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A book that never was . . . Twelve poems from the Manyoshu Twelve woodcuts by Naoko Matsubara inspired by poems of love translated from the Japanese | ||
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About the planned book This was to be our second collaboration with Japanese woodcut artist Naoko Matsubara. Our first was tokonoma, work on which proceeded without our ever meeting, as we live 3,500 miles apart. Everything happened by letter and email. However, in 2019 she had a one-woman exhibition of her work at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and we went along to the opening event and met for the first time. That meeting prompted the possibility of making another book together and this new title emerged from Naoko's long-standing desire to take inspiration from the Manyoshu. The Manyoshu is an important part of Japanese poetic heritage, a collection of some thousands of poems dating from the Nara period. Naoko made a small selection - initially fifteen - that 'sing aloud about love' and for which she felt inspired to make an engraving. Those fifteen were whittled down to a dozen and for each she prepared a large image in her inimitable style. All but three are printed from more than one block in vibrant colours. So what happened? Naoko turned again to fine art printer Alan Flint near her in Toronto to edition the images (Alan printed her blocks for tokonoma). Samples of a number of papers were tried out and finally a Seichosen kozo paper was selected for the images and an order placed with the Japanese Paper Place in Toronto. Naoko also prepared a large image to entirely cover the box that the individual sheets was to be presented in. This required a different paper that would be suitable for binding and also strong enough to survive handling. And a third paper was chosen for a title sheet - a delicious torinoko kozo. We planned to print translations of the poems from various sources beneath the images here at The Old School Press, and we chose Optima as the typeface throughout. Clare Pollard and Penny Boxall prepared new translations from the Japanese. The sheets bearing the images and texts were 343mm by 254mm (13.5in. by 10in.). A colophon sheet, signed by all three collaborators was to be pasted into the bottom of the box and the title sheet was to rest on top of the set of image sheets. There were to be seventy-five copies printed and bound, sixty of which for sale. However, a trunk containing the many hundreds of sheets of Japanese hand-made paper, printed with Naoko's images by Alan Flint, was 'lost' in transit from Canada by FedEx. The story, such as it is, can be read in our newsletters via the 'progress' button above. Was that the end of the story? In desperation, I did look at doing the book using digital printing for Naoko's woodcuts but found it impossible to get the vibrancy in the colours that was required. All that was left was the translations that Clare Pollard and Penny Boxall had prepared and I did not want tem to go to waste so finally produced a small piece containing just those. You will find that book described here. | ||
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Find out more about the book as far as it went |
See the master proofs of all twelve images |
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See a mock-up of the box |
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See a photo diary of work on the book |
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