This 1898 Lost Gem Of Oriental Romanticism Is Intoxicating

by Stephen J. Gertz

The following is my Historical Note to a new translation of Haschisch by Fritz Lemmermayer, originally issued in 1898 and now published for the first time in English by Process Media in association with RKS Library Editions. The black and white illustrations here (as well as the original cover art in color) are by Gottfried Sieben and are taken from the first German edition. All of the striking and plentiful original illustrations are present (and faithfully reproduced) in this exciting new edition along with many supplemental illustrations that illuminate the history of the book. - SJG.

Some novels die and justifiably remain dead. A few are resurrected by bookish saviors and, re-examined, rise to deserved new life. Haschisch by Fritz Lemmermayer is one such literary Lazarus. 

During the nineteenth century Europe was infatuated with the Orient in general and the Muslim world in particular. The Ottoman Empire, which in the late 17th century beseiged Vienna and put all of Christian Europe at risk, had receded as a threat. Translations of The Arabian Nights appeared in French (1704) and English (1706), kindling popular interest in the Orient. Diplomatic and commercial ties with Istanbul, the Ottoman capital, increased during the 18th century and Turquerie, an Orientalist style imitative of Turkish culture and art, had developed into a popular fashion by century’s end. By the beginning of the 19th century literary Romanticism had established itself. Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley, amongst others, lured by the exotic East, indulged, to popular success, their fascination for the foreign in their work. Oriental Romanticism, which captured their fantasies, was the result.

By mid-century the European craze for all things Oriental was at its height. The paintings and color-plate albums of Amadeo Preziosi, a Maltese count and artist who had become a resident of Istanbul, provided a lush feast for Europeans hungry for visual representations of this strange world of unusual costume, customs, and, let us not mince words, alluring women, mysterious with titillating possibility behind the veil. And, too, the use of opium and hashish in the East had captured the Romantic imagination as a gateway to the Oriental mind and fantastic visions not otherwise available to Western man. The exotic East possessed a strong sensuous undercurrent and it will come as no surprise that a genre of erotic literature arose in parallel to Oriental Romanticism to satisfy the European male’s desire, The Lustful Turk (1828) being an early example. The region was perceived to be an erogenous zone.

In Germany, Romanticism tended to look inward to Teutonic myth rather than outward to the East. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, a small group of Neo-Romantics, led by litterateur Fritz Lemmermayer in protest to modern realism, turned their eyes toward the Orient. Haschisch, Lemmermayer’s 1898 novel, is not only Oriental Romanticism’s last gasp, but its acme, the literary culmination of two centuries of feverish thought and interest in the exoticism of the East.

We would not know this, however, without the scholarship of Dr. R.K. Siegel who rescued from obscurity this novel, a book lost in the wake of literary modernism and forgotten almost as soon as it was published. It’s a book that, as an antiquarian bookseller, I first became aware of in the mid-1980s through its 1911 translation into, of all languages, Yiddish. The cover art was sensational. A few of us in the trade who had a special interest in the literature of psychotropic drugs were riveted but, preoccupied with quotidian needs, did not have the necessary time to study and determine just what this book was. Enter Dr. Siegel, a dedicated collector-scholar, a breed of book lover that has so often (and to no financial gain whatsoever) devoted precious time to perform the bibliographical spadework for books in general and orphaned literature in particular. It was he who uncovered the first edition in German and then made the study of the novel’s history a personal mission. The results are here and marvelous.

Amadeo Preziosi, Odalisque.

A word on the novel’s illustrations by Sieben. He was unquestionably influenced by Preziosi’s artwork. Stamboul: Souvenirs d’Orient, Preziosi’s widely and wildly popular color-plate masterpiece first appeared in 1858, its fourth and final issue published in 1883 (as Stamboul: Meours et Costumes) to satisfy unabated demand. When Europeans imagined the Orient it was Preziosi’s imagery that they referenced, particularly his women of Istanbul. The faces of the women in Haschisch are directly those of Preziosi’s women. Preziosi’s image of a harem woman, languid and alluring as she is attended by her servants, tempts us with come-hither eyes as she smokes a hookah. Is she enraptured by hashish, or merely smoking tobacco? It is left to the observer to decide.

I think it safe to say, however, that readers will not have to make a decision regarding the novel’s vivid and operatic narrative. Haschisch is a literary cloud of intoxicating smoke, a phantasmagoria in print, once forgotten but now unforgettable.

