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Six new prints added to Mokuhankan!
Posted by Dave Bull on January 28, 2007 [Permalink]
Mokuhankan started up in the spring of last year, and has grown only so slowly since then. Only six prints were added to the catalogue in the first year, and at that rate, it's going to be a long haul to build things up!
But an opportunity has arisen to broaden the range of prints available - the first of my Surimono Albums has now become 'out-of-print'. All 200+ of the print sets I made in 1999 have now flown away to new homes.
There is just no way that I myself will ever find time to reprint those albums in their entirety, as I - of course - will always be busy with new work. But not to use the blocks would be an incredible waste. That hard cherrywood is capable of producing many thousands of prints, and with only 200 copies pulled so far, it would be a crime to let them sleep indefinitely ...
So, after consulting with a number of the collectors who own those albums, and hearing from them that they wouldn't have any problem with this, I have decided to use those blocks for Mokuhankan - it seems a common-sense thing to do. Years from now, after I'm gone, they will certainly get used for reprinting, so it only seems sensible to do it now, while I am able to maintain tight control over what kind of prints will be made from them ...
I've been talking to Ueda-san the young printer, and he's ready and willing to make some editions for me, but I can't afford to let him get started just yet. So in the meantime, I can get things kick-started by putting my own overstock prints into the Mokuhankan file cabinet.
In order to get 200 clean copies of each print when I made the original batches, I of course started with more sheets than that. Once each batch was done, defects were culled, and the rest put into drawers to await orders from customers. But as the number of good ones varied from print to print within the series, I had to stop selling sets when the ones with the lowest quantities ran out.
So it is these 'extra' prints that are now being made available from Mokuhankan. Here's a small image of each one, clickable to jump over to the catalogue page.
Hokusai:
Hiroshige:
Bun'Ichi:
Zeshin:
Toyohiro:
Koryusai:
I hope you find some of these to your liking!
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