The Library as Influence

One of the most popular things we've ever published--The Come Along Weekly Planner by Lart C. Berliner--was inspired by a scroll we saw in the Ehon exhibit at the New York Public Library. In 1767, a monk named Daiten and his artist friend Jakuchu took a one-day boat journey, sketching impressions and writing poetry as they traveled down the Yodo River on the way to Osaka. Wishing to share what they'd done with their friends, they combined Jakuchu's 15 sketches and Daiten's 22 poems into a continuous printed scroll, which at that time was a new print format.

a section of the scroll from the Ehon exhibit at NYPL (image from nypl.com)
translation: "Mountains colored high and low, pale mist far off; people’s dwellings here and there, kitchen smoke nearby"

For the Come Along, since our design for the planner was short and wide and had lots of long space to put art, we liked that idea of having a long continuous drawing that went from page to page creating a landscape and world over a series of pages as you go through your year. So over a month or so, Lart created a 64-foot long colored pencil drawing on paper posted along the walls of her apartment in Berlin.

an example spread from the Come Along planner

Later on she made an amazing map showing the whole drawing on one page, but the original files were lost. Luckily we still had a low-res version and were able to make a postcard out of it.

the Come Along Postcard by Lart