What is Hobonichi?

Hobonichi, short for Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun, the Almost Daily Itoi Newspaper, began in 1998 as Shigesato Itoi's website: essays, interviews and small observations, published almost daily, as the name promises and carefully does not guarantee.

Its defining product arrived on October 5, 2001: the Hobonichi Techo, a day-per-page planner built for writing in, first edition 12,000 copies with a single cover choice. The Techo grew into a Japanese stationery institution with an enormous range of covers and a devoted annual buying ritual each autumn, making Hobonichi a substantial company built on paper in the digital era.

For this Library, Hobonichi matters most for what it does with Itoi's other career. In 2020 it launched the Hobonichi MOTHER Project, an ongoing program of books, exhibitions and goods for the Mother series: the Complete Scripts, the Pollyanna comics, the clay figure exhibitions, and a permanent online MOTHER shop.

The arrangement is unique in games. A series whose publisher moved on is curated instead by its author's own lifestyle company, at the pace and in the taste of a stationer: paper first, everything shelveable.