Okamoto Ippei.

[Jido Mangashu].

Tokyo, Kobunsha 1927 [Showa 2]. 22x15cm cloth backed publisher's colour illustrated card wrapper; cover, illustrated title in red and black and one colour plate by Ippei, seven full page illustrations in colour, profusely illustrated in b/w by any number of artists. An uncommonly good copy. Shogakusei Zenshu no.23.
¶ The Shogakusei Zenshu, or Complete Works for Elementary Schools, runs to some 88 volumes of educational texts and literature - much of this in translation - few of them seem elementary, and how many publishers of such series would include manga? Ippei, radical and scallywag, was the king of newspaper cartooning as Rakuten ruled the magazines in Taisho and early Showa Japan. It was Ippei that brought the American comic strip to Japan and he heads, with Rakuten, the lists of idols and inspiration of many modern manga artists.

Richard Neylon, BooksellerProfessional seller

Book number: 10869

Keywords: graphic art illustration humour Japan Asia c20th modernism manga children eduation c20th Japan modernism juvenile comics cartoons meiji

Okamoto Ippei.

[Katei wo Akarumi he].

Tokyo, Nisshin Seimei Hoken [c1932]. 13x19cm publisher's colour illustrated wrapper; 16pp with eight colour illustrations by Ippei, some small photo illustrations. A nice copy.
¶ A fun booklet advertising the benefits of insurance from the company, Nisshin Seimei Hoken (Nissin Life Insurance), illustrated by master illustrator/manga artist, radical and scallywag Okamoto Ippei.

Richard Neylon, BooksellerProfessional seller

Book number: 10490

Keywords: graphic art illustration trade catalogues advertising c20th Japan manga cartoons humour

Okamoto Ippei.

[Shufunotomo - Manga Sugoroku].

Tokyo, Shufunotomosha 1929 (Showa 4). Broadside 64x94cm; colour printed. Not the best copy, over creased with several repairs to separated folds, but all there.
¶ A splendid large and lively sugoroku - racing game - by the illustrator/cartoonist whose place in modern manga history is still being argued. Issued as a New Year gift by the magazine The Housewife's Friend, the game is an intriguing melange, to me, of the modern and traditional; whether in conflict or harmony or all round mocked I don't know. The winning post - the joyful family of plump plutocrats with both husband and wife looking remarkably like lucky gods - is the dream of the modern young woman being hatched from an egg in the upper right but she is not the starting point of the game. There seems to be several starting points. Did any young western woman ever dream of being rich and fat? If you look up Okamoto Ippei in non-Japanese places now you will find so many entries telling us how unjustly neglected and forgotten he is in the history of comics and manga that we know his place is assured. Ippei was the king of newspaper cartooning as Rakuten ruled the magazines in Taisho and early Showa Japan. It was Ippei that brought the American comic strip to Japan and heads, with Rakuten, the lists of idols and inspiration of many modern manga artists; hardly forgotten.

Richard Neylon, BooksellerProfessional seller

Book number: 10467

Keywords: paper games pastimes illustration cartoons manga sugoroku c20th Japan modernism graphic art progress Asia feminism women reform

Okamoto Ippei.

[Shufunotomo - Manga Sugoroku].

Tokyo, Shufunotomosha 1929 (Showa 4). Broadside 64x94cm; colour printed. Rather good.
¶ A splendid large and lively sugoroku issued as a New Year gift by the magazine The Housewife's Friend. The game is an intriguing melange, to me, of the modern and traditional; whether in conflict or harmony or all round mocked I don't know. The winning post - the joyful family of plump plutocrats with both husband and wife looking remarkably like lucky gods - is the dream of the modern young woman being hatched from an egg in the upper right but she is not the starting point of the game. There seems to be several starting points. Did any young western woman ever dream of being rich and fat?Ippei, radical and scallywag, was the king of newspaper cartooning as Rakuten ruled the magazines in Taisho and early Showa Japan. It was Ippei that brought the American comic strip to Japan and he heads, with Rakuten, the lists of idols and inspiration of many modern manga artists.

Richard Neylon, BooksellerProfessional seller

Book number: 10630

Keywords: paper games pastimes illustration cartoons manga sugoroku c20th Japan modernism graphic art progress Asia feminism women reform

Okamoto Ippei.

[Yama to Umi] (Mountain & Sea).

Osaka, Asahi Shimbun 1926 [Taisho 15]. Quarto publisher's colour illustrated wrapper; 40pp, b/w illustrations throughout. Natural browning of the paper; a rather good copy.
¶ A comic commentary on the Japanese out and about on holiday and I suspect many other things beyond me. There is a cast of recurring characters and it's evident from the cover that class wars are at play - there is a drawing inside of a plutocrat mugging a beggar - but there's a lot going on in these busy pages that are fun to look at but incomprehensible to me. Ippei, radical and scallywag, was the king of newspaper cartooning as Rakuten ruled the magazines in Taisho and early Showa Japan. It was Ippei that brought the American comic strip to Japan and he heads, with Rakuten, the lists of idols and inspiration of many modern manga artists.

