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The ancient Greek word “histor” meant “learned man.” While I’m not learned, I do enjoy learning about history.

Local historians also consult libraries for information, and one of them passed along a library-related article from the Juneau Empire of Nov. 10, 1915, describing a Japanese cannery worker known only as O. Itow, who was sentenced to death for murdering a co-worker. Itow’s last appeal had been denied, and at death’s door he decided to donate $5 — most of his $7.35 estate — to the Juneau library in honor of “the Mikado’s formal accession to the throne of Japan.”  Too often, libraries are seen only as repositories, old storerooms of dusty information, but American public libraries work in the opposite direction, constantly weeding outdated information and adding new. Sometimes whole new formats are added — MP3 books and video game cartridges — but most of the time, variations are made on existing themes, such as adding new types of print books, like manga.   Manga are Japanese comic books that are enormously popular with American kids. $3.7 billion worth of manga are read in Japan by all ages and social groups annually, and their subjects reflect Japanese tastes and culture.

“Manga” means “whimsical pictures,” and originally they were prints showing famous people like kabuki stars and samurai. That changed when a one-man artistic revolution named Hokusai was born.

The Encyclopedia of World Art calls Katsushika Hokusai the Japanese artist best known in the West, due to his renowned painting of a giant, frothy-tendriled wave crashing onto two small fishing boats as Mt. Fuji stands in the background. His art was strongly influenced by Dutch paintings he encountered through European traders, and while his was a radically new look for the Japanese, his work has proven more appealing to Westerners.

Hokusai changed his name more than 50 times, changed homes 93 times and left 30,000 other artworks behind in his 89 years, from grains of illustrated rice to a monster painting covering over 3,000 square feet. He also invented a new form of manga that depicted common people engaged in everyday tasks — often humorously.

Born in 1760 to poor parents, Hokusai went through several apprenticeships, including a three-year stint as a “librarian” in a book-lender’s shop, which was as close as the Japanese came to libraries at the time. He studied under a number of art masters, but was kicked out by most. One biographer called Hokusai “a thoroughly Bohemian artist: cocky, quarrelsome, restless, aggressive and sensational.”

A few years after Hokusai’s death, an influx of Westerners brought even more radical art into Japan, and he wasn’t influential there. European visitors took his prints back home, however, and Hokusai’s work had a profound impact on Western art for generations to come.

America produced an artist in the same vein: George Herriman, creator of the comic strip “Krazy Kat,” perhaps the most influential of all American comic artists. His engagingly quirky strip, in the words of poet e.e.cummings, “is a meteoric burlesk melodrama, born of the immortal adage ‘love will find a way.’”

Herriman describes the title character as a “humbly poetic, gently clownlike, supremely innocent and illimitably affectionate creature” who is happiest when beaned by brick thrown by Ignatz, the ill-natured mouse she adores, who’s often thwarted from brick-tossing by policeman Offissa Pup, who carries an unrequited torch for Krazy.  Over its 30-year run, Herriman’s strip employed infinite varieties on this unvarying theme using an array of artistic techniques that profoundly affected the best comic strips that followed.

Charles Schulz of “Peanuts” fame said, “After World War II, when I came home, Krazy Kat became my hero … it became my ambition to draw a strip that would have as much life and meaning and subtlety to it as Krazy Kat had.”

Bill Watterson, creator of “Calvin and Hobbes,” said “The constraint of Krazy Kat’s narrow plot seems to have set free every other aspect of the cartoon to become poetry, and the strip is to my mind, cartooning as its most pure.”

Our library has a number of Krazy Kat collections, and your librarians would love to share them, especially since some of us identify with Ignatz, who, as Herriman once noted, “laden with knowledge, pours upon the altar of curiosity a liberal libation of information.”