Useless Books and Archives Aflame: The Typographic Imagination in Prewar Tokyo

Guest speaker: Professor Nathan Shockey, Associate Professor of Japanese, Bard College

Thursday, 5 May 2022 at 6:00PM EST

This talk explores how unread books and destroyed books generated symbolic value in the age of modern Japan’s mass-market publishing revolution. Drawing from my monograph, The Typographic Imagination: Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media (Columbia University Press, 2020), the talk examines bookseller trade magazines and the transformation of library systems, archiving, and indexing practices around the Great Kanto Earthquake to detail a covalent rise in anxieties surrounding the fate of forgotten books. I also read the cantankerous critical writings of the book collector Uchida Roan to consider discourses generated by bibliophilic, materialist modes of reading and the extra-linguistic uses of print media.

Nathan Shockey is Associate Professor of Japanese and Director of Asian Studies at Bard College, where he teaches classes on modern Japanese literature, cultural history, and media studies. He is the author of The Typographic Imagination: Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media (Columbia Univ. Press, 2020), and is presently at work on a volume collecting the bibliophilic writings of Uchida Roan, tentatively titled Books Are Useless.

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