Japanese Prints

64
287
287. [JAPANESE PEONY CATALOGUE]. [Yokohama
Ueki Kabushiki Kaisha]. paeonia Moutan, a collection of
50 choice Varieties. Yokohama. [ca. 1900]. £4,000
Oblong folio, 300 x 410 mm. original blue Japanese ripple-grained
paper wrappers with lithographed paper label on upper cover, stabstitched
with yarn ties; 25 full-page chromolithographs, printed on
rectos and versos of 13 leaves, copyright leaf at end; fine.
A fine copy of one of the special nursery sample catalogues issued
by the Yokohama nursery company, a consortium of Japanese
nursery owners who dominated the lucrative market of flower
export at the height of the Western vogue for Japanese gardens.
Earlier catalogues from the nursery (notably their Maple
catalogues) used pochoir (stencil-coloured) illustrations; the present
catalogue, showing the stunningly bright blossoms of various
different species of peonies, makes effective use of the full range
of tones offered by chromolithography. The flowers are shown
close up, most life-size or larger, against a background of green
leaves and pale green sky; the effect is extraordinarily dreamlike.
Two varieties are shown in each lithograph; each has a small
rectangular caption with the catalogue number in Arabic numerals,
and the name of the flower in Japanese with English transcription
or Latin name. The copyright or colophon leaf at end, entirely in
Japanese except for the words “copyright reserved,” may supply the
date.
The nursery issued catalogs until about 1922, which are collected
as much for their aesthetic beauty as for the detailed evidence they
provide of flower and exotic plant imports at the turn of the century.
Individual trees (including bonsais) and shrubs from the Yokohama
nursery can still be found in the Arnold Arboretum and the
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and among the cherry tree plantings in
Washington, d.c. This is a spectacular example of one of the rarer
flower catalogues issued by the nursery. Two small abrasions to
lithograph no. 35-36, tiny marginal tears to lower edge of first plate;
corners a trifle bumped, some fading to covers, else a fine, bright
copy.
Five copies are listed in rliN and OClC, of which four in America.
288. [JAPAN AND CHINA]. KNOX, Thomas W.
(author). Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey To Japan
And china. The Boy Travellers in the far East. New York;
Harper & Brothers, Publishers. 1880 [1879]. £128
Large 8vo. Original rich red cloth very strikingly decorated in black,
gilt, and silver to both covers and spine, pictorial green endpapers,
plain edges; pp. [ix], 10-421 + [ii]; with coloured frontispiece
guarded by tissue and a host of fine steel-engraved illustrations
printed as full-page plates and vignettes on almost every page;
externally a near fine, and beautiful, copy exhibiting none of the
usual fading to cloth, just one minute (2mm) closed split at base of
spine; internally also very clean and crisp with cracking to endpaper
at inner upper hinge and previous owner’s de luxe (donald S.
Stralem), and small, leather booklabel to front pastedown, otherwise
immaculate.