For those of you who have been holding your breath waiting to see if the latest auction pickings are junk or treasure, I can report positively ... (again!)

There were indeed two 'hon' barens in the lot:

They are - as we expected - very old, and very worn, but not so much to be totally unusable. They are very dry, and will need a good refurbishment (and sterilization - as there is quite a lot of mold present), but once we have time for that, they'll take their place in the tool box.

The brushes are also very worn, and most of them are only useful to us as examples:

We've never seen any quite this small before, and already a couple of the ladies are pushing me to try and get some new ones of this type. A lot of the work we do here is pretty delicate, and brushes like this might indeed be useful.

And one of them is actually useable as it (although it too will need sterilization first):

Once everything was unwrapped and inspected, I phoned Goto-san the baren maker to bring him up-to-date. He has a pretty extensive knowledge of barens and collects data where he can on older ones, and their makers. Interestingly, the maker of this one - Kusayanagi Yoshibei - was completely unknown to him. It is also marked 'Uchida', the name of a one-time major publishing house down in Kyoto, so we suspect that this would have been a baren that they ordered for their in-house printers.

And it does seem to be a bit of a 'Kyoto-style' tool - it's very wide (14cm) and very light and flexible, just the type they typically use.

Fun and games!

Posted by Dave Bull at 8:09 AM | Comments (4)

Do you remember the excitement around here back in March, when we spotted an auction for a box of old tools?

Well it's time for Round Two! We've turned up another 'interesting' one. Here's the main photo from the auction listing:

And here are two closeups the seller provided:

 

These are old tools, and I mean old. The brushes are visibly worn to the point of being ready to throw away. It looks like a woodblock printer was asked to provide a panel showing his common tools, and put this together.

But there are two barens here, presumably 'hon' barens. And one thing about a real baren - it never dies. It will get progressively weaker as it gets older, but that simply means you use it for a different job. A strong baren originally intended for use in printing deep backgrounds will end up being used for more delicate work.

So - of course - I want these!

The auction was set for a five day term, and priced to start at 1,000 yen ($10). If you read the post I made about that previous auction you will know that I had quite a battle on my hands, and ended up paying a very high price for the treasure. Well, this auction ended last night, and I can happily report that I had no competition, and the hammer thus fell at 1,000 yen.

Does that mean everybody else is too sensible to buy this 'junk', or simply that nobody else noticed it?

We'll see when the goods arrive in a few days!

Posted by Dave Bull at 8:34 AM | Comments (1)