My life skills in Daming Liver

In all fairness, Second Young Master Yu's mother loved her son, and the property allocated to Yu Zongyuan was also carefully selected.

This bookstore is located in Tongyifang, the busiest place in Nanping County, and the surrounding shops are not low in style. In modern terms, it is the golden business district, a unique store in this county.

Su Ze has always been cash-strapped since he traveled, and has never had time to visit bookstores. This is the first time he has seen a bookstore in the Ming Dynasty.

Since it is a scholar's business, there is a large plaque hanging in the bookstore with the three characters "Jixiantang" written on it.

In addition to the plaque, there is also a large plaque on the bookstore with the words "Compilation of Ancient and Modern Celebrities' Poems" written on it, and another plaque behind it "New Book Arrived".

In the Ming Dynasty, opening a bookstore was a first-class good business. One of the reasons was that selling books in the Ming Dynasty was tax-free.

This is the rule set by Zhu Yuanzhang, "Except for the tax on books and land implements, folks are exempt from taxation."

Naturally, everyone wants to do this tax-free business, but it is not something that ordinary businesses can do. The Yu family can own a bookstore, which is enough to know their status in Nanping County. You can see how much she loves her youngest son.

After seeing Yu Zongyuan, the yelling guy at the bookstore immediately notified the shopkeeper behind him, and Su Ze picked up the books in front of the bookstore and began to look through them.

The books sold in bookstores all over the Ming Dynasty were mainly in three categories: imperial examination supplementary books, agricultural technical books and novels.

Su Ze picked up a copy of "Selected Periodicals of Time and Literature", which is the latest imperial examination guidance book. It publishes the latest excellent stereotyped essays, similar to modern Chinese essay collections.

In the northern and southern Zhili, where the imperial examinations were prosperous, there were special booksellers’ associations who asked Jinshi of the Imperial Academy to write stereotyped essays, and then compiled this kind of "Selected Periodicals of Shiwen".

Sure enough, the first article was Wang Shizhen's imperial examination article. Now Wang Shizhen is the Wenzong of the world, the most popular young scholar in the capital, and he has just won the Jinshi.

His articles are naturally the most reference for the current imperial examinations, so you can't read the imperial examination articles of former Jinshi.

However, judging from the printing quality of this book and the number of typos in the book, I am afraid that this is not an authentic book. Sure enough, I turned it over and found that it was published by Jianyang Yinfang.

The Ming Dynasty was also aware of copyright, but although it had copyright, it was not easy to defend it.

In particular, Fujian has the largest book printing base in the country, and Jianyang is also a pirate base. All books published in Jianyang are pirated in all likelihood.

For example, this "Selected Journal of Time and Literature" should be a powerful publisher in the capital who paid for articles written by people like Wang Shizhen, and then edited them into an anthology and published them in print.

The pirated booksellers who were ambushing in the capital bought "Selected Journals of Time and Literature" and hurried back to Jianyang, and then immediately summoned craftsmen to engrave and print them, and then sent them to bookstores in various places.

In some remote places, pirated books are even sold wholesale to bookstores earlier than genuine books.

The delivery speed of official documents in the Ming Dynasty is not as fast as these pirated booksellers!

Seeing the price, two taels of silver, Su Ze put down the book decisively.

Well, it's no wonder that these pirated booksellers are working so hard, it's really a huge profit!

Su Ze thought about whether to pirate books in Changning Weiyin in the future, this thing is simply robbery.

Su Ze looked around again. Except for this kind of selected periodicals, the rest are Kaimeng's books and various rhyme books.

However, the prices are also astonishingly high. A thin enlightenment book costs one tael of silver, but the binding is much more exquisite, and there are almost no typos.

This kind of enlightenment book is usually made of engraving at a high price. Anyway, it can be printed repeatedly. This kind of book must not have too many typos, otherwise it will be misleading.

So although it is a pirated book, the quality is very good.

Of course, there is no "Four Books and Five Classics Encyclopedia". It is an official printed book, which is not allowed to be sold in private bookstores, and the imperial court does not allow it to be printed.

Further inside, there are various reference books.

The first to bear the brunt is the number one reference book of the Ming Dynasty, "Multiple Energy and Despicable Things". This book is said to be written by Liu Bowen, the founding minister of the Ming Dynasty. reference book.

However, the historians think that Liu Bowen should not write this kind of book, and it is estimated that Liu Bowen's signature is also a gimmick for selling books.

