Hokusai’s Books: Art and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century Japan

Date: 7 December 2015
Time: 6 p.m.
Location: Common Room, Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University
Lecturer: Ellis Tinios - Honorary Lecturer, School of History, University of Leeds

In this lecture, by way of introduction, I briefly consider the book genres Hokusai favored at various stages of his career. I then turn to my main topic: the books he produced in the last two decades of his life. I trace the publishing history of selected titles through colophons and publishers’ advertisements. I consider his popularity as a book illustrator and reveal the lengths to which publishers went to cash in on that popularity. In the four decades after his death the popularity of his books continued to grow first within Japan and then in the West. I also discuss the posthumous printings of his books, taking the story up to 1880. The latter is a neglected topic.