Zuan-chō – Japanese design albums in the late Meiji Period The Japanese Collection of the British Library includes around 50 Japanese pattern and design books. Thanks to a grant from the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the Library is digitising many of these and making them available online. This series of blog posts features some of the items in the collection, the artists who created them and the publishers who produced them. The first blog looked at the origins and development of Japanese textile pattern books, hinagata-bon, in the 17 th and 18 th centuries. These were mainly practical in nature, serving as manuals for kimono makers or catalogues for merchants and their customers. In this blog we will focus on the end of 19 th and beginning of the 20 th centuries when enterprising publishers and inventive artists collaborated to produce superb design books, or zuan-chō 案帳, intended to be appreciated and enjoyed for their own sake, as much as for any practical application. Fig. 1. ‘Dew on the plains of Musashi’ by Mizuta Shizuhiro from Sono no kaori ‘Scents of the Garden’. Unkindō, Kyoto, 1903. British Library, ORB.30/6166 The Meiji Period (1868-1912) saw Japan emerge from centuries of self-imposed isolation and take its place on the international stage. Exposure to Western ideas and technology had brought profound changes to many aspects of Japanese society and culture and this,in turn, led to a fascination with ‘the new’ and a re-evaluation of ‘the old’ as traditions were adapted, preserved or discarded. In late 19 th century Kyoto, traditional centre of Japan’s textile industry, technological developments in dyeing and weaving led to large-scale production of goods, and a growing demand for new textile designs (zuan). The modernisation of education led to the establishment of arts schools such as the Kyoto Prefectural School of Painting 京都府画学校 (forerunner of today’s Kyoto City University of the Arts 京都市立芸術大学), founded in 1880, where design was taught as a formal subject for the first time. By the 1890s professional zuanka or designers appeared, creating large number of designs