⧉Image Personal Diaries: Work And Study Diary

This is the inside cover of a personal diary by an accountant in Nanjing. He began writing the diary in 1952 and it expanded to cover various jobs, relationships, and scandals he was involved with. The inside cover’s illustration captures several aspects of urban material culture in the PRC, including a diary (the book with Chinese writing depicted on the bottom-left), the fountain pen (bottom-right), sports equipment, personal seals, and musical instruments. This illustration demonstrates that the diary was both an increasingly wide-spread technology, but also one still associated with pre-revolutionary subjectivity.