Regarding Soshu Den Meisaku Shu

[Dealwizard22]

Hello! I am very new here, I did have a question though regarding the 1975 book by Honma Junji. I understand the book is relatively rare, while also being a good resource regarding the Sagami Province swordcraft. Upon trying to find more details regarding the book and its contents, I couldnt help but notice the stark lack thereof. I admit to even checking piracy sites for books and library material. Is it just rare enough that it hasn't been digitized in full?

[eternal_newbie]

It is indeed quite rare, only 1500 editions having been printed. In addition to the scarcity, it is also quite large — far larger than the typical consumer scanners — and rather tightly bound, so the only way to properly digitize it would be to unbind it and scan each page loose. As the book itself is somewhat of a collector's item and rather expensive, nobody who owns a copy is particularly keen to do so.

 

I have, however, created an English index for it which can be found at the Downloads page: 

[Grey Doffin]

Here is the book on my site: https://japaneseswordbooksandtsuba.com/store/book/sword-books/b663-soshu-den-meisaku-shu-by-dr-homma/

to give you an idea what to expect.

Such a pity that all books haven't been digitalized, but then, no one would bother to write books. Why go to all the toil and trouble if your work will be stolen?

Grey

[Dealwizard22]

38 minutes ago, Grey Doffin said:

Here is the book on my site: https://japaneseswordbooksandtsuba.com/store/book/sword-books/b663-soshu-den-meisaku-shu-by-dr-homma/

to give you an idea what to expect.

Such a pity that all books haven't been digitalized, but then, no one would bother to write books. Why go to all the toil and trouble if your work will be stolen?

Grey

Thank you for the link to your site! It has many more pages than I originally thought. Very helpful thank you!

 

In addition, my surprise that there isnt already a digitized version of it does genuinely come from a mindset of preservation of information. You are right though it must be discouraging to authors that their works can so easily be stolen.

Edited June 26 by Dealwizard22
Forgot a thought

[Dealwizard22]

4 hours ago, eternal_newbie said:

It is indeed quite rare, only 1500 editions having been printed. In addition to the scarcity, it is also quite large — far larger than the typical consumer scanners — and rather tightly bound, so the only way to properly digitize it would be to unbind it and scan each page loose. As the book itself is somewhat of a collector's item and rather expensive, nobody who owns a copy is particularly keen to do so.

 

I have, however, created an English index for it which can be found at the Downloads page: 

Your comment made me realize I didnt know how books were digitized to begin with! Destroying the book certainly doesnt seem like a choice anyone should make. On top of that non-destructive methods seem prohibitively expensive. 

[nulldevice]

9 minutes ago, Dealwizard22 said:

Your comment made me realize I didnt know how books were digitized to begin with! Destroying the book certainly doesnt seem like a choice anyone should make. On top of that non-destructive methods seem prohibitively expensive. 

 

There are scanners that can scan books still bound but the images are prone to distortion. If you just want text and don't mind the lines of text having some waves in them as the curvature of the pages is captured, not a big deal, when trying to capture images in books in high resolution, you need to have loose pages that you can feed into a flat type of scanner to prevent distortion. 

 

I recently saw a Chinese book scanner that was able to achieve flat scans while keeping the book in tact, it used air suction to suction a single page to a wedge-shaped scanning apparatus and as the scanner ran up the page, it scanned the contents and the page was turned as the scanner reached the edge of the page and the obverse was then scanned using the same method. Despite being quite a cool contraption, it was huge and bulky and very much out of reach for me and my nihonto books. The problem with unbinding a book is that re-binding them can be quite expensive and you do have to cut some of the page material initially to remove the glue and or stitching holding the binding together. So the page block going back in the binding after scanning will have a few mm of page missing and could lead to re-binding causing some of the tight text to become hard to read. Usually not a problem on big nihonto books as they usually have quite large margins around the images and text blocks, but something to be aware of. 

[Katsujinken]

2 hours ago, Grey Doffin said:

Here is the book on my site: https://japaneseswordbooksandtsuba.com/store/book/sword-books/b663-soshu-den-meisaku-shu-by-dr-homma/

to give you an idea what to expect.

Such a pity that all books haven't been digitalized, but then, no one would bother to write books. Why go to all the toil and trouble if your work will be stolen?

Grey

And $450 was an amazing price, imho!

[eternal_newbie]

11 minutes ago, Katsujinken said:

And $450 was an amazing price, imho!

 

Yep, closer to double that nowadays (and another 50%-ish premium for those of us in the middle of nowhere, i.e. Australia).

[CSM101]

Let us assume that money is not the problem. Then comes time. You need several scans, then stitching and a lot of other stuff. Per page 30 minutes minimum. If you want quality. Do you know how to do that?

 

 

Edited June 26 by CSM101

[eternal_newbie]

This is one of the areas where AI models and machine learning can be genuinely useful as a tool for sharing and preserving information; I believe several independent projects are working on algorithms/models that will read in stitched/distorted scans and clean them up to approximate the appearance of the original media.

[Dealwizard22]

1 hour ago, CSM101 said:

Let us assume that money is not the problem. Then comes time. You need several scans, then stitching and a lot of other stuff. Per page 30 minutes minimum. If you want quality. Do you know how to do that?

 

 

I personally dont have any experience with that sort of thing. I like to think I'd be willing to learn how. Without a proper camera or scanner however I'd be at a loss for where to start.

[Grey Doffin]

A different, less expensive but just as informative option, and in English, is Dmitry Pechalov's Japanese Swords: Soshu Den Masterpieces: https://japaneseswordbooksandtsuba.com/store/book/sword-books/c265-Japanese-swords-soshu-den-masterpieces-by-pechalov/

Grey

[eternal_newbie]

30 minutes ago, Grey Doffin said:

A different, less expensive but just as informative option, and in English, is Dmitry Pechalov's Japanese Swords: Soshu Den Masterpieces: https://japaneseswordbooksandtsuba.com/store/book/sword-books/c265-Japanese-swords-soshu-den-masterpieces-by-pechalov/

 

Also a fantastic book, and even better, contains several English excerpts of various sources that also appear in the Soshu Den Meisaku Shu.

[MassiveMoonHeh]

It is a fab book. Managed to pick mine up through amazon.jp who included delivery which was lucky.

 

These two are currently for sale at: Kosho.

 

 

[Brano]

On 6/27/2026 at 11:15 AM, MassiveMoonHeh said:

It is a fab book. Managed to pick mine up through amazon.jp who included delivery which was lucky.

 

These two are currently for sale at: Kosho.

 

 

Also - since many Japanese booksellers do not ship overseas, Buyee often offers to purchase through them and then ship anywhere in the world