Architecture. GOISSAUD, Antony [introductions]. Garages et Salles d'Exposition. Paris, Librairie de la Construction [1928 & 30?]. Two volumes 25x33cm publisher's cloth backed colour illustrated boards (wear and rubbing); 16pp introductory text in each volume, 102 plates: photo illustrations, plans and elevations; loose as issued. A used copy, I'm sorry to say, with some browning, smudges, and occasional frayed edges; a thoroughly acceptable, complete, I repeat complete, set. With the embossed bookshop labels of Meiji-Shobo, Kanda, Tokyo; an stylish bit of deco design in itself. Au$1000
Royalty among books on automobile architecture: garages, parking stations and automobile show rooms - a small kingdom - and hard to find complete.
Shogakusei Zenshu. [Kodomo Seiri Eisei Monogatari]. Tokyo, Kobunsha 1928 [Showa 3]. Octavo, cloth backed publisher's illustrated card wrapper; one colour plate, photo and b/w illustrations. Some browning and mild signs of use; a rather good copy. Shogakusei Zenshu no.69. Colour frontispiece by Unno Seiko, other illustrations by Hosokibara Seiki. Au$85
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. This one covers health. Seiki's illustrations aren't so well printed but they are lively and amusing.
Shogakusei Zenshu. [Jido Butsuru Kagaku Monogatari]. Tokyo, Kobunsha 1928 [Showa 3]. Octavo, cloth backed publisher's illustrated card wrapper; illustrated title, two colour plates, photo and b/w illustrations through the text. Some browning and mild signs of use; a rather good copy. Shogakusei Zenshu no.61. Cover by Michioka Toshi. Au$90
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. This one is physics and chemistry.
Hamada Masuji, Sugiura Hisui and others. : : [Gendai Shogyo Bijutsu Zenshu : Soshokuhon : Naiyo Mihon] [The Complete Commercial Artist (publisher's sample)]. Tokyo, Ars c1928. 26x20cm publisher's cloth and printed card slipcase; [2],8pp, 62 pages of illustrations and plates, most in colour, 16pp of text. The blank leaves used to bulk out the binding have been removed, odd in a copy that looks like it has barely been opened. Au$800
I didn't know this existed until quite recently. This is the publisher's sample book for the Gendai Shogyo Bijutsu, one of the great monuments of Japanese modernism, published by subscription in 24 volumes. It contains a sample range of illustrations from the work and explanatory text. The set was issued in wrappers or this, presumably more expensive, cloth binding.
Largely the work of Hamada Masuji - credited with the invention of design as a profession in Japan - the Shogyo Bijutsu is an encyclopaedic gathering of all that is new and exciting in Russia, Europe, Britain and America from art nouveau to bauhaus and constructivism, with futurism, expressionism, dada and everything else along the way lavishly mixed with Japanese responses to, and digestion of, these western ideas. Any number of exciting artists and designers contributed. Except to the binding.
Fusuma design album. [Kimigayo Shirushi Ofusumashu]. n.p. [193-?]. 29x23cm publisher's cloth with paper label; 34 card leaves with colour patterns, mostly double page. At the end are two cloth samples with designs from the album in different colours. One small mounted stripe sample might be missing. Au$600
This is volume six of a series of catalogues cum pattern books of fusuma - paper for sliding screens. Since I can't find a mention of any other copies I have no clue how many there were, nor whether they appeared over a number of years. Kimigayo is the national anthem - the range or the maker's name I don't know.
Fusuma catalogues are usually pretty blah; postwar catalogues should be avoided by all but sturdy cultural archaeologists. Seems makers didn't have a high opinion of the tastes of someone who would buy their screens ready made. This one is the only exception I've seen so far. Some is bland but a lot is high class and chic in the neo-neo-rimpa style, ie the reworking of tasteful luxurious antiquity inspired by the turn of the century work of neo-rimpa designers like Korin, Sekka, Nosaburo et al.
