Price available upon request. This piece is currently being reviewed for museum acquisition; serious inquiries from private collectors welcome.
A set of small Japanese erotic (shunga) books, stab-bound (fukurotoji) with original paper covers, one retaining a printed title label. Color woodblock-printed plates of figures in interior scenes and patterned robes, alternating with hand-printed kuzushiji (cursive) text pages. Late Edo to Meiji period. Age-consistent toning, wear, and handling throughout. An authentic example of the printed enpon tradition, offered as an antique collectible / historical document.
Estimated era: late Meiji to early Taisho, roughly 1900s to 1910s. Around 110 years old, read from the paper, printing and bindings.
Details, 3 volumes: Vol 1, about 2 text pages and 12 colour images (red tape); Vol 2, about 18 text pages, text only; Vol 3, about 22 text pages and 12 colour images (tape broken). Each about 5” x 3.5”. Original price: 20,000 yen.
This object belongs to a tradition called shunga (春画, literally "spring pictures", "spring" was a euphemism for s*x). More specifically, the booklet format is called an enpon (艶本 / 艶本, "erotic book"), which was the most common way shunga circulated, far more than the single famous prints people think of today. These works were widely circulated and formed an accepted part of popular visual culture.
On the timeline: the roots go back much further than the Edo period. As early as the 700s, the courtier class had handscrolls with explicit illustrations, and by the 17th century woodblock printing had emerged, making it easier to distribute the work quickly and widely. The Japanese tradition was also shaped from abroad, early Chinese sex manuals influenced Japanese erotic art.
What makes the genre historically interesting is how mainstream it was. Despite being disapproved of by the military government, it was popular with all social classes during the Edo period. It wasn't a fringe underground product: newlyweds sometimes received shunga for educational purposes, samurai carried the illustrations into battle as lucky charms, and married couples kept books at home to view with visiting friends. Traveling lending libraries even brought the art to rural areas. That lending-library detail is worth holding onto, it's part of why so many of these survive in worn, well-thumbed condition like this one.
The legal backdrop matters for dating and for why explicit material kept being produced anyway. There were repeated governmental attempts to suppress shunga; the first was a Tokugawa edict in 1661 banning erotic books known as kōshokubon ("lewdness books"). The various bans only had the effect of driving an already-prolific trade clandestine. So production continued underground through the 18th and 19th centuries.
The famous shunga are luxury woodblock-printed books by named ukiyo-e (the pleasure-seeking urban culture of Edo-period Japan) masters: Utamaro's Utamakura (1788), Hokusai's work, and so on. This one is a fine printed edition, a carved type. That suggests it's a commercial art-print edition. That's common: alongside the deluxe printed books there was a large body of cheaper hand-copied erotic/instructional material that ordinary people made and passed around. The hand-copied being less valuable as "art" than a signed printed Utamaro, but arguably more interesting as a social document. This piece has both the art and the hand-drawn everyday use tradition.
Carrying the soft patina that only time can give. Sold as a historical art object, expect imperfections due to age and the handmade nature of this fantastic piece of history.
