As many regular readers already know, I love books, especially kendo books. The older the better. Last October I had a free afternoon and introduced a portion of my book collection on this site. A couple of weeks after seeing the article a sempai of mine got in touch:
“I found a bunch of old kendo books in a closet. Do you want them?”
“Um, yes please!”
“Ok, there’s a little bit too many to carry to the dojo, so I’ll send them to you.”
Four days later two heavy boxes arrived on my doorstep. I had been expecting maybe 10 or so books, so I was delighted when I opened the boxes to find them crammed-packed full of books… over 80 books In total!! Not all of the books were amazing of-course, and a couple I already had, but there were some real gems in the batch. After the initial buzz of mining through the boxes subsided I realised that my already backlogged kendo reading schedule was in for a kicking.
In an effort to somehow get through them I’ve decided to tackle the books as articles for kenshi 24/7: all through the month of March I am planning to release at least one short-ish article per week, each article featuring content from one or maybe two books. I might even arrange them thematically, for example, by comparing the descriptions or illustrations of kata, or showing how the same waza is explained by two different authors, etc. If you have a preference, please let me know.
To see all the posts in the March Book Project please click here.
Just as a wee teaser, here are a handful of images I pulled from some random books.
5 replies on “March book project”
The drawings with the shinai and the nihonto have made me very curious. What luck to receive and delve into such a treasure chest.
There are loads of interesting illustrations in the books!! I’ll probably concentrate only on normal kendo “teaching” books rather than the more complex ones, which I’ll keep for more in-depth use later.
I cannot articulate how jealous I am. Very much looking forward to this.
The iaido picture must be from Yamatsuta-sensei’s book on Muso Shinden-ryu. Quite a popular book and has some really nice general material. It’s been translated into English and published as a bilingual book some time ago.
That the one I think. I haven’t been able to leaf through it yet but I have it in front of me now.