The printing is outstanding and as usual with such stuff, hard to photograph: the aged gold and silver, heavy raised textures, overprinting, embosssing ... need to be seen in the right light. Very Kyoto and far from the brazen tizz of Tokyo and Osaka. Until we find, at the very end, the stamp of the Yamaguchi Hyoguten of Shibuya, Tokyo. Hyoguten usually translates as mounting store - a business that makes scrolls, screens and sliding screens. There are now Yamaguchi Hyoguten everywhere except Shibuya it seems. I don't know whether any of them are related. Still, I insist the desig n and printing belong to Kyoto.
DOYLE, Arthur Conan & Mikami Otokichi. [Sharokku Homuzu no Kioku]. Tokyo, Heibonsha 1930 (Showa 9). 15x12cm publisher's illustrated flexible yellow cloth printed in black, printed card slipcase; frontispiece. Minor signs of use; edges browned, quite good for a pocket detective novel bound in bright yellow; seldom found with its box. The frontispiece is drab, the endpapers - which are common to the series - delightful. Au$350
First Japanese edition of the 'Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes'. Mikami was a phenomenally busy and succesful novelist who apparently worked best in brothels. His partner, novelist Hasegawa Shigure, said it was the only way he could write. When he couldn't write she filled in.
This is volume 3 in the Complete Collection of World Detective Novels which I think ran to 20 volumes and was published in no particular order in 1929 and 1930. Volume 4 was Mikami's translation of 'The Return of Sherlock Holmes' which I think beat this into print. I can tell you that volume 18 also beat this. Don't confuse this with the Complete Collection of World Detective Novels published by Hakubunkan at the same time.
The binding has a strong family resemblance to one by Onchi Koshiro for an Ars photography book the same year but this isn't any guarantee of anything.
Soma Jiro. [Hentai Shohosen] Selection of Abnormal Documents. Tokyo, Kaichosha 1930 (Showa 5). 19x14cm publisher's illustrated fawn cloth printed in red, yellow and black, printed card slipcase ( a bit torn). Browning and smudging of the cloth, edges browned and scattered light browning through the text. A read copy, I'm sorry, but pretty good for this book. Au$150
Maybe the first printing of this substantial classic of the ero-guro-nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense). The colophon is dated 24th and 29th of June but the cloth and paper are different from another copy I've seen with the same dates.
According to Hakkin Hon (banned books): Bessatsu Taiyo, the book was banned four days before publication and 295 of the 1000 copies produced were seized.
And I found another note on this book that tells us that 38 printings appeared within four months - with 25% of the text blanked out and at least one all blank page. That must be page 508, which in an August printing is columns of dots. But this is all a muddle. This copy is partly censored: page 508 is also columns of dots while the other pages I compared to that August 'first edition' are untouched here. I haven't done a page by page comparison.
I have traced, but not seen, a claimed 38th edition but nothing between one and 38. It makes sense now; they are all, however many there are, first editions without mention of earlier printings.
Hentai Shohosen might translate as 'A Prescription for Perverts'. Drugs, sex toys, punishment, cannibalism and a list of everyday items used by foreign women for masturbation appear among the chapters. So I'm told. Thank goodness I can't read it.
What I really want to know is who did the cheerful cover - one that could double for a book on Japanese motherhood - and box/title page. Designer's names are often tucked away in dim corners but I can't find it.
BLACK, Archibald et al. American Airport Designs - containing 44 prize winning and other drawings from the Lehigh Airports Competition ... NY, for the Lehigh Portland Cement Company 1930. Quarto publisher's illustrated heavy wrapper (a stain on the front, later cloth spine); 96pp, mostly plates. A more than decent copy. Au$250
This is, I believe, the first American book on airport architecture, gathering designs submitted to the country's first such competition. The compiler is confident that there are plenty of new ideas never used in Europe and the schemes range from token crackpot visionary - a circular runway running around the tops of skyscrapers - to beaux-arts, with the bulk falling into classical moderne.
