Much as I love all the anime and manga blogs out there, they don’t help to legitimize fandom as much as actual published books. Especially scholarly ones. And so, I present a list of over 50 real books intended to deepen anyone’s appreciation of anime and manga.

Note:  This includes both books I’ve read and books in my ”To Read” pile, so naturally I don’t have much to say about the books I haven’t read yet.

About Manga

• Paul Gravett’s Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics — A shockingly complete survey of the manga field in Japan over the last half of the 20th century, covering a wide variety of genres and manga-ka. Want to understand manga? Start here.
• Yoshio Kawashima’s How to Read Manga — Gloom Party — Japan’s weird. This book re-prints a gag manga, along with a translation of the words and the cultural references embedded in the comic. It’s a great insight into Japanese humor, artistic expectations, and culture.
• Sharon Kinsella’s Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society
• Brigitte Koyama-Richard‘s One Thousand Years of Manga
• Antonia Levi’s (ed) Boys’ Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-Cultural Fandom of the Genre
• Fred Schodt’s Manga! Manga! — The first English-language book on manga, this is an extensive overview of the medium, from its early days prior to 1900 through the 1980′s.
• Joseph Steiff’s (ed) Manga and Philosophy
• Jason Thompson’s Manga: The Complete Guide — A comprehensive encyclopedia of all manga that’s been published in North America. Including porn.
• Jason Yadao’s The Rough Guide to Manga — Billed as a guidebook to manga history, popular manga-ka, styles, techniques, and genres.
• Masami Toku’s Shojo Manga! Girl Power!

About Anime

• Steven T. Brown’s Cinema Anime
• Brian Camp and Julie Davis’s Anime Classics Zettai!
• Dani Cavallaro’s Anime and Memory
• Dani Cavallaro’s Anime and the Visual Novel: Narrative Structure, Design and Play at the Crossroads of Animation and Computer Games
• Dani Cavallaro’s Anime Intersections: Tradition and Innovation in Theme and Technique
• Dani Cavallaro’s Magic as Metaphor in Anime
• Jonathan Clement and Helen McCarthy’s The Anime Encyclopedia
• Patrick Drazen’s Anime Explosion!
• Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg’s The Science of Anime: Mecha-Noids and AI-Super-Bots — Takes a look at the popular scientific concepts in anime, and how realistic they are.
• Brigette Koyama-Richard‘s Japanese Animation: From Painted Scrolls to Pokemon
• Thomas Lamarre’s The Anime Machine — “Presents a foundational theory of animation and what it reveals about our relationship to technology,” according to its University of Minnesota website. Very heady, but fascinating.
• Helen McCarthy’s 500 Essential Anime Movies
• Susan Napier’s Anime: From Akira to Princess Mononoke and Anime: From Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle — A collection of Napier’s scholarly essays on various aspects of anime, from Hayao Miyazaki’s children’s movies to hentai.
• Colin Odell’s and Michelle Le Blanc’s Studio Ghibli: The Films of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata
• Andrew Osmond’s Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist
• Zilia Papp’s Anime and Its Roots in Early Japanese Monster Art
• Gilles Poitras’ The Anime Companion — This is an encyclopedia of Japanese terms and concepts commonly used in anime, from shrine maidens to bullet trains. Particularly helpful for the fan who wants to know exactly what a particular term means.
• Gilles Poitras’ Anime Essentials — Haven’t read it, but it’s apparently a new fan’s guide to anime. Describes the major names in the industry, information about Japan, etc.
• Simon Richmond’s Rough Guide to Anime — Billed as a handbook to anime’s history, major works and creators, and technical terms.
• Joseph Steiff’s (ed) and Tristan Tamplin’s (ed) Anime and Philosophy

Osamu Tezuka

• Philip Brophy’s Tezuka: The Marvel of Manga (one available used for $200!)
• Helen McCarthy’s The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga — A beautiful, full-color book that both re-prints hundreds of Tezuka’s artworks and provides an impressive biography of the man.
• Natsu Onoda Power’s God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-WWII Manga — A biography of Osamu Tezuka, an analysis of his works, and an excellent overview of the manga industry and its cultural impact in Japan throughout Tezuka’s life.
• Frederik L. Schodt’s The Astro Boy Essays — A collection of essays Fred Schodt wrote about Astro over the years, massaged into book form. An excellent description of Astro and Tezuka’s life, at a level of detail not achieved in other Tezuka biographies.

Hayao Miyazaki

• Dani Cavallaro’s The Anime Art of Hayao Miyazaki
• Helen McCarthy’s Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation
• Hayao Miyazaki’s Starting Point: 1979–1996 — A collection of Miyazaki’s autobiographical essays about his career, basically from Future Boy Conan to Princess Mononoke.

Mamoru Oshii

• Dani Cavallaro’s The Cinema of Mamoru Oshii
• Brian Ruh’s Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii

Miscellaneous

• Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals — Translation of a Japanese book about otaku mental models, and how they relate to postmodern theory. Heady, philosophical stuff, and some of it hard-to-believe, but I thought a lot while I read it.
• Christopher Bolton’s (ed),  Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.’s (ed), and Takayuki Tatsumi’s (ed) Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime — An analysis of Japanese science fiction, with a heavy focus on anime
• Robin Brenner’s Understanding Manga and Anime
• Philip Brophy’s Manga Impact: The World of Japanese Animation (November 2010)
• Stephen Brown’s Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture
• Roland Kelts’ Japanamerica
• Antonia Levi’s Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation
• Frenchy Luning’s (ed) Mechademia volumes 1, 2, 3, and 4 — A scholarly journal covering Japanese pop culture, anime, manga, etc. Includes many articles from various scholars and thinkers in the field. Each volume focuses on a different theme.
• Mark M. Macwilliam’s (ed) Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime
• Susan Napier’s From Impressionism to Anime: Japan as Fantasy and Fan Cult in the Mind of the West
• Susan Napier’s The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity — An older, scholarly tome; note that used copies go for $50 on Amazon.com as of this writing.
• Fred Patten’s Watching Anime, Reading Manga — A collection of Fred Patten’s essays, covering the many decades he’s been a manga and anime fan. A fascinating look at both the Japanese and the American anime and manga fandom and industries since the 1970′s.
• Mark Schilling’s The Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture — Explains many of the pop culture references seen in anime and manga
• Fred Schodt’s Dreamland Japan — A sequel of sorts to Manga! Manga!, this book broadens its scope somewhat beyond just manga, while also delving deeper into the topics introduced in the first book.
• David Stahl’s (ed) Imag(in)ing the War in Japan: Representing and Responding to Trauma in Postwar Literature and Film — Contains several articles about anime relating to Japanese post-WW2 trauma (man, imagine what they’d make of Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms). Unfortunately, it’s US $180 at last check.
• Saito Tamaki and Hiroki Azuma’s Beautiful Fighting Girl — An analysis of the phenomenon of cute girls kicking tail.

Not Yet Released

• Martha Cornog and Timothy Perper’s Mangatopia: Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World (September 2011)

Got anything to add? Let me know in the comments!

(This is a living document; as I find more books, I add them to this list.)