Particle.news
Download on the App Store

Shin Sobue, Pioneering Japanese Book Designer, Dies at 66

His boundary-pushing page experiments reshaped how Japanese publishers think about the physical book.

Overview

  • The acclaimed book designer, who died at his Tokyo home on March 15, was 66 and was mourned in a family-only funeral.
  • He left Tama Art University, worked at the publisher Kosakusha, then founded his Cosfish design office in 1990.
  • In the 1990s he drew wide notice for a Yoshida Sensha manga that used missing and misbound pages on purpose as a design choice.
  • His credits ranged from many Momoko Sakura titles to a 100th-anniversary edition of Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro and the Yorimichi Pan!se youth series.
  • He won Kodansha’s 1997 Publishing Culture Award for book design and became a leading voice across manga, novels, photo books, and picture books.