Common to all designs chosen for inclusion is a formal layout, with runways, often circular, that range from something like parterre gardens to complex occult symbols; surely evidence that a good beaux-arts education still prevailed. Two designs that have some flashy distinction are by Los Angeles and Florida architects, naturally, with a film set skyscraper and a modernist tower respectively. Both are condemned as unsafe. Maybe interesting now would be tracking down the entries that didn't make the cut - neither Wright's nor Neutra's made the book.
PLOYER, Otokar. Views, elevations and plans for the Remislavsky-Stome villa and studio in Prague, along with drawings and plans for a 'California Weekender'. n.p. c1930-35. Eight sheets ranging in size from single sheets 21x33cm to a four fold sheet 34x83cm. These are printed by whatever lithographic process on a heavy parchment paper and coloured by hand. All have Ployer's stamps and are signed in ink. As well there is a typed signed letter, two pages on one sheet, and a photo collage card printed on the back. Together in a contemporary portfolio, 36x28cm, with ribbon ties. Au$185
The client and the house are easy to track. Dancer, choreographer and former National Theatre Ballet Director Remislav Remislavsky and his ballerina wife Irmou Stome opened their purpose built dance school in 1934. He joined the resistance during war and was denounced as bourgeois and his villa seized in 1948 according to one biographer. He lived happily and taught on after the war according to another. The building survives and appears to be home now to a number of companies that don't actually do anything.
The architect not so much. One drawing here has a blindstamp: "Ing. Otokar Ployer Amer. Architekt" and the photo collage card with the lot is Remislavsky's announcement that the school will open in September 1934 and was purpose designed by American architect "Playerem" (sic). On other drawings he is Ing. O. Ployer. The letter, dated January 1 1936, with the lot explains this group of drawings. He suggests in the letter that his friends might like to build his California weekender. I'd say he added a batch of drawings and plans of the Remislavsky villa - his big project - to impress his prospective clients. He mentions he is working on the design of an air raid shelter, a useful thing to have in central Europe as the thirties progress, and he filed, from Prague, for a US patent for an air raid shelter in 1939 which was granted in 1945.
Elsewhere I find the suggestion that he migrated to Sweden at some stage but in 1947 the firm Ployer Otakar of the same address in Prague advertised in a Rio de Janeiro newspaper for contacts with exporters of machinery, rubber, chemicals, coffee, etc and for importers of glass, synthetic stones and toys. 1948 may well have killed that career and seen him off to Sweden. How and where he is an American architect in all this beats me.
The drawings and the photos of the villa built show that a fair amount of rationalisation took place. A grandiose mansion of no fixed heritage is pruned to a large central European Mediterranean villa and built with not a whole lot more trimming down. His California weekender is ... maybe Spanish mission put into a car compactor.
Japanese textiles. A gathering of 15 original designs for textile designs. n.p. [1930s]. 15 sheets in gouche and inks; all about 40cm in one direction and ranging from 20 to 32cm in the other. One with a short clean tear. Short notes on the back of three, numbers on two. Au$650
Pretty lurid, huh? As the thirties pressed on and the avant garde was in disgrace - communist and anarchist scum that they were - textile design became less adventurous in form but brighter, so much brighter, and woodcut pattern books from Kyoto with designs like this proliferated. Something of a Kano school revival.
These flower designs are so highly finished I'm convinced they were made for a pattern book - probably spring or summer; autumn and winter were more restrained. Working drawing are usually much more ... well, working.
Ose Keishi & Onchi Koshiro. [Shin Roshia Gakan]. Tokyo, Ars 1930 (Showa 5). 20x18cm publisher's colour illustrated boards and illustrated card slipcase; numerous photo illustrations, other illustrations and decorations, one full page in red and black. Box browned, used but solid; spine tips a touch rubbed; a nice copy. Au$750
First edition. Ose was an industrious reporter and interpreter of all things Soviet for Japan. I didn't see this in Hokkin Hon (Banned Books) but of course he has other entries.
