Flex Mentallo

There is good reason to believe that the Japanese invented a form of comic book long before we did here in the West. For example Musashi's exploits were depicted in this way. They were a lot cruder than the remarkable prints such as the one below that later found there way here and sparked a revolution in aesthetic sensibility.

The Chinese community was never very large but it gained a reputation for gambling and opium-smoking and Limehouse provided the backdrop for the Dr Fu Manchu films. Indeed, their creator claimed that the character was modeled on a Chinese man of unusual appearance whom he had glimpsed on Limehouse Causeway one foggy night in 1911...

With the growth of its docks, Limehouse acquired an immigrant population and became London’s first Chinatown.

Ackroyd also reintroduced the concept of the golem in his novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), about a series of mysterious murders in 19th-century east London.

Wealthy merchants erected fine houses on Narrow Street, especially in the early 18th century. In 1730 Nicholas Hawksmoor built St Anne’s church just south of Commercial Road. Regarded as one of the architect’s finest works, it has the highest church clock in London. Its location is marked with a pin on the map below. Hawksmoor is also a brilliant 1985 novel by the English writer Peter Ackroyd. It won Best Novel at the 1985 Whitbread Awards and the Guardian Fiction Prize. It tells the parallel stories of Nicholas Dyer, who builds seven churches in 18th-century London for which he needs human sacrifices, and Nicholas Hawksmoor, detective in the 1980s, who investigates murders committed in the same churches. Dyer is modeled on the historical Hawksmoor.

That's interesting! I used to live just across the river in Bermondsey, and even though gentrification was well under way in the early nineties, the dockside area was still very atmospheric - narrow cobbled streets, huge rundown warehouses... From the late 16th century ships were built at Limehouse and traders supplied provisions for voyages.

Considered by many to be one of the finest primary visual sources on Japan before her leap towards modernization, this set is a superb photographic essay and statement of what Japan looked before modernization. It is a broad and wonderful view of travel in the main and obscure places, daily activities and photos of people engaged in the toil of trades, farming, commence and household activities. It is an inward view of a culture about to undergo massive cultural change before the results of Western influence.

"The original photographs, all taken in Japan, were individually printed, washed, fixed, toned, dried, cropped, hand-coloured and pasted onto the page – a process that was repeated thousands of times across the sixteen editions of the book. The photographs were albumen prints created using silver salts suspended in egg white, a more time-consuming process than the gelatine and collodion method that had recently been introduced. "The most distinctive feature of Japan was the hand-colouring of the photographs. This technique had largely been replaced by mechanical colouring, and was already seen as more traditional and prestigious. The Japanese excelled in the hand-colouring of decorative objects such as fans, lanterns and prints, and by the 1880s they were applying this expertise to colouring photographs. It is estimated that a total of 350 individual colorists would have worked for a year on their own part of the work, with each colorist completing, at most, three prints a day."

The work is a guide to the Japanese and 19th Century Japan in general, and gathers together many of the best work by Ogawa and his contemporaries (hence many of the depictions appear in other publications as well.).

While the collotypes, hand colored albumen photographs and color art reproduction plates were imported from Japan, the books were printed, assembled and distributed in the United States.

This comparison of a photo used both in Ogawa's book, Customs and Manners, and the later Japan, Described and Illustrated by the Japanese, shows the radiant quality of the loving restoration from the originals

Which finally brings me on to the book I really wanted to share with you today, which may well be the pride of my modest collection. The Folio Society facsimile edition in 2 huge volumes beautifully restores the delicate photographs and collotypes.

Published in a ten volume limited edition in 1897, it sold for the princely sum of $40. Today an average set might cost $2000 or more.

Japan With an approximate production cost of $200,000 – a staggering sum at the time, equivalent to millions today, Japan was one of the most expensive books ever produced.

Nothing could more aptly reveal the Japanese sensibility for line, simplicity and design.

He also produced beautiful collotypes (a photographic process that can print very fine detail) of flowers.

Ogawa Kazumasa (September 29, 1860 – September 6, 1929), was a photographer, printer and publisher who was a pioneer in photomechanical printing and photography in the Meiji era.