Because the appreciation of illustrated books requires direct contact between the object and the viewer, it is difficult to make the experience of viewing these books accessible to a wide audience—notwithstanding recent advances in digital “page turning.” Viewing a book is usually a solitary act; at most two people might be able to appreciate a volume at the same time. The images in them are encountered one by one in the sequence determined by the artist but at a pace set by the viewer. When a book is exhibited in a gallery, only one opening per volume may be displayed, pinned down and encased behind a pane of glass. Its essential quality, as a three-dimensional, multiple-image object, is lost. Similarly, few books about illustrated books do justice to their unique characteristics. Roger Keyes’s Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan goes a long way toward meeting the challenges presented by its subject. It combines passionate engagement and fluent writing with the generous provision of illustrations, fine design, and high production values.

The Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library possesses one of the finest collections of Japanese illustrated books in the West, with some 1,500 books and over 300 manuscripts ranging in date from the seventh to the twenty-first century. While known to experts in the field, the general public has not been aware of the riches of this part of the library’s holdings. Keyes was invited by the library to organize an exhibition and write a book that together would bring this material to the attention of a wider audience. The result of this commission has been a major exhibition on Fifth Avenue and publication of the accompanying book.

In addition to books, a small number of handscrolls, a prayer slip, a book box, and an example of a woodblock used to print books were included in the exhibition. In Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan, Keyes selects seventy items for detailed description and analysis. He refers to all the material he discusses as ehon, which may be translated as “picture book.” This usage smoothes over distinctions in inspiration, content, purpose, and production between major categories of illustrated books. Keyes further stretches the word to include an eighth-century printed prayer slip that carries nothing more than a short text (no. 1) and a complete set of Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, one hundred individual color woodblock prints issued between 1885 and 1892 that were bound in an album by the publisher in or after 1892 (no. 59). The prayer slip, created for ritual purposes and never intended to be read, is the earliest item in both the book and the exhibition; the most recent item is an artist’s book produced in the United States in 2005 (no. 70). Fifty-eight of his items were published in the Edo period (1603–1868), five before, and twelve after it. Keyes could easily have concentrated entirely on Edo-period illustrated books, but by extending his survey to encompass earlier and later material—including three books by contemporary non-Japanese artists influenced by Japanese material—he sets the remarkable achievements of Edo artists, printers, and publishers into a briefly sketched wider context. Students of the Meiji period (1868–1912) will, however, be disappointed by the scant coverage given to the continuing vitality of the illustrated book in those years: just three titles, with one of those being the album of prints mentioned above.

In his selection of Edo-period material, Keyes concentrates on three groups of books: the finest illustrated poetry anthologies, most of which were privately commissioned by wealthy poetry circles; commercially issued books devoted to actors and beautiful women; and inventive books, also commercially issued, that provide distillations of the painting styles of individual artists. The two prose works included (nos. 21 & 41) hardly hint at the visual riches to be found in the vast field of Edo-period illustrated popular fiction. Even relatively inexpensive serial novels were lavishly illustrated, with the artists receiving billing equal to the authors. Illustrated erotic books, which were designed by nearly all the leading ukiyo-e artists and include in their number some of the finest achievements of artists, block cutters, and printers in the Edo period, are represented by just one, late work (no. 56).

Throughout Keyes refers to the books he is discussing by his translations of their titles. This is not standard practice. Translating the titles of Edo-period books is notoriously difficult because of the layers of meaning they may contain and the lack of agreed-upon translations of basic terms that often appear in them. It may have been considered appropriate to use translations in a book intended for the widest possible audience, but interested readers should be aware that they will not find the same—or any—English titles in other studies or in catalogues. In all cases, the original title is given in Romanized Japanese followed by the Japanese at the head of each commentary.

The book begins with two short essays. In the first, “Ehon: An Introduction,” Keyes establishes what he regards as the essential characteristics of ehon. In doing so he reveals his own deeply personal and emotional engagement with the material. The entire book is informed by his view of ehon as embodying, “in a tangible physical form, the wisdom, traditions, life experience and presence of each of the many people who work together to make them” (14). What is lacking is any consideration of these books as commodities. Some were expensive private commissions financed by poetry groups; most were issued as commercial propositions.

The second essay, “The Distinctive Components of Japanese books,” consists of entries on paper, ink and colors, binding, book covers, contents, language, calligraphy, and pictures. These entries provide accessible answers to the basic technical questions readers are likely to ask.

In the comments on each of his seventy selected items, Keyes combines empathy and imagination with scholarship to speculate on the intentions of artists and publishers. The results of this approach may sometimes puzzle those familiar with the material. Of great value to those coming new to Edo-period books are his summaries of prefaces and his translations of selected poems, for they reveal the ways in which images and texts were meant to interact. In addition, through his descriptions and judiciously chosen illustrations, Keyes succeeds in conveying a sense of the sequencing of images in these books. (The reproduction of all books with full margins and as three-dimensional objects is much to be commended.)

The publication history of Edo-period books is complex and quite different from that of European books. As Peter Kornicki observed:

. . . copies of books printed from the same set of printing blocks in the Tokugawa [Edo] period encompass an almost infinite variety. Publishers . . . tended to use their printing blocks not to produce a large number of copies in one operation but to print from them at intervals in response to the perceived demands of the market. When a publisher . . . printed from them, the results were inevitably different from those of the previous and subsequent printings. The text [and images] might be identical, with no alterations perhaps even to the details in the colophon, but the quality and size of the paper, the decoration of the cover, the title slip, the booksellers advertisements and other end matter were all subject to variation, and as a result it is rare indeed for two surviving copies of a block-printed book to match each other in all respects. (Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 1998, 54)

Because of these variables, it is inadvisable to draw conclusions about any Edo-period ehon after having examined just one copy of it. Keyes is well aware of this problem, but does not clutter his commentaries with discussion of bibliographical puzzles. Instead, he deals with them in a separate section at the end of the book entitled “Bibliographic Descriptions and References.” These twenty pages present the distillation of years of research by Keyes into the variant printings of all the books he chose for inclusion in Ehon. He also includes a full description of each book and information on provenance, reproductions, and bibliographic references. These succinct yet detailed notes will be useful to scholars and collectors alike. Japanese is provided for all the names and book titles that appear in them.

There is a fifteen-page inventory compiled by New York Public Library staff of the Japanese illustrated books in the Spencer Collection. The inventory entries give the title of each book in Romanised Japanese and Japanese (no translations here), the number of volumes, the date of publication, which for Edo-period books usually means the date when the blocks were cut, and the call number. Keyes provides an extensive bibliography and a detailed index of names and book titles. The latter are listed both in Romanised Japanese and in Keyes’s translations of them into English.

Keyes includes two books that are not in the New York Public Library because of their importance in his story: Kitao Masanobu’s Yoshiwara keisei shin bijin awase jihitsu kagami (no. 23); and Satô Suiseki’s Suiseki gafu nihen (no. 48). The copies illustrated come from the collection of Arthur Vershbow. In another instance, he reproduces a better copy from the collection of Edmond Freis of a book that is in the library: Kameda Bôsai’s Kyôchûzan (no. 47). Since Keyes is not writing a catalogue of the exhibition, such additions and substitutions were possible.

Keyes has built on the pioneering English-language work done by Charles Mitchell and Jack Hillier in the 1970s and 1980s. He shares with Hillier a “contagious love and enthusiasm” for this material. It is possible to disagree with some of his assumptions, wonder at his interpretations of some of the material, and query details; but there can be no doubt that he has succeeded in the primary purpose of his project—to widen appreciation of the remarkable achievements of Japanese artists in illustrated books.