Maggs Bros. Ltd.

Serizawa Keisuke's beautifully printed book about taking a day trip to the pottery town of Mashiko.

Located in Tochigi prefecture, pottery has been made in Mashiko over a thousand years. However, it was on in the 1850s that a new, more distinctive type of pottery was named 'mashiko-ware'. This was largely owed to Otsuka Keizaburo (1828-1876), a potter who built a kiln in 1853 and made ceramics using local Mashiko clay. These were not luxury craft items, but rather more utilitarian, every-day pottery with its own unique charm.

This is precisely what attracted artists and craftspeople of the Mingei Movement, who wanted to emphasise what they deemed to be "the beauty of everyday objects". The potter Shoji Hamada, a key figure in the Mingei Movement, moved to Mashiko and set up his workshop there in the 1920s. This attracted more people to the town, including as his close collaborators Yanagi Soetsu, Bernard Leach and Serizawa Keisuke. After setting up his workshop, Hamada committed himself fully to Mashiko pottery and in 1955 was awarded the prestigious title of Living National Treasure, significantly raising the profile of the local ceramics.

Since Mashiko is not so far from Tokyo, it is possible to take a day trip, which is precisely what Serizawa documents in this book. Serizawa himself was later awarded Living National Treasure status for textile dyeing, and so the book can be understood as one master craftsman's appreciation towards another. Every plate of the present book exudes considerable charm; we see mothers carrying their children on their backs, the local architecture, piles of firewood for the kilns and potters hard at work. The timing of this book is also extraordinary, as it was made during the height of WWII.

The true first edition. Serizawa made printed an edition of 50 copies of this book in 1943, of which 25 were cropped and bound in a small format, and the other 25 kept in a large format. The present copy is one of the large copies from the first edition. The following year, Serizawa printed a second edition of this title, again in the large format and in a run of only 15 copies.

Extremely rare. Only one copy in OCLC (Peabody Essex)