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N.B. The politics of Oriental Romanticism are not germane to this post beyond that almost every 19th century stereotype of the exotic East is found in Haschisch. Romanticism's preoccupation with love, sex, and death gets full play here. Throw in exotic drugs and Muslims and Edward Said would have had a field day with it had he lived to see this publication, which is quite something with production values that belie its cost, and a degree of scholarship that is remarkable. Dr. Siegel is a model literary detective; his informative introduction and notes cover the waterfront. It appears he hasn't missed a thing, which would be a bad thing if the story behind the book wasn't so interesting.

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LEMMERMAYER, Fritz. Hashish: The Lost Legend. The First English Translation of a Great Oriental Romance. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Ronald K. Siegel, PH.D. Translations by Hermann Schibli (German); Mindle Crystal Gross (Yiddish). Historical Note by Stephen J. Gertz. Port Townsend, WA: Process Media in association with RKS Library Editions, 2013 [i.e. Feb. 2014].

First edition in English, limited to 418 copies numbered and signed by Ronald K. Siegel, PH.D. Quarto (10 x 6 1/2 inches). xx, 118 pp. on heavy glossy paper. Illustrated throughout in black & white and color. Full blue suede cloth with color illustration laid-on. Gilt lettered spine. Housed in a red suede cloth slipcase. $65.

 

Full Disclosure: I sit on the Editorial Board of RKS Library Editions, along with William Dailey, Michael Horowitz, and Steven B. Karch, M.D., FFFLM.

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The Bible Of Unconscious Buffoonery

by Stephen J. Gertz

Extra engraved titlepage.

Imagine that you've written a book that no one will publish; it's considered over-long and looney. So, to pump-up its importance, impress, and tacitly solicit subscriptions, you ask eminent men, oh, around sixty of 'em, to contribute "panegyricke verses upon the Authour and his booke" extolling your wonderfulness and that of your volume. Amazingly, they do. But your contributors ridicule the book.

You include their mockery, anyway. Some attention is better than none. You underwrite the cost of printing the book yourself and in doing so produce one of the great vanity publications ever issued, and if your contributors insult you, well, how flattering to your vanity that these great men took the time to do so.

Such was the case of Thomas Coryat (1577-1617) and his book, Three crude veines are presented in this booke following (besides the foresaid Crudities): no less flowing in the body of the booke, then the Crudities themselues, two of rhetoricke and one of poesie…, popularly known by its title from the engraved titlepage/frontispiece (and subsequent editions) as Coryat's Crudities: Hastily gobled up in five moneths trauells in France, Sauoy, Italy, Rhetia com[m]only called the Grisons county, Heluetia alias Switzerland, some parts of high Germany, and the Netherlands. Newly Digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset, now dispersed to the nourishment of the traveling Members of the Kingdome.

Coryat's traveling shoes.

Within, Coryat records his step-by-step 1,975 mile schlep across Western Europe. He didn't intend for it to be funny, it just turned out that way. Outlandish, toilsome and wacky adventures are related with such sober and solemn seriousness that the clod is completely unaware that he is a clown in his own touring circus.

"There probably has never been another such combination of learning and unconscious buffoonery as is here set forth. Coryate was a serious and pedantic traveller who (as he states in his title) in five months toilsome travel wandered, mostly on foot, over a large part (by his own reckoning 1,975 miles) of western Europe. His adventures probably appeared to his contemporaries as more ridiculous than exciting, but at this remove, his chronicle by its very earnestness provides an account of the chief cities of early seventeenth century Europe which is at least valuable as it is amusing. It was probably his difficulties with the booksellers which induced Coryate to solicit the extraordinary sheaf of testimonials prefixed to the volume. Possibly he acted upon the notion apparently now current among publishers of social directories that every person listed is a prospective purchaser of the work. At any rate he secured contributions from more than sixty writers at the time. Among his panegyrists appear the names of Jonson, Chapman, Donne, Campion, Harington, Drayton, Davies of Hereford, and others, each contributor vying to mock poor Coryate with solemn ridicule." (Pforzheimer) 

Now, imagine you're Ben Jonson, one of the contributors. You've read the book, and, after re-inserting your eyeballs - which, as if in an animated cartoon, grew to the size of softballs and popped-out of their sockets - you consider what to make of this. As your contribution you write a verse explanation of the engraved frontispiece, decoding its emblematic illustrations. It reads, in part:

Our Author in France rode on Horse without stirrop,
And in Italic bathed himselfe in their syrrop.

His love to horses he sorteth out strange prettilie,
He rides them in France, and lies with them in Italie.

You get the idea. It's an Elizabethan comedy roast but the roastee (known as the British Ulysseys, with accent on Odd-essy), basking in the attention, is deaf to the jokes. It's Mystery Science Theater 3000, the book edition, with eminent readers hurling written wisecracks at the deliriously ridiculous and over-long text while they peruse it from their reading chair, rather than vocally razzing a deliriously ridiculous and over-long movie from their seats in the theater.

