Most obscure book you own?

What’s the most obscure book you own? I could cheat and say my entire Ainu collection because pretty much ain’t nobody looking for *any* of these books.

But I’ll settle on one from the collection: Petticoat Vagabond in Ainu Land and Up And Down Eastern Asia by Neill James.

I literally stumbled on it through an eBay listing and was like “I’ve *never* seen this book anywhere before mentioned in relation to the Ainu…” So I nabbed off eBay and it’s an original printing from 1942. I’m not sure if this book even *got* more than one printing or not. It’s basically a woman’s memoir of traveling through Japan and other areas. I only read the part where it focused on the Ainu since, well, that’s *why* I got the book in the first place. I’m not usually one much for memoirs.

Then I looked it up on the Internet Archive and they have *two* different PDF versions.

…Although it’s *technically not* this book if you count the fact I managed to stumble on an annotated museum catalogue of Ainu-related pieces in their collection. And it’s from Scandinavia. And was printed in the 70s. But it’s not really a *book* in the sense of something you’d actually sit down and *read*. (Seriously, the depths of AbeBooks gets ***WEIRD*** the deeper you go. But when you’re on the hunt for *every* piece of information you can find on an obscure topic, you’ll pick up what you can.)

I also own *two* copies of an article from 1968 by Hitoshi Watanabe on how the Ainu traditionally subsisted on the land they inhabited. One’s written basically on tissue paper by a typewriter and the other is in a little booklet. But these aren’t *books*, they’re copies of an article from a conference about hunter-gatherer people and their habits.

by Kiki-Y