Posted by Noel Chiappa (98.166.150.196) on November 13, 2010 at 15:12:59:
Hi, I'd appreciate some advice from the community on an issue regarding the identification of Yoshitoshi prints.
For our catalog site (yoshitoshi.net), we are identifying most prints using Keyes' numbers, as Schaap and van den Ing did in their book. For some series, there are prints he was missing, but we just number new prints 'in sequence', as they did (for example, with 289.19 through 289.21 - we have added 289.22 and 289.23). However, we have discovered a number of series which do not seem to be in Keyes at all, and I'm wondering how to number them for identification purposes.
The thing is that Keyes assigned his numbers in time order, so that 200 is from 1867, and 300 from 1874, etc. So if we simply numbered 'new' series as 600, 601, etc they would be easily identified as series added since Keyes (his numbers stop at about 540), but we would be losing the time ordering. On the other hand, numbers like 370A (that is, a series between 370 and 371) are unsightly, and to me seem potentially confusing.
Another possibility is to number new prints/series from the 1860s with 6xx numbers, new prints/series from the 1870s with 7xx numbers, etc, etc.
However, none of these strikes me as 'clearly the best choice', so I would be grateful for help and advice on this point from everyone else.
Noel