Richard Neylon, BooksellerProfessional seller

Book number: 10570

Keywords: graphic art illustration humour Japan Asia c20th modernism manga

Iribe &c.

La Baionnette. Volume 4. Nouvelle Serie. No.40 [... to No.52].

Paris, April to June 1916. Thirteen issues, quarto together in publisher's illustrated boards (knocked and rubbed); illustrated throughout in colour (some double page) and b/w, all covers preserved.
¶ Each number of La Baionnette, successor to L'Assiette au Beurre, is a special number with one theme. Number 41 is Iribe's Danse Macabre, 42 is devoted to war time fashion, 45 to machines of war, 51 ('Les Pirates') to the U-boats ... Almost a surfeit of savage feats of satire by Iribe, Sem, Wegener, Capiello ...

Richard Neylon, BooksellerProfessional seller

Book number: 9419

Keywords: graphic art satire c20th France periodicals military great war humour

Ise.

[Isesangu Meisho An'nai no Zu].

Yamashita Sobei 1925 [Taisho 14]. Colour printed broadside 34x50cm; woodcut and half-tone printing? Folded, natural browning of the cheap paper but rather good..
¶ An odd anachronism, this combines the production of the cheapest printing of a generation earlier. Yamashita Sobei produced these pilgrim tourist guides without changing their style from 1898 at least, updating details like trains, trams and new buildings. Maybe the lurid roughness became part of the tradition of the regular pilrimages to the two shrines of Ise.

Richard Neylon, BooksellerProfessional seller

Book number: 9999

Keywords: graphic art Japan c20th Asia progress maps guides religion transport reform

Masakata Ishibashi.

[Eigosen].

Tokyo [Bankyukau c1870?]. Two volumes (18x12cm) publisher's wrappers, title labels mostly gone. Some worming at each end of volume one, unsightly on a couple of leaves but not serious. Pleasingly used, with some annotations in red, some pencilled notes and a bored-student kabuki face brush drawn at the end of the first volume.
¶ A comparatively substantial English Japanese vocabulary and conversation book which like many of their first such manuals I suspect is based on some outdated, possibly Dutch model. There seems no other explanation for the long chat about what can only be the Napoleonic wars. The expected errors are sweetly amusing of course but I think I can see two completely different kinds of errors - those that come from phonetic transcription and those that come from copying alien writing. In more than one case I suspect the woodcutter gave up and aimed at a swirl that held the spirit of the word he had to copy. Waseda University illustrates their copies of an 1861 edition, an 1872 edition and an undated edition. This most closely resembles the 1872 edition but there are several differences.

Richard Neylon, BooksellerProfessional seller

Book number: 9606

Keywords: education manual handbook c19th Japan language linguistics English dictionary Asia phrase book conversation

Yoshida Isojiro.

[Seito Hikkei : Shinsen Shogaku Taisojutsu].

Tokyo, Shueido 1885 (Meiji 18). Two volumes 13x19cm publisher's wrappers with title labels; a folding plate and small illustrations throughout. A nice copy.
¶ And a nice little book, a self proclaimed essential set of physical exercises for school kids. The boys are the ones in western clothes, the girls swaddled in traditional dress. Worldcat finds no copy outside Japan.

Richard Neylon, BooksellerProfessional seller

Book number: 11126

Keywords: social sciences education children juvenile sports health gymnastics c19th Japan exercise

JACKSON, Wilfrid S.

Nine Points of the Law.

London, John Lane 1903. Octavo publisher's illustrated cloth blocked in git, white and brown. A few spots at the edges and ends, a rather good copy.
¶ First edition. A goodhearted thriller with a Candide-like hero dragged into action and wrongfully suspected. This appears to be Jackson's first book and his only mystery. He published a couple more novels but none seem to have set the world on fire (though his next novel 'Helen of Troy, NY' got a good notice in the NY Times) and he settled into a steady career as a translator and general man-of-letters.

Richard Neylon, BooksellerProfessional seller

Book number: 8613

Keywords: literature fiction c20th England thrillers mystery detective

JACOBS, Thomas Jefferson.

Scenes, Incidents, and Adventures in the Pacific Ocean, or the islands of the Australasian seas, during the cruise of the clipper Margaret Oakley, under Capt. Benjamin Morrell. Clearing up the mystery which has heretofore surrounded this famous expedition .. full account of the exploration of the Bidera, Papua, Banda, Mindoro, Sooloo, and China Seas .. the inhabitants of the islands .. and a description of vast regions never before visited by civilized man.

NY, Harper 1844. Octavo publisher's blind stamped cloth (rebacked with the lower part of the spine laid down); 372pp, three plates (one folding - a view of Canton), wood engraved illustrations through the text. An unusually fresh and unspotted copy.
¶ A defence of Morrell in part, the worst of whom Jacobs would only say: "I am inclined to the belief that Captain Morrell was not so abandoned a man as many suppose, and that after the wreck of the vessel he became partially insane." Jacobs tried to join the expedition as a paying passenger, was refused by a suspicious Morrell and somehow became a sort of gentleman apprentice navigator cum companion. That's what he says, but nothing much else in the book is to be trusted and this can take an honourable place in the imaginary voyage canon.

