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September 16, 2009
John T. Carpenter, ed. Reading Surimono: The Interplay of Text and Image in Japanese Prints Leiden and Zurich: Hotei Publishing in association with Museum Rietberg Zürich, 2008. 432 pp.; 400 color ills. Cloth $147.00 (9789004168411)
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The Japanese term surimono refers to privately commissioned prints intended for circulation to a limited group of individuals in connection with some special occasion or significant event. As such, they reflected the interests of the groups to which they were sent, and they almost always differed in distinctive ways from contemporary commercial prints put out by the same publishers. There are a number of features that set them apart. One is the expensive pigments and...