PBA Galleries

39pp. Illustrations by the author, double-page end papers in color (“Gay Procession in the Streets”), 15 black-and-white text drawings (several full-page), and 2 full-page color drawings. 5x7" original color-illustrated wrappers (detached from spine and somewhat chipped). First and Only edition. 

A prolific illustrator, Lum published only two hardcover books of her own, but also wrote and illustrated two soft-cover travel booklets for Canadian Pacific Railways – the Japan piece offered here and another about Peiping (Beijing) China. Very rare; WorldCat locates only one copy in the US, and no copy was seen by Lum’s 1990 biographers.

Lum, a white woman artist from Idaho who frequently traveled to the Far East, helped to popularize Japanese and Chinese woodblock printing in the United States about the same time that architect Frank Lloyd Wright began to collect and deal in ukiyo-e prints. Lum's own woodblock prints, produced between 1900 and 1936, now bring up to $2,000 each at auction in the U.S.