The design is by Onchi Koshiro. Onchi has plundered constructivist sources and photo-montage but has - as often - made it his own and Japanese.
Itagaki Takao. [Atarashiki Geijutsu no Kakutoku]. Tokyo, Tenjinsha 1930. 20x15cm publisher's illustrated wrapper and printed card case; 10,246pp including photo illustrations on 16 plates. Covers mottled as with every copy I've seen that stayed safe in its box, some browning and minor signs of use; quite good. Au$500
First edition of this essay by the champion of modernism in Japan on the machine and new architecture and design, propounding his concept of "machine realism". This was a theme Itagaki pursued through a few books between 1929 and 1933.
I think the cover shows a locomotive bursting out of some old world construction but it all reminds me of a crashing zeppelin. I can't find a designer's name. I read somewhere a mention of a magazine appearance of a collaboration between Itagaki and photographer Horino Masao with layout designed by Itagaki. So, perhaps Itagaki designed his own covers.
Tanoe [or Tanoue or Tanouye] Yoshiya. [Tanoe Yoshiya Kenchiku Gashu]. Tokyo, Kensetsusha 1931 (but Raifushuppansha 1987). 27x19cm publisher's printed wrapper, illustrated card slipcase; 110pp, photo illustrations, renderings and plans. At cost price. Au$250
Not the great bargain I hoped for. This is not the first edition, it's a facsimile I didn't know existed until I unwrapped this. It's a good facsimile, very good, and it's more obscure than the original. It's a local production by a Hokkaido publisher - not to be confused with current Tokyo 'Life Publishing' which deals in puerile self help stuff.
Tanoe began his career working for Wright on the Imperial Hotel - from 1919 to 1923. He then headed off to Hokkaido and is now an architectural hero of the island, even while many of his buildings have vanished. The prairie style is evident in some of these early houses but no more than Japan is evident in the prairie style. I read somewhere that for one of the buildings in this book he kept his original plan rather than the compacted plan that was actually built. This was so that his sense of space was preserved.
I think the rest of this Artistes Nouveaux series - maybe seven titles in all - are all painters including three Europeans: Matisse, Vlaminck and Chagall. They weren't reprinted of course.
Worldcat finds no copies outside Japan and it's not common in Japan, neither the original nor this reprint.
Izumi Keiji [ed]. [Neo Dekameron] Neo Decameron on the cover. Tokyo, Bunshodo 1931 (Showa 6). 18x11cm publisher's decorated cloth blocked in white, printed card slipcase; 49 plates (one colour) from various sources. A nice copy. Au$200
First edition. A pleasing example of the ero-guro-nansu (erotic-grotesque-nonsense) craze of the early showa period. This is a stylish gathering of salacious pieces that would normally appear in pulp magazines. What caught my eye is the piece which sort of translates as 'The Electric Artificial Maiden's Secret Room' which sums up the whole notion of ero-garu-nansu. This jostles with sex murder in the Shanghai British Concession and plenty more. The illustrations are pinched from louche sources, mostly European I'd say.
Neo Decameron it may be but there are 21 stories, not ten. Worldcat finds no copy.
Hakkin Hon (Banned Books) I p.170
Tanoe [or Tanoue or Tanouye] Yoshiya. [Tanoe Yoshiya Kenchiku Gashu]. Tokyo, Kensetsusha 1931. 27x19cm publisher's printed wrapper, illustrated card slipcase (this marked and a bit worn but solid); 110pp, photo illustrations, renderings and plans. Rather good. Inscribed and signed by Tanoe to artist, later folklorist, and dogged communist Hashiura Yasuo who gets a passing mention in the book. Au$1850
Tanoe began his career working for Wright on the Imperial Hotel - from 1919 to 1923. He then headed off to Hokkaido and is now an architectural hero of the island, even while many of his buildings have vanished. The prairie style is evident in some of these early houses but no more than Japan is evident in the prairie style. I read somewhere that for one of the buildings in this book he kept his original plan rather than the compacted plan that was actually built. This was so that his sense of space was preserved.
