The Tribute Elephants (Zō no mitsugi 象のみつぎ)
A Japanese woodblock-printed book from Osaka in 1729 by Nakamura Heigo, published by Yasui Kahei and devoted to elephants. Its pictures show elephants carrying ornate canopied howdahs, a gated palace compound with a small attendant, and a rocky mountain landscape with figures, all paired with dense columns of kana text on facing pages. A designer might take the cross-hatched linework, the red and black accent colour on the cloth and roofs, and the dense vertical text blocks as a model for layout.
