CBAS Annual Meeting - May 1st

All are invited to CBAS's Annual Membership Meeting

Sunday May 1st, 2pm
Tower Room, Main Library, 3rd Floor, South Building.
800 Vine Street
Cincinnati, OH 45202

At 2pm, CBAS Board Members will report on and review the past year and discuss plans for the future. Please come to the meeting to ask questions and find out more about CBAS activities or dream about the future! We are a member organization and we want to know what you think!

Featured  Guest Speaker: Kazuko Hioki at 3:00 PM

Illustrating and discussing: "The World of Edo Binding"

Kazuko will have actual examples to share with the audience.
Informal question and answer periods during and after the talk.

All are welcome to attend this presentation.

Summary for CBAS meeting on May 1, 2011

Until the seventeenth century, most Japanese texts circulated in the form of handwritten manuscripts and were limited to a small group of social elites.  Although printing was introduced  as early as the eighth century, printed texts were almost exclusively made by Buddhist institutions with small print runs.  The Edo period (1603-1867) was the turning point of print culture in Japan.  During this period, books became a popular commodity, as a result of a flourishing commercial publishing industry.  At the peak of the print culture in the eighteenth century, it is estimated that over 10,000 titles had been published totalling more than ten million copies.  A wide variety of texts, from classical to how-to manuals, and medical texts to popular fiction, were published in response to the demands of the expanding reading population. Book covers became one of the most effective advertising tools.  Bright colours and elaborate decorations were used for book covers. Books were mass-produced using low-cost paper, and dimensions were standardized. Physical appearance, such as size and book cover decoration,  became associated with certain genres of writing. 

This talk examines examples of these physical characteristics, in particular book covers, of printed Edo books, and discusses the publishing industry and print culture of the Edo period.