1 The First Printed Books · Part 2

writing playing cards and paper money. In medieval Japan, poets and prose writers were regularly published, and books were cheap and abundant. Printing of visual material led to interesting publishing practices. In the late eighteenth century, in the flourishing urban circles at Edo (later to be known as Tokyo), illustrated collections of paintings depicted an elegant urban culture, involving artists, courtesans, and teahouse gatherings. Libraries and bookstores were packed with hand-printed material of various types – books on women, musical instruments, calculations, tea ceremony, flower arrangements, proper etiquette, cooking and famous places. Box Kitagawa Utamaro , born in Edo in , was widely known for his contributions to an art form called ukiyo (‘pictures of the floating world’) or depiction of ordinary human experiences, especially urban ones. These prints travelled to contemporary US and Europe and influenced artists like Manet, Monet and Van Gogh. Publishers like Tsutaya Juzaburo identified subjects and commissioned artists who drew the theme in outline. Then a skilled woodblock carver pasted the drawing on a woodblock and carved a printing block to reproduce the painter’s lines. In the process, the original drawing would be destroyed and only prints would survive. Fig. – An ukiyo print by Kitagawa Utamaro. Belonging to the mid-13th century, printing woodblocks of the Tripitaka Koreana are a Korean collection of Buddhist scriptures. They were engraved on about , woodblocks. They were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in . Source: Fig. 2b – Tripitaka Koreana Fig. 4a – A morning scene, ukiyo print by Shunman Kubo, late eighteenth century. A man looks out of the window at the snowfall while women prepare tea and perform other domestic duties.