A Book from the Sky () is the title of a book produced by Chinese artist Xu Bing in the style of fine editions from the Song and Ming dynasties, but filled entirely with meaningless glyphs designed to resemble traditional Chinese characters. The book, which consists of four volumes totaling 604 pages, was printed in a single print run of 126 copies between 1987 and 1991, and was first publicly exhibited in October 1988, in Beijing's China Art Gallery. The work was originally titled Mirror to Analyze the World: The Century’s Final Volume (), a title which "evokes the trope of the book as jian 鍳 or mirror in the venerable tradition of imperial historiography". However, the artist eventually felt that this title was "cumbersome" and "heavily influenced by Western forms and the current cultural climate", and decided to adopt the name that was already in popular use, Tianshu. In Chinese, the term tian shu (“divine writing”) originally referred to certain kinds of religious texts, but is now used to mean "gibberish"; it has thus been suggested that nonsense Writing would be a more appropriate translation of the title. Production The book is composed using a set of 4,000 characters, as this is roughly the number of characters in common usage in modern written Chinese. These characters were designed on the basis of the Kangxi radicals, so that "in terms of density of strokes and frequency of occurrence, they... appear, on the page, to be real characters". In addition to these, page and fascicle numbers were indicated using tally marks based on the Chinese character 正. The characters were carved into individual pieces of movable type made from pear wood, in a style slightly squatter than that of Song typefaces. Initially, Xu himself typeset sample pages, and took them for printing to a factory in the village of Hanying (), in Caiyu township (). (This was one of the last remaining traditional printing factories in China, which after the Cultural Revolution mainly produced state-sponsored reprints of classical texts using pre-Revolution woodblocks.) Later, workers at the factory typeset the pages by referring to a "model book" prepared by Xu, which contained symbols such as ↓★○☒❖ that had been placed in a one-to-one correspondence with his 4,000 pseudo-Chinese characters. Reactions Critical reactions to A Book from the Sky were initially dismissive. In 1990, an article in a Beijing newspaper, said to have