Job Lot 41 Antique Vintage Books on Japan Art Travel War History Fiction

A large, lovingly assembled collection of 41 books on Japan, spanning from late-Victorian/Meiji-era volumes through wartime accounts to modern art and design titles. The collection has been gathered over many years from a wide range of sources - some bought from high-end antiquarian booksellers, some acquired during military service that gave access to unusual material, and some are former library copies from the UK and further afield. As a result there is real variety here, with several genuinely scarce early titles among the more common ones. What's included (highlights): Art & illustrated: Hiroshige - One Hundred Views of Edo (Uspensky); Japan - Art of the World (Swann, with slipcase); Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (Fenollosa); The Way of the Samurai (Storry & Forman); Japanese Mythology (Piggott); A Japanese Touch for Your Home (Yagi); Japanese Gardens Revisited (with slipcase); Japanese Cinema (Richie). Literature & translation: The Life of an Amorous Woman (Saikaku, with slipcase); Shank's Mare / Hizakurige (Jippensha, with slipcase); Blue Trousers Lady Murasaki, trans.

Waley; The Japanese Spy (Lawton, 1908); Japan Sinks (Komatsu); Wonder Tales of Old Japan. History, travel & memoir: Japan - A Short Cultural History (Sansom, 1931); Traveller from Tokyo (Morris); The Civilizations of the East: Japan (Grousset); The Mastery of the Far East (Brown); Notes in Japan; Meeting with Japan (Maraini); Feudal and Modern Japan, 2 vols (Knapp); Japan Mortimer Menpes, A. Black; From West to East (Jerningham); Letters from Japan (Mrs Hugh Fraser); Letters from a Japanese Schoolboy (Irwin); Introducing Japan (Richie); Changing Japan Seen Through the Camera. War & wartime Japan: Ten Years in Japan (Grew); The Japanese Enemy (Byas); Behind the Japanese Mask (Craigie); Burma Under the Japanese (Thakin Nu); Trial of Sumida Haruzo and Twenty Others ed.

Sleeman; Gazetteer of the Japanese Empire (US Navy Hydrographic Office, 1943); plus a 2-volume Japanese-language WWII photographic record. Reference: Japanese History & Culture from Ancient to Modern Times - Seven Basic Bibliographies (Dower); a Japanese-English tourist dictionary.

Overall quality is good, but condition varies across the lot as you would expect for their age. Some volumes show slight mould/foxing, edge wear, sunned or frayed spines, rubbing to boards and general shelf wear. A number are ex-library and may carry stamps, labels or markings.

Some hardbacks have dust jackets, some do not; a few have slipcases (noted above). Please study all the photographs carefully, as they form part of the description.

Why this collection is special This is not a random box of books - it's a genuine library, built over many years from antiquarian bookshops, access gained through military service, and institutional collections in the UK and abroad. Several titles are scarce and rarely come up together in one place. Standouts include Mortimer Menpes' Japan A.

Black, the celebrated Edwardian colour-plate book whose tipped-in plates remain as striking today as in 1905. There are two beautiful slipcased Tuttle editions - Ihara Saikaku's The Life of an Amorous Woman and Jippensha Ikku's comic travel classic Shank's Mare (Hizakurige) - alongside Arthur Waley's translation of Blue Trousers from The Tale of Genji.

Early travel and adventure is represented by Lancelot Lawton's The Japanese Spy (Grant Richards, 1908), with its wonderful pictorial cover, and G. Sansom's Japan: A Short Cultural History (Cresset Press, 1931) - long considered one of the finest single-volume cultural histories ever written on the subject. The wartime material is a collection in its own right: Ten Years in Japan by US Ambassador Joseph Grew, Hugh Byas' The Japanese Enemy, Sir Robert Craigie's Behind the Japanese Mask, the green-cloth war-crimes record Trial of Sumida Haruzo and Twenty Others, the 1943 US Navy Gazetteer of the Japanese Empire, and a striking two-volume Japanese-language WWII photographic record - first-hand documents from a pivotal moment in history. Add to that Fenollosa's Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, the lavish Hiroshige: One Hundred Views of Edo, The Way of the Samurai, and design titles on gardens and the Japanese home, and you have a ready-made, beautifully rounded library spanning travel, art, gardens, war, history and fiction. For a book dealer, there is clear scope to break the lot up and sell the scarcer titles on individually.

For a book collector, it is a complete and characterful library on Japan that would take years and considerable effort to assemble from scratch - offered here in one lot.