Beginning in the fall of 1875, Yale Library accessioned more than 3,000 woodblock-printed Japanese volumes across a wide range of fields and genres—the first collection of its kind in the United States.
This talk details the involvement of several Yale faculty members, including Addison Van Name, O. C. Marsh, and J. Willard Gibbs, in initiating and funding this undertaking. It also explores the key role played by a group of Japanese students who lived in New Haven in the early 1870s in assembling the collection, shipping it halfway around the world, and cataloging its contents.