Here's an excerpt from John Donne's panegyric to Coryat and his Crudities:

This Booke, greater than all, producest now,
Infinite worke, which doth so farre extend,
That none can study it to any end.
Tis no one thing; it is not fruite, nor roote;
Nor poorly limited with head or foote.
If man be therefore man, because he can
Reason, and laugh, thy booke doth halfe make man.
One halfe being made, thy modesty was such,
That thou on th' other halfe wouldst never touch.
When wilt thou be at full, great Lunatique?

Ouch!

Coryat apparently experienced this - and the other testimonials - as "Oooh, they like me, they really like me!"

I am sory I can speake so little of so flourishing and beautifull a Citie [as Turin]. For during that little time that I was in the citie, I found so great a distemperature in my body, by drinking the sweete wines of Piemont, that caused a grievous inflammation in my face and hands; so that I had but a smal desire to walke much abroad in the streets. Therefore I would advise all English-men that intend to travell into Italy, to mingle their wine with water as soone as they come into the country, for feare of ensuing inconveniences... 

In short, Coryat was drunk during his entire stay in Turin.

Complete copies of Coryat's Crudities are scarce. "Perfect copies with the plates intact are not common...The D.N.B. has repeated the statement that the Chetham copy is the only perfect one known" (Pforzheimer).

A complete copy has, however, recently come into the marketplace.  Offered by Whitmore Rare Books, the asking price is $25,000. Despite its faults it's one of the great travelogues.

"Coryate drew on his experiences in writing Coryats Crudities (1611), which was intended to encourage courtiers and gallants to enrich their minds by continental travel. It contains illustrations, historical data, architectural descriptions, local customs, prices, exchange rates, and food and drink, but is too diffuse and bulky - there are 864 pages in the 1905 edition - to become a vade-mecum. To solicit ‘panegyric verses’ Coryate circulated copies of the title-page depicting his adventures and his portrait, which had been engraved by William Hole and which he considered a good likeness. About sixty contributors include many illustrious authors, not all in verse, some insulting, some pseudonymous" (DNB).

Coryat Meets Margarita Emiliana bella Cortesana di Venetia,

As for Thomas Coryat, the "great Lunatique" died in 1617 and now permanently sleeps with the horses in Italy, which beats sleeping with the fishes in Sicily. It's the difference among character assassination, corporeal execution, and the bestial joy of equine companionship on an arduous journey; bathing in horse-piss in Italy was a bonus, pass the Purell, please - and a barf-bag and incontinence pad, the better to endure Coryat's voyage to France and his feed to hungry fish as written in chapter one's first sentence:

I was imbarked at Dover, about tenne of the clocke in the morning, the fourteenth of May, being Saturday and Whitsun-eve, Anno 1608, and arrived in Calais (which Caesar calleth Ictius portus, a maritime towne of that of part Picardy, which is commonly called le pais reconquis; that is, the recovered Province, inhabited in former times by the ancient Morini) about five of the clocke in the afternoone, after I had varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the excrementall ebullitions of my tumultuous stomach, as desiring to satiate the gormandizing paunches of the hungry Haddocks (according as I have hieroglyphically expressed it in the front of my booke) with that wherewith I had superfluously stuffed my selfe at land, having made my rumbling belly their capacious aumbrie.

It isn't often that an author opens his book with a tableau presenting the painting of a ship with his (or anyone else's) diarrhea. It's a riveting first sentence with repulsive denouement; readers may spew the contents of their now tumultuous stomachs through their northern orafice. Yes, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, a dark and stormy night, with emphasis on the dark storm raging at Coryat's southern orafice. Yet sunny skies and silliness await the intrepid reader. Be not afraid. Read on ye armchair traveller, you have nothing to lose but your sanity to this seventeenth century version of your friend's interminable seminar with soporific slideshow about a recent vacation, no detail too picayune to omit. Coryat, for instance, never fails to tell the exact time of day that something occurred, and, it seems, reports on everything he put in his mouth -

 I did eate fried Frogges this citie [Cremona]

- and everything he encountered, with the possible exception of dust motes. He then concludes his exhausting review of each city with a breezy, unintentionally amusing, "so much for Paris;" "so much for Venice;" "so much for Milan." It's so very much.

Yea, verily and alas, the booke lacketh backgrounde musik by the eminent Elizabethan composer and performer, Boots Randolph, playing that olde English aire, Yaketie Saxe, to highlight its slapsticke gravitie and the inadvertent Keystone Cop qualitie of Coryat's adventures chasing after Europe, and enliven his dreary descriptions.

