Further Adventures Of The Old Japanese Book Collector

[aadroma]

Again, I've been looking at old Japanese books -- this one, in particular, piques my interest as I'm a HUGE fan of old maps, especially ones like THIS. At this point in time Japan had been cut off from the rest of the world for years, and it would still be quite a bit of time before it opened itself up to the remainder of the world -- meaning that

Comments

[aadroma]

Oh I know it does -- I'm just amazed that it still happens, when you'd think that people would know better. Yes, I know I seem to only be fooling myself ^^;;;

[gullinbursti]

It happens to medieval manuscripts all the time too -- they're worth more sold to collectors as individual pages than as whole codices, so they get split up. It's heartbreaking.

[muckefuck]

Am I missing something or wasn't that the original purpose of books likes these?

[aadroma]

What, the original purpose of these books was to tear apart??? Lord no, why would that be the case? Especially when there are texts on topics like building temples, the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and Japanese arithmetic, and to me it makes no sense to decorate your house with a MATH book.

Artists like Morikuni and Kuniyoshi did decorative prints specifically FOR the purpose of decorating -- Kuniyoshi in particular was quite prolific in this area. And I'm sure the easy-to-remove binding was a cost issue rather than a "here, here's some cheap wallpaper we just printed up; go to town" dealy.