[EHON] Yamaguchi SOKEN — Soken Gafu Soka No Bu

1806. [EHON] Yamaguchi SOKEN. SOKEN GAFU Sôka no Bu. 3 volumes, complete. Medium grey paper covers with original printed title labels. String-bound Japanese-style, fukuro-toji. 26.2 x 19.0 cm. Bunka 3 [1806] Illustrated in b+w and grey woodcut throughout. This is perhaps Sôken's most successful ehon - illustrating a series of plants and grasses quite wonderfully. There is much use of block scraping to produce wonderful printing effects, especially on leaves and stems. The difficulty of the printing techniques means that this book always hovers on the edge of aesthetic disaster - when it is good it is very good, when it doesn't work it dissolves into pictorial chaos. Ours is very good. I have compared our copy to the Chaikin/Gillot/Hayashi copy which is the benchmark for the book and it holds up very well - the main difference being in the paper - the Chaikin copy being printed on whiter, thinner, harder "chinese-style" paper and this copy being on a heavier, softer, Japanese-style buff paper. As for bibliographic details, our colophon is identical to the Mitchell, etc. copies, save that in ours the names of the Kyoto bookseller/publishers have been excised from the block, indicating a somewhat later printing. A remarkably nice copy of a very scarce and important book. The Louis Gonse copy sold at the Beres sale in 2002. .