Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

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[sacentaur]

Dang, now I’ll have to get that Taschen book.

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32 minutes ago, sacentaur said:

Dang, now I’ll have to get that Taschen book.

I had that feeling!

 

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Hiroshige Matthi Forrer

 

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Another great product here. The book measures 32.4 x 4.3 x 43.8 cm and is printed in the Japanese way with pages concertina-ed and then edge sewn on one side.

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Studies from Nature

Kitagawa Utamaro (Illustrator)

Translated by John T. Carpenter

Limited to 500 numbered sets

Essays by John T. Carpenter, Alfred Haft and Alex Kerr

Five hand-crafted books of exquisite Japanese art and poetry in facsimile for the first time

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I thought this Folio Society limited edition worth highlighting, even though I dont own a copy! It's not the Utamaro I could have wished for, but extraordinary none the less. From the listing on their site:

 

During Japan’s Edo period art and literature flourished and Kitagawa Utamaro (c.1754–1806) rose to fame as one of Japan’s most highly regarded artists and printmakers. Alongside his contemporaries Hiroshige and Hokusai, Utamaro was an acknowledged master of ukiyo-e, pictures of the Floating World.

Designed between 1788 and 1790 the Studies from Nature are amongst Utamaro’s earliest known works and brought together the artist and the era’s best writers, printers and bookbinders. The two-volume The Book of Crawling Creatures, the single-volume Gifts of the Ebb Tide and the two-volume The Book of Myriad Birds are considered the ne plus ultra of the colour woodblock printer’s art and the art of bookmaking of the period.

The Folio Society has printed from amongst the finest surviving first editions – luxury items in their own time and now treasures of the British Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum – reproducing each element with absolute fidelity. These beautiful books are designed to be read in the traditional Japanese style from back cover to front, and from right to left across the page. In each, Utamaro’s elegant illustrations, as interesting to the naturalist as they are to lovers of art and poetry, are paired with kyōka: playful, erudite and often erotic poems on the sentiments of love, composed by some of the form’s most prominent poets.

Edited January 30, 2020 by Flex Mentallo

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