Oriental Ceramics: 9 volumes (of 12)
The World's Greatest Collections

by Fujio Koyama and John A. Pope, (eds.)

(Kodansha, Tokyo, 1976.)

Limited international edition of 300 copies; copy number 4. Text is bilingual Japanese and English. Small folios, 314pp., each volume contains approximately 100 tipped-in colour plates and 300 monotone text illustrations. Boards are covered in cloth specially woven for the publication, with gilt stamping to front panels and gilt titles on spine. Silk covered clamshell boxes; spines faded; a few marks and bumps; volume 3 has a few watermarks and frayings to front; volume 10 has small tear to inside lining; volume 12 has small scrape and perforation to outer bottom panel. Otherwise very good.

Volume One: Tokyo National Museum. Volume Two: National Museum of Korea, Seoul. Volume Three: Museum Pusat, Jakarta. Volume Four: Iran Bastan Museum, Teheran. Volume Five: The British Museum, London. Volume Nine: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm. Volume Ten: The Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Volume Eleven: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Volume Twelve: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Missing are Volume 6: Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Volume 7: Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, London; and Volume 8: Musee Guimet, Paris.) Each volume presents the collection of one of the world's important museums known for its outstanding Oriental ceramic section, thus showing the diversity of ceramics in China, Korea, Japan, Annam, Persia, Turkey, and Southeast Asia in new sets of photographs. Many of the masterpieces and rarities were published here for the first time. The introductory essay in each volume and the 100 word descriptions for each colour plate were prepared by the scholarly staff of the respective museums, and, as well as all the identification data, are given in English and Japanese.

Price: $3000