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IN THE P UBLIC DOMAIN: JAPANES E TREASUR ES AT TH E NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AU STRALIA – TAASA Review March 2010

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This article was originally found in the March 2010 edition of TAASA Review (Volume 19, Issue 1, Page 21).

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Anya Dettman with Mayumi Shinozaki T hink of a library and you may think of sombre rows of books, not the sinuous lines and vibrant colours of ukiyo-e prints.

But since 2008 the National Library of Australia has been steadily building a collection of Japanese woodblock prints of the 19th to the early 20th century.

They have been selected not for their artistic merits (beautiful though many of them are) but rather for their value as social history, as a visual supplement to the Library’s extensive Japanese language book collections...