Soizaijiten Catalog

Lately I have been fascinated by the Datacraft Sozaijiten (素材辞典) series, a Japanese "material dictionary" CD-ROM directory of stock photos that have been used in countless works over the decades, notably numerous Japanese videogames and backgrounds of artwork found in the Pokémon Trading Card Game). Many of the pictures are quite beautiful on their own, in my opinion. Check out the "Pokémon Aaah!" site or the "RENDER96 wiki" to see some of the incredible community work that has matched texture sources to their use in games and card art. Community member Gareth48 has also gone to great lengths to archive Sozaijiten preview images and thumbnails, creating a searchable directory in the process, among cataloging other stock image photo sets. So this list is mostly for my own benefit so I can catalog some information about these products. This list is Sozaijiten-oriented, but maybe someday I will work to include other material dictionary series. This catalog includes: Volume, Title, Descriptive Text, and (hopefully eventually to these next three), Publication Year, Cover Image, and Links to these galleries of images.

Recently, searching browsing previews of Sozaijiten volumes online has been made much more difficult; the collections have been rolled into the much-less-user-friendly-and-highly-bloated ImageNavi platform. Thankfully most volumes are currently available on the Internet Archive, and the aforementioned directory linked above. This list below has especially come in handy for me lately when want to quickly see which volumes contain what content.