Author: Japanese textiles.
Title: Sample book of woven ribbed silk and brocades for decoration and furnishing.
Description: n.p. late 19th, early 20th century. 35x48cm stitched with card wrapper on the back, front wrapper gone but contents complete; 113 samples on both sides of 33 leaves, several more blank leaves. Thoroughly used, staining of the paper but the textiles in good shape. On the back cover is the name Takahashi Masajiro or Seijiro. ¶ Size does matter. Small can be elegant and fetching but, with things like this, big is best. Several of the samples cover the full page and all the others are plenty big enough to get the full effect of colour and pattern. Very much a working haberdasherer's sample book, several still have attached paper tags with handwritten numbers and descriptions and a few have small pieces of contrasting or harmonising fabric pasted on for effect. I've seen heaps of Japanese sample books for dress fabrics of all kinds but I don't remember ever seeing an unequivocal furnishing fabric book anywhere near this date. I'm too ignorant to know how and where these fabrics were used; to me they they seem too bold for scrolls and screens and I wonder whether heri - the binding of tatami - is one use. Heri was, I'm told, a significant indication of wealth and class. Still, these are modern fabrics - they are jacquard woven - at a time when western and traditional rooms could sit side by side in one house.

Keywords: applied arts textiles kimono Japan c19th c20th pattern book samples silk design Asia interiors furnishings meiji