Binding firm. Pages and plates are lightly tanned throughout. Light sunning to spine and edges.
Japanese label in the back ,see picture below.

-Reginald Horace Blyth (3 December 1898 – 28 October 1964) was an English writer and devotee of Japanese culture. He is most famous for his writings on Zen and on haiku poetry.
When Britain declared war on Japan in December 1941 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Blyth was interned as a British enemy alien. Although he expressed his sympathy for Japan and sought Japanese nationality, this was denied. During his internment, his extensive library was destroyed in an air raid. In the internment camp in Kobe he finished his first book Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics and wrote parts of his books about haiku and senryu.
Blyth's early publication Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, published 1942 when he was interned in Japan during World War II, and his Zen and Zen Classics series exerted a significant influence on the Western writers and Zen community, although nearly all of his books were published solely in Japan.
Many contemporary Western writers of haiku were introduced to the genre through his Zen-based haiku explanations. These include the San Francisco and Beat Generation writers, Gary Snyder,[13] Philip Whalen,[14] Jack Kerouac[15] and Allen Ginsberg,[16] as well as J. D. Salinger ("...particularly haiku, but senryu, too...can be read with special satisfaction when R. H. Blyth was on them. Blyth is sometimes perilous, naturally, since he's a highhanded old poem himself, but he's also sublime"),[17] Octavio Paz,[18] and E. E. Cummings.[19] Many members of the international "haiku community" also got their first views of haiku from Blyth's books, including American author James W. Hackett (born 1929), Eric Amann, William J. Higginson, Anita Virgil, Jane Reichhold, and Lee Gurga. The French philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes read 1967 Blyth's four-volume set, using it for lectures and seminars on haiku 1979. - Wikipedia