Chats on Novelties of Foreign Lands (Kōmōzatsuwa 紅毛雑話)
Chats on Novelties of Foreign Lands is a Japanese illustrated miscellany published in Osaka in 1796 by Shiba Kōkan, a painter and early Western-style printmaker writing for a general Edo-period readership curious about Dutch learning. The pictures are fine ink line drawings of a rock formation, a fencing or wrestling pose sequence, a striding figure in a robe, and a scientific apparatus with cylinders, plus dense columns of Japanese text. For a designer, they offer a spare, hand-drawn woodblock vocabulary of contour lines, cross-hatching, and sparse ground lines that suits simple editorial or botanical-style graphics.
