Whales and Whale Oil (Jokō roku)
Whales and Whale Oil is a Japanese woodblock-printed book of 1826 by Hasegawa Settan, a writer of the late Edo period, describing whaling and oil production for a general reading audience. Its pictures are black line drawings of rice fields, farm work and tools, with small columns of Japanese text beside each scene; a designer might take their clean hatched outlines and dense, cropped landscape compositions as a model for rural documentary illustration.
