A few months ago, a curator at the Honolulu Museum of Art stumbled upon a rare 19th century manual on Japanese art that he didn’t even know existed in the museum archives. Stephen Salel had been searching for materials for an exhibition devoted to  female Japanese manga artists. Recognized today as a sub genre of graphic novels, manga as an art form dates to the nineteenth century, and Salel was looking specifically for work created by Katsushika Oi (1800-1866), considered by many experts to be the first female manga artist. If the name sounds familiar, that’s probably because she was the daughter of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), whose 1823 woodblock print The Great Wave Off Kanagawa has been reproduced countless times around the world. More at the Fine Books Blog.