A Forgotten Book

The title translates 忘れられた書物 directly, and the print most likely treats a single old book — closed or partly open — as a quiet still-life subject rather than a literary illustration. Takeda's forest and pond work approaches the natural world this way; A Forgotten Book applies the same close-attention idiom to a man-made object that has begun to drift into the same condition of slow neglect. Etching is suited to the aged spine, raised bands, and worn cloth or leather of an older volume; aquatint carries the gradations of dust, shadow at the page edge, and the soft fall of light across the cover. A spit-bite or selectively stopped-out aquatint can give the book's recessed gutter its depth without harsh contrast. Chine-collé adds a paper-on-paper quality that pairs with the subject's own materiality. The work falls within the Literary tag of her catalog, but its sensibility is closer to memento mori than to bibliographic illustration: an object remembered for being unremembered, printed at the modest intaglio scale that has defined her output since the early 1990s.