Cover of an Album of Comic Verse

This is the outside of the book: a worn cover with its printed title slip still legible down the center, the paper crazed and darkened by more than two centuries of handling. Cheap to make and made to be used, books like this were the ordinary reading matter of Edo, not objects kept under glass. Inside is the deluxe album of comic-poetry portraits designed by Kyōden under his artist name Kitao Masanobu. Showing the cover beside its pages is a reminder of what these things were: bound, sequential, portable, opened and read in order, closer in kind to a modern paperback than to a hanging scroll. The survival of so fragile a wrapper is its own small accident of luck.