Table of Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments 1. A Traveling Clerk Goes to the Bookstores 2. The Library of Public Information 3. Maps Are Strange 4. Blood Right and Merit 5. The Freedom of the City 6. Cultural Custody, Cultural Literacy 7. Nation Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author

Mary Elizabeth Berry is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto (California, 1994) and Hideyoshi (1982).

Reviews

"Anyone interested in the history of media and communications should read Beth Berry's extraordinary book. Learned, lucid, and lively, it has much to teach students of premodern societies in Europe and elsewhere." - Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University "While historians have known that early modern Japan produced maps, for example, no one has heretofore compared them to their medieval predecessors or examined them for what they say about an emerging Japanese cartographic imagination. This is a highly original work, and it will change the field." - Anne Walthall, author of The Weak Body of a Useless Woman: Matsuo Taseko and the Meiji Restoration"