They mostly know Mokuhankan as it exists at present, our little shop in Asakusa, and the workroom in my home back in Ome. They think it's a few years old. They are wrong.

It began in 1998~1999, just as I was finishing up the long ten-year Hyakunin Isshu poets series. The word 'Mokuhankan' hadn't come to mind yet; I didn't have a name for the project I was cooking up. The concept was quite vague at first. I had been doing well with making/selling reproductions of traditional prints via private subscription, but felt that I wanted to 'modernize' things a little. It didn't seem to be so useful to simply keep making reproductions.

Rather than try to explain more here, let me link to an archive copy of a web page that I put up at that time. This was before Facebook, before YouTube, before Google "¦ and I don't remember how I imagined that I would actually reach many people, but there it was.

Please go take a look at the page.

So how did the experiment turn out? Did I get a flood of response from eager and willing designers?

Well, no. I ended up having conversations with two people, both friends from the (then flourishing) Baren Forum I had started a few years earlier, John Amoss and Gary Luedke. Without a strong showing from interested designers, I hesitated to push the project forward, and ended up letting it slide. I did work with both those two friends, incorporating their designs into two of my Surimono Albums. The wider vision of a 'publishing house' was set aside.

We move ahead to 2005. My project that year had been the - very successful - Hanga Treasure Chest, a set of 24 prints that I had issued every two weeks during the course of the year. There were a lot of subscribers, and the bank account was looking quite nice. The 'publisher' idea reared its head again, but this time with a different cast. Instead of trying to set up a subscription series based on contemporary designs, I would take a different approach - I would simply begin to issue prints one at a time as my resources permitted, putting them into an online shop, using both traditional designs, and - if I could find designers - modern work as well. (The internet was now much more advanced, and shopping online was clearly a 'thing' at this point.)

I needed a 'brand', and after some thought, came up with the word Mokuhankan, which can be translated as 'The place for woodblock prints!' I am able to tell the very day when I came up with that, because the domain registration - which I must have done straight away - is a matter of public record: November 5th, 2005.

So that is why I am making this post today. Early November is clearly the most important time in the calendar for us - our Asakusa shop was one year old this week, and I myself will be 64 next week, but Mokuhankan got its start exactly ten years ago tonight.

The first item - catalogue #1 - was a print made from blocks I had carved some years earlier, to make a Gift Print for the collectors of the Hyakunin Isshu poets series. We've come a very long way in that ten years, of course not entirely in a direction I had intended, but that's irrelevant; we are now well and truly established, I think!

I can't leave a blog post this lengthy without putting some kind of image in, so here's a photo given to me by an amateur photographer who snapped me outside a few days ago, while I was preparing to take some video for the next upcoming YouTube episode.

Happy Anniversaries, Dave! :-)

Thanks for all the years of support!