Album summary

Album summary by Keisai Eisen is documented on ukiyo-e.org from an entry attached to a publication titled Nihon Shosui sha, identified as a Japanese Selected Woodblock Prints album. The 'album summary' designation typically refers to a frontispiece, table of contents, or summary sheet at the front or back of a multi-print album, often used to identify artists, titles, or themes within the binding. Such sheets formed a routine but largely overlooked part of Edo and Meiji-era publishing practice. Eisen, working within the Edo ukiyo-e tradition that supplied designs to both single-sheet and book-format publishers, contributed regularly to album projects of varied subject matter, from bijin-ga to landscape and shunga. Because the sheet appears with the publisher Nihon Shosui sha rather than with a specific genre attribution, it may date to a later Meiji-era reissue of Eisen designs, in which earlier blocks were assembled into albums for export markets or for collectors interested in retrospective surveys of the master's work. The ukiyo-e.org record preserves the image and metadata as part of a comprehensive catalogue effort that includes such ancillary sheets alongside the better-known set pieces of Eisen's bijin-ga and Chushingura production. Within his corpus, the album summary reminds the viewer that Eisen's images circulated not only as autonomous prints but as part of bound collections, each requiring its own kind of identifying material to serve the practical needs of readers and owners.