For seven centuries, Japan was ruled by samurai, the warrior class. Over the course of this unique national history, the samurai have exerted a powerful and enduring grip on the Japanese imagination. Their exploits, first recounted by wandering minstrels and later recorded in literature, drama, and art, are often seen as morality tales or models for behavior. There is also an insatiable desire to understand warriors as distinct individuals through biographical details that illuminate their grand, romantic lives and explain their victories or defeats. Today, the Japanese public’s enthusiasm for samurai stories is met with countless novels, TV dramas, films, and computer games, many of which have found audiences in the West. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the medium of popular culture was the woodblock print. Colorful, dramatic, and affordable, prints played a key role in shaping not only Japanese but also Western perceptions of the samurai as complex and even conflicted characters. The 26 prints in this exhibition were selected to introduce some of the most famous warriors of the twelfth through sixteenth centuries, as well as varied moods and perspectives. In these prints we find portraits of heroes and cowards, men who conquered as well as men who lost, and men who are remembered as musicians and poets as well as fighters.

Exhibition dates: September 14, 2013-January 12, 2014

This article argues that in Tristram Shandy Sterne expresses his desire to be the sole owner of his literary work through images of the hand and handwriting. It explores his experimentation with the typographic manicule and his innovation in representing script in print. I suggest that Sterne represents the hand and handwriting as ambiguous markers of authenticity in order to illustrate and lament the complexities of assigning literary property in this period.

This is the first thorough examination of Enrique Chagoya's codices, an ongoing body of work begun in 1992. Conceived as pseudo-historical documents, Chagoya's codices are the most intricate and sustained articulation of his core concept of "Reverse Anthropology," in which he "cannibalizes" the art and culture of Western civilization and reinterprets it in a pre-Columbian format to explore contemporary themes. The artist's ideas have been informed by the Antropofágia movement
in Brazil and his study of pre-Columbian manuscripts and post-Conquest codices. The article traces his development of the codex format in the nineties, beginning with his first unique codex in 1992 and other formative projects, followed by a sustained discussion of the editioned works of 1999-2011.

The first edition of the 'Secreti' by Alessio Piemontese has the oldest printed recipe for intaglio printing ink, on pp. 188-189. The recipe is repeated in a number of its 266 editions, translations, reworked versions and photomechanical reprints.