Bibliography of Japanese Tobacco Ware (Bib)

The bibliography of Japanese tobacco ware is a survey of the core texts written in Western languages and in Japanese on the kiseru and the items surrounding it. Listed on Pipedia under the abbreviation "Bib," this is the final installment of a series John C. Loring wrote on Japanese tobacco ware; according to the copyright notice on the page, it was compiled in 2001-2002.

The field has no dedicated journal of its own, so its literature is not gathered in a single place — it is scattered across netsuke society bulletins, journals of Asian art, and museum publications.

Comprehensive Reference Works

The first stop for anyone doing a survey is Norman L. Sandfield's The Ultimate Netsuke Bibliography, published in Chicago in 1999. Though the title points to netsuke, this 384-page volume, holding more than four thousand four hundred entries, presents books, journal articles, and auction catalogues in separate indexes; the literature on pipe cases and tobacco pouches is included in this compilation as well. The compendium was updated in 2001 with an addendum and corrections booklet. The volumes turned to for reading signatures are George Lazarnick's single-volume dictionary of 1976 and his two-volume dictionary of 1982; while their focus is on netsuke signatures, the signatures of case and tonkotsu makers also appear in these volumes.