Not only such illustrious personages as the above-mentioned Emperors, Shogun, and eminent warriors, but men of mediocre means or of unpretentious rank, such as _samurai_, priests, literati and merchants, also vied with one another in publishing new and old books of Japan as well as of China, by the method of woodblocks or of movable types. Among wealthy merchants the most renowned at that time as the Mecaenas of arts and learning was Yoichi Suminokura. He was born of a rich family living in a suburb of Kyoto, and was himself an enterprising merchant. Moreover, his accomplishments in the Chinese classics and in Japanese versification were far ahead of the average literati of the time, and his skill in calligraphy has been said to be almost incomparable. Out of the immense fortune which he had amassed by trading with continental countries as far as Tonkin and Cochin-China, he spent great sums freely in publishing books, the greater part of which were works famous in Japanese literature. It is said that more than twenty sorts of books were issued by him alone, counting in all several hundred volumes. What most attracts our attention in his undertakings, however, is the fact that all of these books were printed, not in the movable type then in vogue, but in the wood-block style of old. The new method of printing with type, though introduced several years back and assiduously encouraged by many influential persons, had not been able to demonstrate its advantages to the full. In each edition, whoever might have been the publisher, the number of copies issued had generally not exceeded two hundred, and that the number was so small shows at the same time the narrowness of the reading circle of that age. It proves also that Japan was not yet in any urgent need of seeing books suddenly multiplied by the busy use of movable types. Moreover, many inconveniences, not known in the typography of the West, manifested themselves in the adoption of the new method in a country like the Japan of that time, where Chinese ideographs had been used almost exclusively as the necessary vehicle for expressing thought. We had to provide a great variety of fonts of types, each type-face representing a special ideograph, so that a far larger and more varied assortment of fonts was required than in the case where an alphabet is in use, not to mention that the total number of types had to be enormously augmented out of the necessity of having numerous multiples of the same type. To print sundry accessories alongside Chinese texts, in order to make them easily legible for Japanese students, was another difficulty which was found almost insuperable in the adoption of movable types. The desire of some editors to insert illustrations could not also be fulfilled easily, if the text was to be printed in type, for setting the blocks together with type was considered a very irksome business at a time when printing in type was still in its infancy.