Banpō zensho : Volume 4
Banpō zensho, volume 4, is a Japanese woodblock-printed reference book issued in 1770 by publishers in Edo and Osaka, covering antiquities of Japan and China for a general reading audience. Its pages mix dense columns of black printed text with rows of carved seal stamps and seal-script characters, reproduced as bold black blocks on white paper. A designer might draw on the strong contrast between square red-or-black seal forms and the fine vertical brushlike script, using the tight grid and dense typographic texture as a model for layout.
