Customer Reviews

The Ultimate Netsuke Bibliography: An Annotated Guide to Miniature Japanese Carvings

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Norman Sandfield has saved everyone a lot of time and effort with this excellent annotated guide to the world of these miniature Japanese carvings. References abound on netsuke types, specific pieces, inro, ojime, sagemono, and toggles in addition to those on legends, subject matter, techniques, materials, and various artist's schools.

Not content to confine himself to the English literature, outstanding foreign references have been included. Any serious collector of netsuke, okimono, or sagemono must consider this book.

Norman Sandfield spent many years collecting information on netsuke from a variety of formats and languages, including books, articles in newspapers, magazines and newsletters, convention programs, auction catalogs, dealers brochures, and more. This collection was listed in this volume in 1999, and updated in 2001. It has to be emphasized that many of these materials are not online in any format, and no search engine, Google included, can find them all.

Mr. Sandfield has now donated over 3,000 of the over 4,400 items to the Norman L. Sandfield Library of Netsuke and Oriental Art at the Toledo Museum of Art Reference Library. Additional items will be contributed to the collection over time.

You can search the entire collection by going to the Reference Library section of the Toledo Museum of Art. Mr. Sandfield is donating his collection to Toledo for the following reasons:

"According to Mr. Sandfield, the Toledo Museum of Art is one of only two museums in the U.S. to show a serious, active, and continuing interest in netsuke. This is primarily due to the work of his long-time friend and collector, Richard S. Silverman, whose efforts have helped to strengthen the holdings of netsuke at the Toledo Museum of Art. The other museum is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which has a fine netsuke collection from Raymond Bushell and the important Cornelius Van S. Roosevelt Netsuke Library."

The Ultimate Netsuke Bibliography will continue to have great value to serious netsuke collectors for the foreseeable future, according to the Library:

"Sandfield's bibliography contains records for over 4400 items and includes not only the categories of titles mentioned above, but has citations for articles in netsuke journals, general periodicals, convention and seminar programs, and non-print format, and ephemera. Eleven appendices and four indices to the 24 chapters and 211 sub-chapters offer guidance to accessing the worldwide wealth of information available. Particularly interesting are Appendix A (Basic netsuke glossary), Appendix C (Building your own netsuke libraries), and Appendix I (Some statistics). The supplement brings in-print access to 2001. It is hoped that Mr. Sandfield's complete database will be available to interested users sometime in the future."

Eventually all these netsuke riches may be available online; in the meantime this volume remains an essential resource.

Robert C. Ross 2008

This book is extremely misleading by title. There is NOTHING in this book to help either identify Netsuke or the artists that carved them. If I wanted to know WHO had written books on Netsuke I would have used a search engine for free. I was under the impression that this was a book about identifying Netsukes NOT a list of everyone that ever wrote an article ABOUT Netsukes.

This is probably my own fault-my brain passed over the word Bibliography and stuck on the word "guide". I am unsure of who exactly would use or need this book.