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Baren Digest                Tuesday, 2 June 1998        Volume 03 : Number 171

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From: David Bull <davebull@woodblock.com>
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 1998 20:38:51 +0900
Subject: [Baren 856] David goes to heaven ... (temporarily) 

Here's another 'briefing' on the London print places I visited ...

***

When I talked about the Print Room at the Victoria and Albert Museum the
other day, I mentioned that their Japanese prints were in a different
place ...

The museum itself is organized in what seems a bit of a chaotic way -
some of the rooms are devoted to a particular _type_ of object, say
textiles, or jewellry, etc., but some of the rooms are organized
according to date and place, say 17th century Europe, etc.    As a
result, things tend to be scattered all over the place, and you need a
lot of legwork to find whatever it is you are looking for.  And this is
one _big_ place ...

I first headed for the room entitled 'Japan' on the main guide map.  
Samurai armour, screen paintings, netsuke carvings, etc. etc. ... but only 
seven prints on the wall.    I knew there had to be more somewhere, and 
after quite a bit of searching, I found a doorway hidden in one corner of 
one of the rooms of the Silverware (20th Century) section ... "Far Eastern
Department - please ring the buzzer for assistance"

A young student-type guy poked his nose out, and after a bit of
discussion I was told that I would have to phone them and ask for
permission if I wanted to see any prints.  After returning to our hotel,
I called them and made an appointment.

Back the next day to the same door (after paying another 5 pounds
entrance fee) ...  I was admitted and spoke to a Ms. Liz Wilkinson.  She
asked me what I wanted to see, and my answer was ... "I won't know until
I _see_ it!"

I explained my work to her and added that I was trying to find suitable
designs for my next project, and what I simply wanted to do was to
'browse' through as many prints as possible, looking for those prints
that caught my eye ... prints that jumped up and yelled "Me!  Me! 
Choose Me!"

I really didn't expect to be allowed to do this.  The collections that I
have visited before all work on a 'card catalogue' system.  You go
through the catalogue, select the item you wish to see, put in a request
for it, and it is then brought out to you.  That obviously makes sense,
but in my case it just wouldn't work at all.  Requesting a thousand
prints ... one-by-one ...?

And to my surprise she agreed - "Well obviously the only way to do this
is for you to come into the back where all the prints are, and start
going through the boxes ..." And she led the way through doors, up
stairs, and into the room where the Japanese prints live ...  just about
20,000 of them ...

She then started pulling out box after box after box ... laying them on
a couple of large tables.  She got out a book and settled into a chair
to catch up on some reading, and I started 'digging'.  

I was a torn between two desires - I wanted to spend time with each
print, drinking it in and studying it carefully ... but I also wanted to
see as many different designs as possible, to find ones suitable for
next year's project ...

I have no idea how many I saw.  She brought out more boxes as I needed,
and I made extensive notes on those prints I thought suitable, including
their accession numbers, so that I could order photographs later.  It
was an amazing experience, expecially for someone who almost never gets
a chance to see a real 'original' from that era ...

The only thing that finally brought this to an end was the realization
that Ms. Wilkinson was being kept away from her normal work (museum
rules obviously didn't permit her to leave me alone in there ...).  So
after a couple of hours I reluctantly asked her not to bring any more
boxes out ...

She introduced me to the museum procedures for ordering photographs,
etc., (all handled by a separate department), and I then reluctantly
headed out of the museum.

It may seem a bit strange to you than someone has to travel all the way
from Tokyo to London to be able to see a good selection of Japanese
prints, but that's the inevitable result of a couple of things - the
fact that the Japanese pretty much threw this stuff away a century 
ago ... and the general open-ness of an institution like this, as compared
to the very very tightly closed doors of similar places in Japan.  

So thank you to Ms. Wilkinson and her wonderful museum!  I'll be back
again one day for another session in that 'back room' I'm sure!

***

Dave B.



P.S.  I noticed this afternoon that I made an error in that 'one-point'
lesson the other day.

'Kento' is the Japanese word for the set of registrations marks on a
woodblock.  The 'L' shaped corner mark is known as the 'kagi' (the 
'key' ...)

***

P.P.S.  In case anybody is interested, a print-out of some of the statistics
relating to Encyclopedia accesses from the woodblock.com server is now 
up on that web site, and will be updated at the end of each month.
http://www.woodblock.com/stats/stats.html

It shows a bunch of different stats, among them the most common 
_topics_ from the Encyclopedia, but doesn't give an actual breakdown 
of the individual pages.  I've pulled that out separately ...

Here's the current 'top ten'
 1: Woodblock printmakers on the web
 2: Ray's Newbie journal
 3: Suppliers in America
 4: "Editor's Choice"
 5: The Tokuno book
 6: Basic carving tools
 7: "Turn of the Century" printmakers
 8: "Collaborations"
 9: Overviews of the printmaking process - With keyblock (Bull)
10: Overviews of the printmaking process - Without keyblock (Brown)

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End of Baren Digest V3 #171
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