Edo prints
| Design: | Totoya Hokkei (1780–1850) | |||||
| Title: | Dōchū gafu jō | |||||
| Size: | 22.2 x 16.0 cm | |||||
| Posthumous printing from the original woodblocks | ||||||
| Photography: | Jacques Commandeur |
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Originally commisioned and privately issued around 1830 by a group of poets called the Hanazonoren including their kyōka poems. This is a later public edition without poems - classified by Forrer (1985) as the II-D edition - released in two volumes by publisher Ōhashi Eisaburō on 5 April 1888.
Orange book cover with embossed repeated diamond shaped pattern of the Eirakuya Tōshirō firm.
Title printed in green on a white slip on the book cover:
| Character | Reading | Meaning | Translation |
| 五 | go | five | |
| 十 | jū | ten | |
| 三 | san | three | Fifty-three |
| 次 | tsugi | station | stations |
| 北 | hoku | north | |
| 斎 | sai | room | |
| 道 | dō | road | |
| 中 | chū | throughout | Hokusai’s |
| 画 | ga | drawing | album of pictures |
| 譜 | fu | book | along the highway |
| 上 | jō | top | Volume 1 |
Title page on the inside of the front-cover:
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Red title in the middle column of the title page:
| Character | Reading | Meaning | Translation |
| 道 | dō | road | |
| 中 | chū | throughout | |
| 画 | ga | picture | Album of pictures |
| 譜 | fu | book | along the highway |
Frontispiece displaying the shop of publisher Eirakuya Tōshirō, the original owner of the woodblocks:
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The characters on the noren read shosai (書斎, i.e., bookshop), those on the post outside the shop furuhon baibai (古本売買, i.e., second-hand books bought and sold).
The images in the Dōchū gafu can be viewed on the website of the London British Museum here.
References
- Forrer, Matthi (1985). Eirakuya Tōshirō, publisher at Nagoya. A contribution to the history of publishing in 19th century Japan. Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben.
Provenance: Yagiya Bobongua store