In addition to "Multi-Neng Despicable Things", there are various recipes, tea books and other miscellaneous books. Su Ze also saw a chess record. There are still a lot of books in the Ming Dynasty.

But Su Ze soon saw more books that left him speechless.

"New chapters on multi-energy despicable things", "new sayings on multi-energy despicable things", "new chapters on multi-energy despicable things", "secret chapters on multi-energy despicable things".

These books of all kinds occupy half of the bookcase, needless to say, this is also a work done by pirated booksellers.

This kind of reference books often needs to be iteratively upgraded, but these books are basically pirated garbage books written to make up the number of words.

For example, the "Secrets of Versatile Despicable Things" opened by Su Ze claims to contain secret pages that were not published in those years, and it contains many secret recipes that are not handed down.

Even judging by Su Ze's Lv1 cooking skills, these recipes are all made up and have no operability at all.

There are also some methods of making pastries, which are completely nonsense, and pastries made in this way will definitely not be sold.

Putting down this money-losing garbage book, Su Ze flipped through the novel section at the back of the bookstore.

The prosperity of citizen literature was also a feature of the Ming Dynasty.

Few people in rural guards like Changningwei could read and write, but in places like Nanping County, there were still many literate ordinary people.

In the Jiangnan area where the literary style is prosperous, the literacy rate of the people in the county towns even exceeds 10%. These huge literate populations naturally also brought about the prosperity of citizen literature.

However, the Jiajing era was still a period of development of citizen literature, which gave Su Ze a lot of space for public copying.

"Water Margin", "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", old faces.

"The Later Legend of the Water Margin" and "The Romance of the Later Three Kingdoms" are another work for pirated booksellers.

"Youyang Miscellaneous Zu", a ghost story in the Tang Dynasty.

"Ancient Romance"? Su Ze flipped through it and quickly put it down, the ancient yellow book.

There are also poetry books such as "Quyi Sanji" and "Anthology of Tang Poems", but the most numerous are novels.

However, the prices of these books are also much cheaper than the previous ones. For example, "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms" is divided into ten volumes, which can be purchased separately. The price of one volume is only half a tael, which is affordable by ordinary people.

Just when Su Ze was thinking about what works he could copy to make money, the shopkeeper in the back room finally came out.

This is a short and fat man in his forties. He looks very sleek and sophisticated at first glance. After seeing Yu Zongyuan, he immediately saluted and took every mouthful of his boss's. A few points.

Seeing that Yu Zongyuan drifted away after being called out twice, Su Ze could only feel that this man was really taken advantage of.

Strictly speaking, this shopkeeper surnamed Yu is not a servant of Yu's mansion, but a distant relative of Yu Zongyuan.

The shopkeeper's name is Yu Dong, who took over the bookstore ten years ago with great difficulty, and can pay thirty or forty taels of silver to Yu's family every year, which is considered good among the many shops in Yufu.

But how much Yu Dong has been greedy for ink depends on the dozens of acres of land he has newly purchased in the past ten years.

Of course Yu Zongyuan's father knew that there was a problem with the accounts, but he didn't know how to check the accounts, and these shopkeepers were all old people in Yu's mansion, so they couldn't move easily.

But now that the shop has been transferred to Yu Zongyuan, in theory it can be regarded as a change of owner, and how Yu Zongyuan cleans up is his business.

So Yu Dong was a little nervous these days, but seeing Yu Zongyuan come in with only Su Ze today, the tension in his heart disappeared.

If the accounts were really checked, there would be absolutely no way to figure out the books of the bookstore without more than a dozen people.

Yu Zongyuan only brought Su Ze, a young scholar, who might not even be able to understand the account book!

So Yu Zongyuan didn't come here to check the accounts. The shopkeeper Yu let go of his heart and asked the clerk to deliver the latest sour plum soup that is popular in the city. It seems that Mr. Yu is just inspecting his own property, so it should be easy to send him away.

Su Ze took a sip of the sour plum soup. Because the cheap cochin sugar was used, the sour plum soup had a slight bitter taste, but he was sweating all over the way, and drinking the sour plum soup really quenched his thirst.

Yu Zongyuan finally did not forget the purpose of his visit, and said with a straight face: "Shopkeeper Yu, close the shop, take out the account book, I want to check the account!"

If it was someone else, at least he would have to be hypocritical. Second Young Master Yu has such a sloppy personality, so he directly stated his purpose straight to the point.