Richard Neylon, BooksellerProfessional seller

Book number: 8286

Keywords: travel exploration maritime historyimaginary voyages c19th Australia Pacific south east asia new guinea sea nautical

JANE, Fred T.

All the World's Fighting Ships.

London, Sampson Low 1898. 20x32cm publisher's cloth (spine rubbed, tips worn); line drawings throughout. Inner front hinge with an old cloth tape repair; a used but acceptable copy.
¶ The first of what became Jane's Fighting Ships and hard to find.

Richard Neylon, BooksellerProfessional seller

Book number: 10898

Keywords: nautical maritime ships technology c19th military naval architecture

Vietnam: anti war and underground American press in Japan.

A collection of newspapers and leaflets produced by or for the American military in Japan during the Vietnam war.

vp (Okinawa, Iwakuni, Yokosuka, Tokyo &c) vd c1969-74, mostly 1970 to 1972. 71 items in two old folders (plus a few duplicates) of various sizes on various papers ranging from the clumsiest mimeograph leaf to reasonably well printed offset - most down the lower end of the production scale - many illustrated with varied success by photo or drawing. The condition ranges from shabby but complete to fresh off the press - mostly up the top end of the condition scale.
¶ A splendid collection made by someone who must have been involved in the production of some of these ephemeral outcries. I suspect a member of the Beheiren - the loose organisation of Japanese opponents to the Vietnam war: on one Beheiren piece the address and phone numbers have been updated by hand; with another, three fresh copies on different colour paper have been preserved. There are annotations here and there in English and a few in Japanese.There may be a more complete collection of these things somewhere in the world but I haven't found it. I thought the Wisconsin Historical Society GI Press collection was such a place until I discovered that it is a digital collection scanned from pieces all over the world by the dedicated academic James Lewes. He didn't find quite a few things that are here.Titles include Semper Fi; We Got the brASS; Yokosuka David; GI Free Press Okinawa; Fall In at Ease; Demand for Freedom; GI Newsletter; the 1st Amendment; Omega Press; Freedom of the Press.Most of these say adamantly that the authorities were not allowed to confiscate them; I wonder how that worked in practice.

Richard Neylon, BooksellerProfessional seller

Book number: 10814

Keywords: social history counter culture protest c20th America Japan Vietnam war periodicals racism military politics

Japan.

[Ichikawake Hiden Kumadori zukan - ie Drawings of Kumadori Secrets of the Ichikawa Family].

Tokyo, Ishikawa Shoten 1918 (Taisho 7). Oblong quarto (190x260mm) pattern cloth with ribbon ties (the covers a little marked and used) in a later chitsu case; four leaves of text and 39 colour plates (woodcut and possibly stencil coloured, two with gold) with calligraphic captions.
¶ Kumadori is the painted face of Kabuki and this is a series of exquisitely coloured and dramatically stylised faces of characters, full face and in profile. Ichikawa Danjuro I was said to be the originator of Kumadori in the 17th century and an unbroken succession to Ichikawa Danjuro IX (who died in 1903) kept alive and added to the characters.

Richard Neylon, BooksellerProfessional seller

Book number: 6993

Keywords: graphic art Japan Asia theatre make-up colour woodcuts

Photography - Japan.

Portraits from photographs scrupulously hand painted to impersonate lithographs.

n.p. [c1880-1890?]. Two sheets, 54x41cm and 60x48cm, with nine portraits all but one oval; each about 25cm - ten inches - high.
¶ Are these the ultimate modern one-up-manship in family portraiture? Painted over photos are common enough and paintings from photos equally so but these are large scale, done from scratch purposely to mimic the grain of lithography. The stippling is so painstaking and exact that it would have been easier to make and print lithographs. By the 1880's reaction to modernity and the west, by nationalists watching their tradition vanish, was strident and often powerful. Don't forget the western design of the residence of the new Imperial Palace was abandoned after earthquake damage to brickwork and the official carpenter took over. No small victory for superior Japanese traditions. The arguments over portraiture and photography are often unexpected, confusing and contradictory to me. Schools that I would think traditionalist welcomed the camera and realism - though some disliked photo portraits for moral or ethical reasons - but whatever the argument the photograph and its wedded industry - portraits painted in oils over or from photos - became ubiquitous essentials for the family shrine. Our well to do family is not only on the side of western modernity, they go one step further by embracing the foreign technology of the lithographic print. So why hand painted on such a scale? Maybe partly because that's what a prominent family can afford but likely because portraits like this were still private family affairs. According to Conant (Challenging Past and Present), the painter Takahashi - portraitist of the Emperor - was thwarted in his 1880s project to paint portraits of the heroes of the Meiji by families refusing him use of their photographs. The smaller set of portraits here is signed and sealed Hokushu. The other, clearly of later photos, has an illegible, to me, seal.

Richard Neylon, BooksellerProfessional seller

Book number: 9898

Keywords: art photography printing modernism progress Japan painting c19th Asia military reform