Hototogisu, July 1911 (vol. 14, no. 12) — magazine cover

This Hototogisu cover, designed by Tsuda Seifu for the July 1911 issue (volume 14, number 12) of the literary magazine, was printed in color woodblock combined with letterpress and lithography and is preserved at the Rijksmuseum, where this impression is consulted through the museum's Wikimedia Commons holdings. Hototogisu was the haiku magazine that brought Tsuda into contact with the novelist Natsume Soseki, the friendship that would shape the central decade of his middle career. Tsuda designed several Hototogisu covers in the early 1910s, and the July 1911 example belongs to the height of his late Meiji and early Taisho period design practice, when his graphic sensibility carried him fluidly between kimono pattern albums, deluxe poetry books, and the literary magazine market. The composition draws on the ornamental vocabulary Tsuda had perfected in his Zuan shu compendia of 1900-1901, simplified for the small format of a magazine cover and combined with the letterpress masthead through the multi technique printing the publisher used to produce these issues. The cover stands as a document of late Meiji period Japanese print design, in which color woodblock craft survived alongside the new lithographic and letterpress technologies that were reshaping the magazine industry. The Rijksmuseum impression preserves the woodblock registration and the colored ink areas that distinguish a strong example of Tsuda's Hototogisu work.