Descriptive Catalogue of Japanese Books in the British Library Printed before 1700

British Library; Tenri Central Library, London Tenri-shi, Japan, first edition, 1993. Cloth, 8vo, 27 cm,. xlv, 753 pp, + 114 pp of plates with 14 colour and 315 black-and-white illustrations. 637 entries. A very detailed and exemplary bibliographical catalogue of the British Library's rich collection of over 600 pre-1700 Japanese printed books. From a review by P.F. Kornicki: "Gardner has done a great service in producing a catalogue so rich in learning... The value of his work lies not only in its definitive detail and bibliographical exactitude, exemplary though they are, but also in its broader applications, for there is much to be gleaned from this catalogue about the production and consumption of cultural artifacts in Japan, about seventeenth-century sinology, about book-collecting both in the Edo period and in more recent times by early Western japanologists." From the Preface: "The British Library's collection of Japanese books printed between the 12th and the 17th centuries is one of the most important in the world, and certainly one of the very finest outside Japan itself. The collection is representative of the whole range of Japanese book production of the Kamakura, Muromachi and early Edo periods, and is particularly strong in early movable type editions, in works printed at the Buddhist monasteries during the Chusei period, in Chinese works printed in Japan, in the editions known as Saga-bon influential both in terms of Japanese literary history and the development of book illustration, and in popular literature of the Edo period. One special feature of the British Library collection, which it shares with that of Tenri Central Library, is its holdings of works printed at the Jesuit Mission Press, Kirishitan-han, which are among the rarest of antiquarian Japanese printed books. A number of antiquarian Japanese printed books were present in the foundation collections of the British Museum when it was created in 1753. These had been gathered in Japan by the German physician Engelbert Kaempfer in 1690-92 and were subsequently acquired by Sir Hans Sloane. The strength of the antiquarian collection was really established with the purchase in 1868 of some three thousand volumes from Alexander von Siebold, son of the physician and traveller Philipp Franz von Siebold. During the 1880s two further collections were added, one of illustrated books acquired by William Anderson, the other of early block prints and movable type editions, from the library of Sir Ernest Satow..The collection has been steadily augmented by gift, purchase and exchange during the present century...". As New in dustwrapper.