Event

Please join us for the next lecture in the EALC Speakers' Colloquium. 

This talk explores how book collecting culture and a burgeoning trade in used books informed modern practices of archiving, new understandings of the materiality of bibliographic documents, and fresh forms of knowledge about book history in prewar Japan. The development of the commercial book industry in the first decades of the 20th century precipitated a robust speculators’ market for old and rare books, creating covalent anxieties about commodification, canonization, and the fates of forgotten volumes in shops and libraries. In 1923, the destructive fires following the Great Kanto Earthquake reduced countless thousands of volumes to ash, spurring discussions about preservation, the transmission of culture, and the organization of Japan’s written heritage. I examine bookseller trade magazines, catalogs, and the writings of the cantankerous critic Uchida Roan to consider discourses generated by bibliophilic modes of reading, the extra-linguistic uses of unread books, and the ways in which collector practices gave rise to genealogies of Japanese literary history.