I think the rest of this Artistes Nouveaux series - maybe seven titles in all - are all painters including three Europeans: Matisse, Vlaminck and Chagall.
Worldcat finds no copies outside Japan and it's not common in Japan.
Exposition - Hokkaido 1931. [Kokusan Shinko Hokkaido Takushoku Hakurankai Kinen Shashin Jo]. Hokkaido Takushoku Hakurankai, 1931 (Showa 6). 27x37cm publisher's patterned silk, cord ties; title page, photo illustrations on 35 leaves of heavy gloss paper, 12 pages of text and a plan. A nice copy. Au$600
A luxurous celebration, with exemplary printing, of the 1931 Hokkaido Colonization Exposition. Had you heard of it? Me neither. Thankfully the important old men who always head such books don't take up too much space and it gets more interesting the further we go in. What's wonderful is the number of pavilions that might have come straight out of the pages of the exposition volume of the Gendai Shogyo Bijutsu Zenshu - the Complete Commercial Artist - of 1928-30. Either the same designers were at work or the organisers handed out copies of the book and said, "go for your life."
At the very end we find what seem to have been the big draws for the 600,000 plus visitors: the human cannonball, the world's fattest woman, and dancing girls.
Itagaki Takao. [Geijutsukai no Kicho to Jicho]. Tokyo, Rokubunkan 1932 (Showa 7). 22x16cm, publisher's cloth with onlaid colour illustration, mildly used printed card slipcase; 428pp including 36 pages of photo illustrations. Rather good. Au$650
First edition. Itagaki was seemingly indefatigable as a champion of modernity and modernism in the late twenties and early thirties. Between 1929 and 1933 he worried at the relationship of the machine to art, design, architecture, photography and film, propounding his concept of "machine realism" in a small bundle of books like this. Come the deadly government crackdown on Itagaki's natural disputants - the "proletarian realists" - he apparently retreated into conservative didactic writing on western art and film.
Yodogawa Taisuke. [Suwae Kokorozashi Iku?]. Kyoto, Uchida 1932 (Showa 7). 20x26cm, introductory leaf and 48 leaves, each with two mounted colour designs and tissue guards, card with colophon; loose as issued in wooden box with brocade lid and integral folding cloth case. Title label on the front board nibbled, some spotting or browning of the tissue guards barely affecting the mounts. Au$450
A deluxe, very Kyoto refined, album of textile designs. The introductory leaf indicates that eight artists are responsible for the designs. These designs are not dramatic, they are autumnal and tasteful, beautifully printed, and texture is part of the process.
EDWARDS, Edward B. Dynamarhythmic Design. A book of structural pattern. N.Y. Century 1932. Small quarto publisher's cloth; xx,122pp, 28 plates, numerous illustrations through the text. Rather good. Au$300
First edition, not easy to find in good shape. Whatever we think of the theories of Jay Hambidge, drawn from his perceived rediscovery of the Egyptian and Greek system of symmetry, Edwards use of them has produced "one of the most attractive and ingenious studies of geometric ornament [and] one of the few examples of European geometric design to rival Islamic work in complexity" (Durant: Ornament).
Advertising. Katsumi Tsuji. [Kessaku kokoku zuan daishusei]. Tokyo, Kobunsha 1934. 27x20cm publisher's illustrated cloth, illustrated slipcase; 320pp with hundreds of illustrations (eight pages in colour, the rest in varying monochromes). A mildly fatigued copy, used but nothing in particular. Au$350
A splendid compendium of modern advertising layout and typography; there are examples from Europe and America but fortunately the bulk is Japanese. Both the book cover and the slipcase are pretty smart, the slipcase in particular. The 'AD' design on the cover of the book is a direct link to the Art Directors Club, presumably this is a forerunner of the current Tokyo Art Directors Club.
