the Commercial Press is in the sea, and this request is also very unreasonable, and the reference room will be moved, and what should the editors do if they want to check the materials in the future?

Chen Muwu's second method is to buy books from Zhang Yuanji.

He wanted to pay a lot of money to buy the entire Oriental Library's collection and then transfer it.

But this idea is still an unrealistic whimsy.

Zhang Yuanji is a person who loves books like his life, and he has spent so much effort to collect books from all over the country, how can he say that he will buy them?

Moreover, the Commercial Press is not short of money, and it can't look down on Chen Muwu's two jujubes.

In the end, Chen Muwu could only come up with this last solution.

That is, to write a book that can attract Zhang Yuanji's attention and exchange it with him.

However, this is an exchange, not a book for a book, Chen Muwu thought of another way, the so-called film.

Although camera technology is the same now, Chen Muwu is still using the most primitive photographic negatives like applying a developer to the back of a glass plate in the Cavendish laboratory, but the technology of microfilm has begun to be used in the preservation and backup of library collections.

In particular, Chen Muwu recently read in the newspaper that two Belgian engineers, Paul Ottlet,

and Robert Goldschmidt, who had been working on the development and refinement of microfilm as early as 1906, had also participated as the host of the first Second Solvay Conference.

And more recently, the technology has begun to be used in the business environment.

It's just that the earliest use case is not a library, but a bank in the United States.

A banker in the United States, in order to save his bank from having to store so many copies of expired or cancelled checks, developed a patent for a "check recorder" to make microcopies of these useless checks so that the bank could keep them permanently.

This patent was later bought by the American company Kodak, and it made a lot of money.

The technique of microphotography has finally matured, and since it can be used to photograph checks, it can also be used to photograph books.

In fact, just in the last year or two, the Library of Congress, which has no background, has begun to use microphotography to photograph more than 3 million pages of books and manuscripts in the German-speaking British Library.

The time before 1932 was too short, and Chen Muwu was not sure whether he could prevent the "January 28" tragedy.

But he can always use this method to make a backup of the books in the Oriental Library, which can be regarded as preparing a worst way to cover the tragedy.

Although paper books may be lost, at least the contents of the book can be preserved intact.

It is true that when he said to Zhang Yuanji that he wanted to exchange the book of the Commercial Press for the publishing rights of this "Rise of a Great Power", it was Chen Muwu who said a big thing.

After he explained clearly to this senior in the publishing industry, Zhang Yuanji, who had never been able to figure out what kind of medicine was sold in Chen Muwu's gourd, finally breathed a sigh of relief.

The reason given by Chen Muwu is also very high-sounding, he did not say that he wanted these books, but said that the Swedish crown prince, who was visiting China recently, has always been very interested in Chinese culture - otherwise he would not risk war and travel thousands of miles to the East to make such a trip.

He found Chairman Zhang this time, and he wanted to make a backup for the Swedish side of the books in the Oriental Library.

If I have the opportunity, I would like to exchange books with the Oriental Library every year, and select a batch of books to be shipped to Sweden for exhibition.

Chen Muwu's "The Rise of a Great Power" can be regarded as a welcome gift to the Commercial Press.

If the Commercial Press could nod and agree to facilitate the matter, the Swedish side would also send a copy of the microfilm as a backup.

Chen Muwu said all this with a smile on his face, but there was still a little pain in his heart.

This microphotography machine must have appeared on its own, through the door of Oppenheimer's house, to the United States.

But the good name that fell was given to the Swedish crown prince, who knew nothing about it.

Maybe in Zhang Yuanji's eyes, he is so concerned about this matter, and he runs for it, he doesn't look like a dignified physicist at all, but like a comprador running errands for the Swedish side.

But even if it is a black pot with a bad name, he must do it, just ask for a clear conscience.

Zhang Yuanji agreed in principle to help the library collection of books to shoot microfilms, which is beneficial and harmless, but as for book exchanges, we still have to think again.

After all, the books in the Oriental Library were all searched for by myself and my colleagues, and transported abroad.

At that time, Zhang Yuanji was more interested in Chen Muwu's "The Rise of Great Powers", and he asked how many countries were involved in this series, and asked if the three countries that had already been written could be published as the first series.

If you are an ordinary person, you will definitely take advantage of Chen Muwu.

But Zhang Yuanji is still very righteous, and he also promised that the book will definitely pay the manuscript fee according to the price, and Chen Muwubai must not be allowed to work so hard.

Money is better than nothing, and I don't know that this manuscript fee can be worth a fraction of the cost of ordering microphotography machines from American companies.

The train runs along the shores of Lake Baikal, and unlike when it came in the middle of summer, the windows are now full of autumn scenery on the lakeside.

Oppenheimer was still in the bunk opposite the box, making changes to his Chinese travel diary.

Chen Muwu also finally finished writing the American chapter of "The Rise of Great Powers", which has been greatly abridged, and it is also the last article in this series.

He planned to wait for the train to arrive at the final stop of the trip, Jusco, so he asked the embassy staff to help send it back to China.

(End of chapter)