City-Royal: A Memory of Kyoto. Illustrated by Japanese Prints of the Period by Gaines, Ruth

Privately Printed, New York, 1953. 'Copyright 1953, by Georgia Willis Read.'. Soft Cover. 'Printed in the United States by Columbia University Press.' 144 p., index, 12 plates (11 folding; 11 color); bound in brown patterned paper, brown linen spine, paper spine label; a little edge-wear, faint foxing on endpapers, else fine. 'Two hundred copies only of this book have been printed of which this is number 51. Monotype Bembo was used for the setting of the type. The book was printed on Arches No. 293. The illustrations were printed by collotype. Typography and production were supervised by Melvin Loos.' Ruth Gaines' father, the Rev. Marshall R. Gaines, was appointed missionary to Japan in 1884, when 'Japan was learning, desperately learning, the present as interpreted by the West. Her existence depended on this education, and from all the great nations she called her teachers, German, French, British and American. Of this company were our parents, teachers in the Doshisha, that dream of a Christian University which it was the lifework of Joseph Hardy Neesima to realize.' Georgia Willis Read, in her Preface, says, 'This, her last book, her distilled memory of Japan, will appear in 1953, the centenary of Commodore Perry's visit to Yedo Bay, which opened Japan to the world-- an event appreciably close to the days etched, with color, in her pages. Among her papers I find this statement: '[City-Royal] was smelted out in sweat and blood and tears. It took final form under the impact of my elder brother's death. ...I wrote it night and day. It is my ihai'.' Stock# 31,231. Americans in Japan; biography.