Onchi Kōshirō Book Design

恩地孝四郎の装幀 / 1910s–1950s / Style / Publishing and Editing

Book design that treats the cover as a print in its own right rather than as a frame for a picture. Representational illustration gives way to abstract shapes and flat colour, and the title lettering sits inside that surface as one of its parts.

Covers built only from abstract shapes and flat colour, with no representational illustration / Title lettering drawn by hand rather than set in type, sitting on the same surface as the image / Few colours, with form made by overlapping planes instead of outlines / The bare colour of the paper left showing, with the image laid straight onto it

Onchi Kōshirō Book Design — Woodblock print by Kōshirō Onchi 1929 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain — Woodblock print by Kōshirō Onchi 1929 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain ／ Kōshirō Onchi, Kyūsoku (Repose) 1928 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain ／ Kobayashi Takiji, Kani kōsen (The Crab Cannery Ship), Senkisha edition cover, 1929 — Wikimedia Commons / CC0

Onchi Kōshirō Book Design — Kōshirō Onchi, Kyūsoku (Repose) 1928 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain — Woodblock print by Kōshirō Onchi 1929 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain ／ Kōshirō Onchi, Kyūsoku (Repose) 1928 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain ／ Kobayashi Takiji, Kani kōsen (The Crab Cannery Ship), Senkisha edition cover, 1929 — Wikimedia Commons / CC0

Dictionary entry

Best used for: Covers for poetry and collected works made as a print rather than as a holder for a picture · Few color printing where even the title lettering belongs to the image surface
Type: Title lettering drawn by hand instead of set in type, on the same surface and at the same weight as the image
Composition: The cover composed as one surface rather than as a picture with lettering added to it
Material: Few colors and no outlines, form made by overlapping planes, the bare paper left showing and counted as one of the colors
Caution: Setting a representational picture into a frame turns the cover back into a place to put a picture, and the surface stops being a print.
Further study: Onchi Kōshirō's Shosō / Takehisa Yumeji's bindings / contemporary designers like Kikuchi Nobuyoshi

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