The 'Surimono Albums' was a set of 50 prints created by Dave Bull, in the years before he initiated the Mokuhankan publishing venture, when he was still working as a solo craftsman. He created 10 prints per year, in the five years from 1999 through 2003, with the prints being sent out to waiting subscribers as each one was finished.

These were the years immediately following his 10-year project to reproduce Katsukawa Shunsho's set of 100 designs depicting the 'Hyaku-nin Isshu' poets, originally created in 1775. As the prints in that series had all been designed in a similar style, Dave wanted a project that would provide a chance to use many of the different techniques of traditional Japanese printmaking. To that end, over the course of the five years of the project, he selected images that would provide that learning experience.

The collectors of the series began each year with an empty album cover, into which they mounted the prints one by one as they arrived roughly monthly, and they never had any idea what would be coming next. Each print was accompanied by an episodic descriptive pamphlet, and those short descriptive pieces have been included here with each print image.

The woodblocks were of course carefully preserved, and some of the prints from this series are now available in a new edition, having being reprinted by the Mokuhankan staff printers. Links to these prints - where available - can be found in the description for each design.