Touch Me! Books with Engineered Design from Early Modern Japan

In the nineteenth century the world of the Japanese commercial book was enriched by books with engineered design: flaps, tags, foldouts, and much more. Inhabiting a rich media ecology that celebrated movement, these movable components acted as an invitation for the reader to become an agent of visual and narrative change. By exploring two examples--a graphic narrative and a sexually explicit mock-book--this talk interrogates the material qualities of this rich textual tradition to explore the meanings unleashed by the interactive nature of this type of book.