Elizabeth Huff came to Berkeley as founding curator and head of the East
Asian Library in 1947, the year I was born. Then a recent Harvard Ph.D. in
Chinese literature, she had spent most of the previous seven years in
China, including thirty months of internment by the Japanese army in
Shantung. Once in Berkeley, Miss Huff (as everyone remembers her) undertook a visionary plan of development that would double and then redouble the library’s East Asian holdings by 1950. Her boldest decision, approved that year during extraordinary summertime consultations between
President Robert Gordon Sproul and the Regents of the University of California, was to purchase 100,000 items offered by the Mitsui Bunko in
Tokyo. Among those items were 736 sheet maps and almost 5,000 book titles (in over 16,000 volumes) that were printed in Japan during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868). This collection of early Japanese printed material is the largest outside Japan.1 It forms the foundation of this book, just
one of the many legacies of a woman I never met but routinely visit in
spirit.