The serial knowledge of cognate thoughts, culture, systems, language, engraving and edition of classic ancient books was organized based on their subject-guided reading activities, which plays a rather effective role in promoting the readers to read them. The selection of subject-guided reading activity contents, forms of subject-guided reading activity design, implementation of subject-guided reading activity were analyzed with the ancient e-dition of《Handbook of prescriptions for emergency》as an example. A knowledge chain-based subject-guided reading model of classic ancient books was proposed for promoting the reading of ancient books on traditional Chinese medi-cine and the reading of Chinese national culture in related academic libraries.