Yu Dong's expression remained the same, he had already prepared for the audit. He had prepared the account books for two years, and immediately ordered the staff to carry out the account books.

Yes, lifted it out.

The bookkeeping method of the Ming Dynasty was still the four-pillar bookkeeping method, and the real double-entry bookkeeping method of Longmen bookkeeping only appeared in the late Ming Dynasty.

The so-called four-pillar bookkeeping method is to include the old account balance, new attachment, expenditure, and remaining four parts.

The bookstore is characterized by a wide variety of items, because there are so many types of books, and each type has to be made into account pages. A box full of account books is so big that Yu Zongyuan looked at Su Ze with help-seeking eyes.

Su Ze picked up an account book, activated the "Account Room" skill, and soon discovered the tricks in it.

The shopkeeper Yu deliberately split the same book into different categories, which greatly increased the complexity of the ledger. If there is no trick, there will be a ghost.

It's normal to be tricky. For a bookstore in such a location, two groups of customers came after Su Ze entered the door. This kind of bookstore only makes a profit of forty or fifty taels a year? This is because Yu's family has a big business and there are no knowledgeable scholars in the family, so he has been deceived by these people for so long.

Su Ze's "accounting" skill is only Lv1. From the point of view of bookkeeping and checking, Su Ze is naturally far inferior to a counterfeiter like the shopkeeper.

But Su Ze has "math" skills!

Su Ze simply abandoned the entry and exit of inventory in the ledger, and began to look for mathematical problems.

This is about to use a famous mathematical theorem - Benford's law.

This theorem of probability and statistics is mainly used to check data falsification.

The principle is probably that as long as there are enough samples of the data, the frequency of numbers starting with 1 in the data is not 1/9, but 30.1%.

The frequency of numbers starting with 2 is 17.6%, and the frequency of occurrence decreases in turn, and the frequency of 9 is the lowest, only 4.6%.

The bookkeeping operation is such a data collection with enough samples. Su Ze does not look at other data, but only grasps the balance data of each type of book, and starts to apply Ford's law.

Su Ze wrote and calculated, and quickly counted all the remaining books. Sure enough, after applying the rules, the appearance rules of many numbers did not conform to Benford's rules.

Su Ze found out the problematic categories again, checked them with a pen, and said to the buddy:

"Take out these sets of books."

The clerk took the paper and glanced at the shopkeeper, his face immediately changed.

Shopkeeper Yu also took the paper, his expression became even uglier.

No matter how stupid Yu Zongyuan was, he saw the problem at this moment.

"Hurry up and take it out! Can't you take it out?"

Shopkeeper Yu was about to break out in cold sweat. What was the origin of the scholar Yu Zongyuan brought here? How did he find out where he had made false accounts so quickly?

The shopkeeper Yu's method of making false accounts is also very low-level, that is, hiding profits in unsold books and falsely reporting inventory to take away profits.

These books that do not actually exist on the books are the excess profits of the bookstore.

As for these "non-existent books", shopkeeper Yu has made a complete account of purchase and sales. If only from the account management, there is no problem at all.

And a bookstore squeezed out a lot of used books. He made entries for so many books, and it was really difficult to count them.

And once the audit starts, shopkeeper Yu only needs to paste the books that need to be checked on the book cover and make up for it temporarily, and then he can get away with it.

This set of methods has been used until modern times. It can be said to be an upright and simple method of false accounts, simple and practical.

But Su Ze just wrote and drew for half an hour, and then found out the problematic stored book, and Yu Zongyuan asked the assistant to take it out immediately, how could he get it out!

The guy was trembling all over. If the shopkeeper made false accounts, he would naturally get a dividend as a guy.

He has the courage to make false accounts, but he can't afford the consequences of being found out by then.

The guy is the son of the Yu family, and his household registration and identity deed are all in Zong Yuan's hands.

After all, Yu Zongyuan was his father.

The son made a mistake, if the real father killed his own son, the government would only reprimand him, let alone a house slave?

Of course, the government will definitely intervene if someone is really dead, but the Yu family is a military guard, and how many servants disappear every year in the Yu family. It is too easy for these big families to deal with the subordinates.

Su Ze pointed to the guy and said, "Tell me, which ones on this list are true and which ones are false, and I ask Mr. Yu to forgive you."

The guy was still trembling, Yu Zongyuan kicked him over and said, "Stop talking! I'll kill your whole family!"

Mr. Yu's threat was simple and direct, and the guy gave a wow, and he recruited them all.