Relying on a technology that had changed little since Japanese craftsmen made woodblock prints in the eighth century, the artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced works of art for both mass production and discriminating collectors. For some time, the trade was dependent on wealthy North American collectors - Frank Lloyd Wright was one of countless visitors to Japan who returned home with trunks stuffed with prints. From the Meiji era (1868-1912) to the Pacific War, generations of artists inspired by the monumental achievements of Hiroshige, Hokusai, Utamaro, Harunobu, and Masanobu found that newspapers and other mass-produced publications needed their skills - encouraging them to address subjects unknown to the great masters of the past. A conservative instinct, which delighted in scenes of birds and flowers and famous sights, confronted the drive to record the vicissitudes of the modern world, and more than one printmaker set a locomotive in the foreground of...