asia

The editorial note in this guidebook states that "The tourist library series aims at presenting concise, authoritative and unbiased information on various phases of Japanese culture, old and new."

This particular guidebook, one of a series published by the Japan Travel Bureau over several decades, invites the reader to explore the proud heritage of Japanese garden design. It reflects pride in the natural beauty of the islands, as well as the skill, sensitivity, and insight of the local gardeners.

Kinrande (金襴手) refers to a Chinese porcelain known as “gold brocade type,” which was highly prized by Japanese tea masters and collectors. Today, many fine examples of this type of ware are found in private Japanese collections. This book remains the only important English-language work on this porcelain type.

This collection of articles, by various experts, covers the treatment and diseases of wildlife. It provides an in-depth look at the scientific knowledge needed—and challenges—of treating wildlife disease in the countries of the Pacific Basin. This collection is edited by Murray Fowler, considered to be the father of zoological medicine; the depth of his knowledge lends special relevance to this text.

The author of this booklet, Dr. Robert Miller Spaulding, Jr., aka “Dr. Bob,” was a 90-year-old professor of Japanese history at Oklahoma State University. Originally from Alabama and Mississippi, he briefly served as an Army Officer (like the librarian at the National Postal Museum, where this book is housed). The Army sent him to school to learn Japanese, and then sent him to Japan in 1946. Dr. Spaulding published many professional books on Japanese history. He was also a philatelist, and was an active member of The International Society for Japanese Philately.

This book is Part 1 of an important four volume publication on the history of Nepal. The set was formerly in the private library of Dr. Mary Shepherd Slusser. This volume and one other in the set are in need of conservation treatment.

With classic British understatement, Harold Maxwell-Lefroy (1877-1925) describes this two-volume, 800 page guide as an “imperfect” attempt to describe the insects of the Indian subcontinent. Published in 1909, Indian Insect Life is “largely a product of [Maxwell-Lefroy’s] spare time and scanty holidays.” One wonders what he would produce if he were able to devote his full time and energy.

So who authors an important scholarly work on early Chinese jades; maps the main prison camps in Germany and Austria during WWI; writes biographies about Anna Van Schurman, Agnes Strickland, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles Dickens; writes first-hand accounts of talks of rebel leaders during Ireland’s revolutionary period; and is appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire? That would be the scholar par excellence of Renaissance art John Pope-Hennessy’s mother. 

Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831-1889) is considered to be an important successor to artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Kyōsai was also Japan’s first political caricaturist. He was imprisoned a number of times by the shogunate for his disrespectful art. When not painting caricatures he often chose subjects from folklore, nature, religion, and the Nô drama. Harold Stern, former director of the Freer Gallery of Art, proposed mounting the first major exhibition of Kyōsai’s work but that plan was dropped with Stern’s untimely death in 1976.

The ancient city of Palmyra was, for a number of centuries, an important trading center for materials transported across the Silk Road to and from many points in Asia and the Middle East. Much of our current understanding of silk in antiquity comes from the study of material from Palmyra. This book on Palmyra textiles picks up from earlier scholarship, seeking to identify the origin of these silks and to expand their cultural context.

The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Library has an extensive collection of books about European and American architecture and architectural ornament. This copy of the rare 1834 Essay on the Architecture of the Hindús written by Rám Ráz (1790-1830), a native of India, is not a book you would typically expect to find in the collection. The author compares Hindu architecture with the Greek, Egyptian, or later European architecture that is helpful in understanding sources of design, particularly of temple architecture.

The Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, has an important collection of Greco-Bactrian and Bactrian gold and silver vessels, many of which were likely in the Siberian collection of Tsar Peter the Great (1672-1725). In 1940, Kamilla Trever (1892-1974), a curator at the Hermitage and a Russian historian specializing in the history and culture of Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and Iran, published this important but obscure Russian-language work on the collection.