New pfd book uploaded to articles section

[Brian]

All,

One of our members here, bluboxer (Alan) recently went to the trouble of scanning and editing the entire book titled "Japanese Works of Art - Selected from the Mosle Collection" which is an out-of-copyright book from 1914 that is hard to find. It has great pics of one of the finer collections of tosogu from that time period.

At 133 pages, Alan...you have far more time and patience than me :lol:

He wanted to share it freely with the members and has provided me with the file to upload and host here. The original 600 meg file was reduced to around 168 megs.

Take your time getting it...no rush and let's not go mad on the bandwidth just yet

I have uploaded it to the articles section, to feel free to add it to your reference library those who don't have it yet. I believe there may be one armor page missing and some of the non-sword images were omitted from the scan.

My thanks to Alan for all that work, and for willingly sharing it with everyone so freely.

 

Regards,

Brian

[pcfarrar]

Excellent book, many thanks to Alan for his hard work.

 

If you OCR it with Adobe Acrobat 9 clearscan the file size comes down to 56MB with no loss in quality. It also then gives you the advantage of being able to search the book for information.

[bluboxer]

Good day all,

just wanted to clarify a few things about this pdf.These images were taken with a Canon 12+ mpixel camera which allows for some extremely large and detailed images.I was impressed as to the quality of the original image process from 1914.I am not familiar with the printing process used on this book but it must have been the finest for it's time.

The extra large tsuba images at the end of the pdf are demonstrative of the image size and resolution attainable and; if there are any particularly significant pieces that anyone would like to see this size (to analyze the mei for instance) I can make another trip to the library and shoot some more pictures.

When I first came across this book a few years ago it was in the general oversize collections and was all scattered with no cover or box.It has since been moved to our special collections and is now getting some proper care.Subsequently there may be some missing pages.Perhaps someone may be able to discern and/or provide an image of any missing nihonto related sheets.There are many more pages to this book that I did not include (textiles,ceramics and artwork) as I only wanted to document the nihonto related pages.

I hope these prove useful in our shared quest for knowledge,

respectfully,Alan.