Japanese Postcard Books Week

While chatting with Lisa from the wonderful store Kid O (a children’s store with the nicest designed toys from around the world) I learned about a Japanese bookstore- Kinokuniya Bookstores- I never knew about. (And apparently they have stores in a lot of major cities so check for yours.) You can’t imagine how excited I was to have found this. It’s a big store in Rockefeller Center with a little section for design books. Displayed on the short table in front of the bookshelf was piles of postcard books. I bought a whole bunch of amazing ones which I’ll post about all week. Postcard books are so nice because they are like art books without so much text- which in this case would be in Japanese anyway. And a few of them had hardcovers or little short illustrated stories in the front before the postcards, like this one. This is that same artist, Junzo Terada who did The Book of Imaginary Books that I love so much. And I learned he designs fabric and designed a poketo wallet! I am so glad to find more of his work although I have a feeling his work will be everywhere in the US very soon. I purchased two postcard books of his but this one is bigger and nicer. The short story illustrations are all of a pair of animals sitting on a bench. The rest of the illustrations also have odd couples or groups of animals doing different activities together. There’s so much nice texture in these images. I think that has a lot to do with why it stands out among other more flat children’s character illustrations.

© Julia Rothman 2007