Books about Korea galore

Anyone looking to do some reading might want to have a look at the Royal Asiatic Society's E-book collection. Up until now it has included every issue of Transactions, the Royal Asiatic Society's annual journal, dating back over a hundred years, as well as issues of the Korea Repository (a journal from the 1890s) and the Korea Review (from the first decade of the 1900s). Now, however, a rather large edition has been made to the library - former British Ambassador Martin Uden's collection of books, which have all been digitized in pdf form. With 373 books or magazine articles to choose from, reaching as late as the 1970s, you should be able to find something interesting. The Time Magazine articles from around the time of the Korean War I found quite interesting, as was the book "Korea," published by the troop information and education section headquarters of XXIV Corps, which occupied Korea from 1945-48. More recent is a memorial booklet of K-17, the seventeenth group of Peace Corps Volunteers brought to Korea (circa 1971) to teach English in middle schools. Here's a shot of apparent 'chopstick games' from their orientation:

On a related topic is this Peace Corps volunteer's memories of arriving in Korea in the 1970s.

In other 1970s-related news, Naver's news archive's side bar focuses on different news stories from the past, and this week its focus is on the story of the Baileys, who were shipwrecked for four months until being rescued by a Korean fishing vessel in 1973 (a story I looked at last year). The author of the Naver article managed to dig up quite a few photos I hadn't seen, and it's kind of neat that we both looked at this rather obscure story.