November 24, 1900 · S.S. Kinshin Maru · Nippon Yusen Kaisha · Dinner
November 24, 1900 places this menu on a winter trans-Pacific crossing. First-class dining aboard NYK during this period was rigorously western in food but Japanese in service — first-class stewards wore traditional dress, served tea ceremonially, and decorated dining rooms in Japanese style.
The cover painting shows a geisha in traditional kimono with detailed hair ornament, set before a rising-sun flag fragment. The menu slip is affixed in the centre and the colour lithography preserves the flat tonal areas of the original wood-block tradition. This is among the most striking visual styles in the entire NYPL menu collection — found nowhere else on the global ocean-liner market of the period.
The Kinshin Maru was one of NYK’s late-1890s steamships running the trans-Pacific service. The “-maru” suffix is a traditional Japanese ship-name convention, used for nearly all Japanese civilian vessels since the medieval period.
Visual style: Ukiyo-e style geisha figure with hand-affixed menu slip and rising-sun flag.
What you receive
- Three print sizes: 8×10, 11×14, 16×20 inches (300 DPI, ready for any home printer or framing shop).
- Two versions of each size: a pure print (no added text) and a museum print (with a small caption: restaurant or ship, year, and source).
- A 1–2 page PDF with the menu’s historical context.
- One ZIP file, instantly downloadable after checkout.
About the source
This menu is preserved in the Buttolph Collection of Menus at The New York Public Library and is in the public domain in the United States. The Menu Press has curated, digitally restored, and reformatted the work for modern printing.
