Chinese Materials in the Cotsen Collection
This is a digital showcase of Chinese materials held at the Cotsen Children’s Library. As of 2014, Cotsen has collected fourteen thousand titles of Chinese-language materials that reflect the history of childhood, children's entertainment, and education in China. The majority of the Chinese titles were published from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century. Primers, textbooks, children's books, magazines, newspapers, comic books (lianhuanhua), arts and crafts handbooks, political posters, wall charts and slides for the school classroom, educational journals, cigarette cards, and calendars are all part of the library's Chinese collection.
East Asian Library Digital Bookshelf
A miscellany of items digitized at the Princeton University Library from the East Asian Library holdings but belonging to no well-defined collection. The items include books, manuscripts, reports, maps, and albums from many eras.
Japanese and Chinese Prints and Drawings donated by Gillett G. Griffin
This group of Japanese and Chinese prints and drawings was donated by Gillett G. Griffin, curator emeritus of graphic arts, in honor of Dale Roylance. It represents a small portion of the Far Eastern works on paper held by the graphic arts division. Also included are several sketchbooks, which were collected together with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drawings.
Japanese Prints and Drawings in the Costen Collection
A digital showcase of Japanese prints and drawings held at the Cotsen Children’s Library. Spanning from the Edo Period (1600-1868) to the first half of the twentieth century, this collection contains hand-painted scrolls, game boards (sugoroku), woodblock prints, pictorial maps, classroom wall charts, and playing cards (iroha karuta). The game boards were selected from a total of around 300 sheets of sugoroku held at Cotsen, a rare collection comparable to the few existing in Japan. A dice-based game, sugoroku has entertained the Japanese for centuries. A wide range of topics and themes can be found in the heavily illustrated game boards, which served not only for recreation but also for the dissemination of information, commercial advertising, literacy education, moral and political socialization, and militarist propaganda targeting children and adults alike.
From the 17th through 19th century the ehon or “picture book” was one of Japan’s most important art forms. It was in these heavily illustrated volumes that some of the most famous woodblock print artists of the day began their careers, experimenting with the compositions, color, and printing techniques that we find in their later Ukiyo-e masterpieces.
Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (Tōkaidō gojūsantsugi)
Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō brings together works from various Princeton University Library collections that have, as their theme, the rest stops along Japan’s legendary Tōkaidō Road.
