FRAGILE BOOKS' original posters are onion skin posters with a thickness of 0.04 mm. It can be used in a variety of situations, such as hanging on the wall as it is or wrapping a gift.

The first series of onion skin posters features four black-and-white photographs printed by photographer Tokuko Ushioda (1940- ) from her "Views of The Books" series, which she has been photographing for over 20 years.

The idea of photographing books as objects suddenly occurred to her, and she has visited a variety of places, including public and university libraries, private study rooms, editorial offices of publishing companies, and the studio of her mentor, Ohtsuji Kiyoji. This is Tokuko Ushioda's life's work.

A set of four photographic posters will be presented.

1. Bungei Club

The leather covering the back of the book with gold lettering has deteriorated, and newspaper is used for the underlining, revealing an advertisement for the popular Meiji-era magazine "Bungei Club" (1895-1933), published by Hakubunkan. Ichiyō Higuchi, Koyo Zzaki, and others were regular contributors to "Bungei Club". After the restoration was completed, this newspaper advertisement returned to its function of underlining and was never seen again.

2. bandages

A friend of Tokuko Ushioda's became the director of the library, and the Waseda University Library gave him permission to photograph it. The first thing I saw when I entered the storage room of the university's Special Collections Room was a book on the shelf, dressed in what could be seen as a bandage or a potholder. When I printed out the photos I had taken over the course of several days and showed them to the librarian for debriefing, she had a subtle reaction: "It's embarrassing to be seen not getting around to restoring it".

3. ribs

Tokuko Ushioda's first encounter with medieval decorative manuscripts was when an acquaintance who worked for a small publishing company asked him to come see an amazing book that was used in a church in Spain at the end of the 15th century. I was told by an acquaintance who works for a small publishing company that "there is an amazing book that was used in a church in Spain at the end of the 15th century. Upon opening the thick, dark cream-colored cloth in which the book was wrapped, Tokuko Ushioda was overwhelmed by its presence at first glance. The painful sight made her husband Shimao Shinzo feel as if he were looking at the emaciated ribs of Jesus Christ pasted on the cross on the hill of Golgotha.

4. broccoli

Fall 2008. Tokuko Ushioda was watching a TV program showing how first graders begin to use dictionaries, and the content of the program caught her attention, so she began to write a letter. In the blue light of a cathode-ray tube, Keisuke Fukaya, a teacher at Ritsumeikan Primary School in Kyoto, was teaching first graders who were beginning to learn to read how to draw a dictionary. The children looked up "things" and "matters" around them at random and put sticky notes one after another on the words they looked up. One year later, the result was a dictionary full of sticky notes that looked like broccoli.

Message

I feel a strange emotion when I touch "books," which have had various destinies in different eras. It is strange to see a Bible sitting like a king on the altar of a church in some European countryoda