Hokusai

When I was at Aardvark Books, I looled around the book shelves and found a lovely book of Hokusai prints. He was a Japanese printmaker around 1800 and his most famous print is The Wave. This book was printed and bound in Prague but totally in the Japanese style. That is, two prints are on one sheet of paper and the sheet is folded and bound into a stitched spine so that the fold is at the fore edge. The cover is paper and the whole book is enclosed in a Japanese-style case.

You can see the bone fasteners on the left hand side. It is slightly spoilt by that the outer cover which is European standard red book cloth. They ought to have used paper. But the prints are a lovely collection. I cannot work out how they were selected although there is a good introduction. I canot photograph the inside of the book because it is too tightly bound. The other criticism is that the book is printed on paper which is too heavy at about 50 or 60 gsm whereas it should be less than 30gsm. It would open better if it was lighter. Anyway a real find.

I have worked hard over the last few weeks and have cleared off all the small jobs I promised people I would do. I am finding that being treasurer of two groups and chairman of a third is more onerous than I expected. The treasurer jobs are not difficult but it is all the meetings which are difficult to juggle. So I have given up the Complex Weavers Study Group on Tied Weaves which I am sad about but another set of deadlines is asking for trouble. I have however just started attending a local class on print making. This I excuse by saying that I must really get on with making the book on Sir Patrick Spens. I intend to have the verses on the righthand side and a lino cut on the lefthand side. What I forgot was that I should have gone to the class with the designs ready. So I spent Monday afternoon at the class drawing out some of the designs. I do not want to start making the lino cuts until the designs are all finished. There may be a problem in selecting paper. At home I have used thin Chinese paper of about 30 gsm which looks good but I could not put through my printer for the text. Those earlier prints were done by rubbing with the back of a spoon but the class has a press!!! So I may be able to use a much heavier paper. The tutor likes to use Hot Pressed waterolour paper which will be at least 120 gsm. I can see a lot of experimentation going on when I start on this in earnest.

One job I have completed is completing the sections on my website. So now all the old sections are present as well as one or two new ones. I will add additional sections as an interesting topic comes up.