Although printed labels identifying a book’s owner are primarily a development of the West, their use did spread to other cultures as well. By way of illustration we present in this issue of JLH an example from a Buddhist temple library in Japan.

            Buddhism reached Japan from China in the sixth century and quickly established a monastic life in which the written word assumed some importance. Buddhist temple libraries in Japan can be traced back to the seventh century, and might be considered similar in many respects to monastic libraries in the West. However, the Zojoji Temple in Shiba, Tokyo prefecture, which was responsible for the bookplate depicted here, was built near the end of the sixteenth century.

            With the information presently available there is little that can be said about the history of our bookplate and its use. It was apparently printed from a woodcut some time during the eighteenth century and is perhaps one of the first bookplates to have been used in Japan. The example here is reproduced from a short work by Shozo Saito, written in English, entitled Bookplates in Japan, which was published in Tokyo around 1941. During World War II the Zojoji Temple was destroyed by bombing, and although the buildings themselves have been restored, there appears to be little record or recollection left as to what its library might have contained or exactly how it might have been used.

            Michael Cooper, the editor of the journal Monumenta Nipponica, has kindly provided a translation of some of the characters in our bookplate. The four characters in the upper portion of the plate mean, roughly, “don’t take out of gate.” The large characters written vertically signify “a book of the storehouse of Choshoan,” which was probably a subtemple of Zojoji, Choshoan may, in turn, be translated as “The Arbor of the Listening Pines.” It must have been a delightful place to spend time with a book.

 Phillip A. Metzger

Graduate School of Library Science

The University of Texas at Austin

 

Bookplate courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago

[Originally published in Journal of Library History, vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring 1978): ]