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Titlepage.

CORYAT, Thomas. [From engraved title]: Coryats Crudities. Hastily gobled up in five moneths trauells in France, Sauoy, Italy, Rhetia com[m]only called the Grisons county, Heluetia alias Switzerland, some parts of high Germany, and the Netherlands. Newly Digested in the hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset, now dispersed to the nourishment of the traveling Members of the Kingdome. London: Printed by W[illiam]. S[tansby]., 1611. First edition.  Quarto in eights (8 1/8 x 6 inches; 206 x 153 mm). [-]2; a8-b8 ([-]1 inserted after a3); b4; c8-g8; h4-l4; B8-D8 (D3 inserted after preceding D); E8-3C8; 3D4; [-]2 (first is signed 3E3; both are errata). Extra engraved titlepage (i.e. frontispiece) by William Hole, five engraved plates (three folding), two text engravings and numerous woodcut initials and head-pieces. With two leaves of errata.

Pforzheimer 218. Cox 98. Keynes 70.

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Images courtesy of Whitmore Rare Books, currently offering this volume, with our thanks.
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A Bookbinding Workshop In 1840

by Stephen J. Gertz

This busy image of a nineteenth century bookbinding workshop c. 1840 is one of thirty hand-colored lithographed plates depicting twenty-nine trades and professions issued in 30 Werkstätten von Handwerkern by Jacob Ferdinand Schreiber, a leading German publisher of children's books.

Originally published c. 1840, this, the 1844 second edition, was greatly expanded from the first, which only contained twelve plates. Included here are views of potters; sculptors and masons; farriers; nailsmiths; locksmiths; coppersmiths; plumbers; cutlers; tinsmiths; bell founders; blacksmiths; gold and silver smiths; carpenters; coopers; turners; butchers; bakers; ropers; soap makers; tanners; shoemakers; saddlers; brush makers; drapers; tailors; milliners; weavers; and, in Booktryst propinquity, bookbinders. 

Each unsigned plate features a central image of craftsmen at work bordered with the primary tools of their trade.

The book - highly sought-after and rare with OCLC recording only nine copies in institutional holdings worldwide - is complete with an accompanying sixteen-page text booklet that is often lacking when copies find their way into the marketplace. But, according to ABPC, no copies have come to auction within the last twenty-eight years.

A copy, however, recently found its way into - and immediately out of -  circulation. It sold for $16,500.

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SCHREIBER, J.F. 30 Werkstätten von Handwerkern. Nebst ihren hauptsächlichsten Werkzeugen und Fabrikaten. Mit erklärenden Text. Zweite Auflage. Esslingen am Neckar: J.F. Schreiber, 1844. Second edition. Oblong folio (335 x 425 mm). Lithographed title page, thirty hand-colored lithographed plates. 16 pp text booklet inserted.

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Image courtesy of Antiquariaat Forum, with our thanks.

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Parrots Found In Rare Book On German Birds: The Writing Parrot Squawks

by Stephen J. Gertz

On command (his to me) once more, today's guest blogger is Albert the Writing Parrot, a thirty-five year old Yellow-Naped Amazon, Booktryst's mascot, my ward since his five-months old birthday, and, pathetically, my most successful long-term relationship. He knows more about parrot books than I do. If his writing voice sounds similar to mine do not be surprised. He is, after all, a parrot  - SJG.

Psittacus Albini
(Cacatua galerita fitzroy)
Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo.
   

Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather: parrots in the Fatherland.

Greetings, bibliophiles and parrot-freaks, I'm Albert, the Yellow-Naped Amazon, who was once given a pen to render into plastic confetti but discovered, to my amazement and Gertz's, that when held in zygodactyl foot made comprehensible prose when applied to a sheet of paper  provided for my amusement. No bird-brain, I picked-up a thing or two while reading the newspaper on the bottom of my cage despite its crude punctuation with the end product of digestion.

Psittacus Rufus vertice nigro
(Lorius Domicellus)
Purple-Capped Lory

The other day Gertz presented me with another rare antiquarian book on birds for review, Vorstellung der Vögel in Deutschland und beiläufig auch einiger Fremden nach ihrer Eigenschaften beschrieben by Johann Leonhard Frisch (1666-1743).  It's a book on the birds of Germany originally published in Berlin, 1733, and issued in parts at irregular intervals over the next thirty years, the final section published in 1763. It’s considered to be the first great German color-plate bird book. Gertz brought home a copy of the third and most complete edition, a folio of fourteen parts in one volume issued 1817-1820 with 255 gorgeous hand-colored plates.

