Extraordinary early 20th century magazine covers from Japan

A number of great Japanese magazine cover designs from the early 1900s posted by Will Schofield, a rare books collector, in his wonderful blog A Journey Round My Skull.

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These covers come from Bookcover Design in Japan 1910s-40s (ISBN 4-89444-426-7) edited by Masayo Matsubara. Published in 2005 by PIE Books, this incredible book is already out-of-print and becoming hard to find (it was actually hard for me to find and I spend hours per day searching for rare books). This book is in Japanese only, but of course you need it for the 650 illustrations.

Many of the images in the book are small, so it was fun blowing them up through hi-res scanning. Click for much larger versions.

I tried to alternate the charming children’s covers with the creepy modernist covers, but I soon lost the ability to tell one type from the other.

More magazine covers from Will’s flickr gallery: Japanese book and magazine covers.

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