The Book of Tea Classic Edition. Okakura Kakuzo

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      FOREWORD

      by Elise Grilli

      NOT ALWAYS does the fame of an author keep step with the fame of his books. Sometimes the man advances and his work recedes, as, for example, in the case of Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose personality continues to intrigue us today, just as much as it did his contemporaries; we can still see him vividly through the eyes of Boswell and other diarists and recorders, while much of his own writing has taken on an obsolescent tinge.

      The opposite fate seems to have befallen Okakura Kakuzo and The Book of Tea. The book is just fifty years old, and in this half century its fame has grown steadily and continuously. Starting out as an esoteric morsel for a select few in the small aesthetic world of Boston at the turn of the century, it has been moving in ever-widening circles, propelled as by a natural movement across the waters that lap the shores of Asia and of Europe, always radiating from the modest little edition that first appeared in America in 1906. From this original publication in English, the book has been translated into innumerable languages including, as an ironical apogee of fame, its author's native tongue, Japanese. Its sales through the years and in many languages and editions reach certainly into the hundreds of thousands, and nothing bears more eloquent witness СКАЧАТЬ