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The Henry Manga comes to life!
Posted by Dave Bull on February 17, 2016 [Permalink]
Here we go! We're finally getting to the end of the long process of getting the Henry Manga books out the door!
Here's a little 'photo story' showing the first copy done ...
I chose a vermillion washi for the thick covers; I think it sets off the inner white pages very nicely:
We carved and hand-printed - in pearl powder - a small floral pattern on one corner of the cover:
The characters are a phonetic rendering of 'Henry Manga':
All the body of the book was carved by our young carver Ms. Noriko Kawasaki, but we wanted the frontispiece - featuring her - to be a surprise, so Dave carved this part of the book:
There are six inner spreads ... with the 'action' moving from page to page ...
... crossing the borders from image to image ...
The final page is a kind of 'colophon', with information on the three people who created the book ... Designer: Jed Henry ... Carver: Kawasaki Noriko ... Printer: Chiharu Kanai.
The publisher's address and the copyright information are there, and inside the back cover is a printed label with other information on the project:
But those previous photos didn't really give much of a sense of the 'woodblockiness' of this book, so let's have a few more, with the book held under raking light (don't miss the enlargements!):
(If you noticed a couple of mis-registrations in those closeups, don't panic; the volume I had available for photographing today is the first one back from the binder, and this was made with proof sheets, not prints from the actual production run.)
Now that everything has finally got to this stage, the rest will be easy; we expect to start shipping in a week or so. Thank you to all the collectors for their long patient wait!
(The volume isn't completely sold out; we have printed 140 volumes, and so far about 120 of them have been spoken for (last year's subscribers). If you are interested, please visit this information page for details.)
Added by: Franz Rogar on February 18, 2016, 12:08 am
Simply stunning!
What else can be said... but burning waiting for it to arrive! :-)
Added by: Dave on February 18, 2016, 12:17 am
There is something else to mention about this book - something that we hadn't really realized when we began the project. Making book with woodblock printing technology was commonplace back in the Edo~Meiji era. It was nothing 'special' at all.
But we've hunted around to try and find more recent examples ... and can't find anything at all in the post-war period. There was a reproduction of an old Hokusai book printed a while back from preserved blocks, and there is a company in Kyoto still running copies off some old Hokusai Manga reproduction blocks, but it's possible/probable that this book of ours is the first completely new wood-block carved and printed book published in this country since long before the war ...
Congratulations Jed, you've made history!
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