Posters. [Shogyo Bijutsuten Posuta Shusei]. Osaka, Shogyo Bijutsu Renmai 1934 (Showa 9). 27x20cm publisher's patterned boards and slipcase printed in orange and black (this fairly rubbed but solid and presentable enough); [5]ll and 104 b/w plates printed on one side. Au$300
Short on colour maybe but still a good exhibition of modern Japanese poster designs mounted by the Commercial Art League (Shogyo Bijutsu Renmai). Designs - not printed or published posters - with artists all identified. Not such a rare book but hard to find in better than revolting condition.
Kawakita Renshichiro & Takei Katso. [Kosei Kyoiku Taikei]. Tokyo, Gakko Bijutsu Kyokai Shuppan-bu 1934 (Showa 9). 22x16cm publisher's colour printed boards (a bit spotted with small surface scrapes at the tips); [2], 12 plates (four colour), 520pp, profusely illustrated throughout. Some spotting around the edge; a rather good copy of a vulnerable book. Au$1650
First edition. A textbook in a way but a remarkable and thoroughly modernist one. Much influenced but, I'm told, not slavishly, by the Bauhaus method of teaching, this education in design or composition contains both the philosophy and practice of Kawakita's Shinkenchiku Kogei Gakuin (School of New Architecture and Design) successor to his Seikatsu Kosei Kenkyusho (Research Institute for Life Configurations).
Kawakita's success in the Ukraine state theatre competition apparently isolated him even more than he was from the modernist mainstream. I've read that this book caused some unhappiness among cutting edge architects who complained that it was too abstract but was hugely popular among art teachers. This might explain why the book seems so hard to find: a bunch of black thumbed, paint spattered art students soon put paid to any book. Worldcat finds only the NDL entry.
Yokomitsu Riichi. [Tokei]. Tokyo, Sogensha 1935 (Showa 10). 20x14cm publisher's black cloth with mounted aluminium panel on the front; cloth covered slipcase with printed labels (cloth browned, knocked, used but solid). Aluminium panel with light scratching; white spine lettering a bit rubbed Some browning; a very good copy for this book. The aluminium panel, tied on with thread is often missing, usually battered and scratched; the spine is usually disintegrating with the white lettering gone. A sheet of paper signed by Yokomitsu Riichi and Sano Shigejiro mounted on the front fly. Au$650
First edition; there were plenty more but not with this fabulously impractical binding. Yokomitsu was proclaimed a god of literature around 1930. At first mocking, it soon was used earnestly by his fans. Judging by his photos he could well have been a rock star in later generations. His friend Kawabata Yasunari wrote in 1933 that (crudely translated) "the chorus of praise by young people sounds like a song that might enshrine him in the hall of misfortune". His writings during the war earnt him the title of literary war criminal but he didn't live so long anyway.
The cover is by Sano Shigejiro, painter and prodigious designer of covers for some fifty years from 1930 on. He was a friend of Yokomitsu and did the covers for a few of his books. He apparently studied with Matisse and hung out with Miro in the late thirties.
von ERDBERG, Eleanor. Chinese Influence On European Garden Structures. Harvard Univ Press 1936. Quarto publisher's cloth (a touch of wear to spine top); [6],221pp & 95 illustrations. Harvard Landscape Architecture Monographs I. Au$100
A scholarly but none the less interesting study. With an annotated list of the buildings mentioned giving description, bibliography and present condition, if any.
Architecture. Kenchiku Kenkyukai. [Wayo Kenchiku Sekkei Jitsurei-hen]. Osaka, Kenchiku Kenkyukai 1936. 27x20cm publisher's printed boards; 51 folding plans, elevations, measured drawings; a few photo illustrations. A little browning. Au$225
A reprint, first published in 1934, this is a thoroughly useful book from the Architectural Research Association. Enlarge the plans and you could build straight out of the book. Japanese and western are still differentiated and you can choose from ten houses, small school houses, or small apartments.
Worldcat finds no copies outside Japan and it's not so common in Japan.
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