Yochi shiryaku [Outlines of World Geography or a Short Description of the World]. Volume 12. [Australia and the Pacific].

A$950 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Tokyo : Uchida Masayoshi zoban, 1880. Volume 12 only (of thirteen volumes published between 1870 and 1880), Large octavo (253 x 178 mm), original wrappers with title labels, string-bound in the Japanese manner, printed woodblock text on folded rice paper, with numerous lithograph illustrations and a folding map; occasional pale water staining to bottom corners, map with split to the fold, otherwise extremely good throughout, a nice example of this particular volume of Uchida s geographical encyclopedia; [TOGETHER WITH] Hubert de Castella, Souvenirs d un squatter Français en Australie , pp. 81-128 in Le tour du Monde , Volume 3, Paris, 1861; large quarto (290 x 210 mm), disbound. (The reason for the inclusion of de Castella s article is explained below). Uchida Masao (1838-1876) graduated from the Nagasaki naval school and was sent to Europe by the Tokugawa shogunate, where he studied Western culture and technology in The Netherlands from 1862-1867. Uchida was part of a Bakufu student group that visited America on his way back from Europe, and he returned to Japan with oil paintings, photographic albums, and hundreds of pictorial natural history images. Basing his work on the sources he collected on his travels, Uchida began to compile the Yochi Shiryaku in 1870, a thirteen-volume of encyclopedia of world geography. Its success was primarily due to the huge number of illustrations that Uchida called shashin (photography) , the images copied from the Western photographic albums

• Binding: Hardcover

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