Psittacus viridis alis capite liteo
(Amazona barbadensis barbadensis)
Yellow-Shouldered Amazon

A book on the birds of Germany. What, you may ask, are parrots doing in this otherwise delightful strudel in print? Exotic, tropical birds like parrots are typically found in Central and South America, the Caribbean, India, the South Pacific (where they engage in Happy Talk on Bali Hai-Ai-Ai), parts of Africa, or as escapees on the lam in Southern California and San Francisco. Sightings in the Black Forest, Bavaria, Brandenburg, Bad Arolsen, Bad Bentheim, Bad Bergzabern, Bad Berka, Bad Berleburg, Bad Berneck im Fichtelgebirge, Bad Bevensen, Bad Blankenburg, Bad Bramstedt, Bad Breisig, Bad Brückenau, Bad Camberg, Bad Colberg-Heldburg, and Bad Düben through Bad Wünnerberg are non-existent. Yes, there's a whole lotta Bad in Germany but it's not as bad as it seems, though hamburgers in Heidelberg are nothing to write home about. As a natural habitat for parrots, however, it's definitely the opposite of good. I was once there in January and froze my pecker off. A bird that can't peck soon goes hungry but what bird eats blechküchen, anyway? Gott in Himmel! Gimme a bagel with a shmear of cream cheese.

Psittacus veridis fronte albo collo rubro

But enough about brunch at Nate n' Al's in Beverly Hills with a flock of ancient Hollywood dodos gumming schmaltz herring.

So, anyway, German linguist, entomologist and ornithologist Johann Leonhard Frisch began to publish Vorstellung der Vögel in Deutschland und beiläufig auch einiger Fremden nach ihrer Eigenschaften beschrieben in 1733. Following his death, the book was continued by his sons Leopold, who handled the text, and Ferdinand Helfreich and Philip Jakob who took care of the engraving and coloring of the plates, while a member of the third generation, Johann’s grandson Johann Christoph, created the final thirty plates. In 1763, the year the last part was issued, a second edition of the entire work appeared in Berlin from publisher Bey Friedrich Wilhelm Birnstiel.

Psittacus Rufus alis viridis
(Lorius garrulus garrulus).
Chattering Lory.

Here's the skinny on it: “One of the most enjoyable of all bird books but rare...Frisch's 'Vorstellung der Vogel' is not only an attractive book but it is very, very seldom seen. And there is no doubt whatever that this makes it much more exciting, when we do see it, or possess it" (Sitwell, et al, Fine Bird Books 1700-1900, p. 67).

How rare is it? Rarer than a rocky island off the coast of Peru without guano. (NB: bird guano has a fertilizer analysis of 11%-16% nitrogen - the majority of which is uric acid, FYI - 8%-12% equivalent phosphoric acid, and 2%-3% equivalent potash. Thank me the next time this comes up in casual conversation).

¿Quánto cuesta? When Gertz told me how much this copy of the third edition was going for I instantly moulted all my feathers. Looking like a plucked anorexic dwarf chicken with prosthetic hooked pecker, I exclaimed in a screech heard all the way to Swaziland, "$119, 045!?!"

After repeating the exalted sum seventeen times (because repetition is reflexive and what we parrots do) I asked him what a complete copy of the first edition is worth. No copies have come to auction within the last thirty-eight years and who knows how much farther back than that: Gertz accidentally left his fifteen-volume set of the ABPC Index 1923-1975 in a nightclub while partying with Rihanna, perusing it while she danced a wild tarantella on a tabletop, spliff insouciantly hanging from her lips while Chris Brown desperately clung to her hips. Still, he estimates a 1st ed. to go for $150K-$175K, maybe more. But what does Chris Brown know about rare books?

Polly wants a crack at it! No chance.

Psittacus Carolinensis
(Conuropsis carolinensis)
The Carolina Parakeet,
the only North American parrot, now extinct.

Alright, alright, alright, already, what are parrots doing in a book on the birds of Germany? it turns out that the third edition was augmented with a Supplement featuring some non-Aryan foreign species, I suppose to demonstrate the superiority of ornithology's master race by comparison. I tend to think, however, that a color-plate book of German birds needs a tonic to offset dull, drab, and dour Teutonic avifauna like Herr Schwartz's Brown Eagle below, hence the vivid splash of psittaciformes.

Der Schwartz braune Adler. Aquila melanaetus.

This copy also contains Verzeichniß der in Ferdinand Helfreich Frisch Vorstellung der Vögel in Deutschland...abgebildete Säugethiere und Vögel, nach der 13ten Ausgabe des von J.G. Gemelin bearbeiteten Linne’schen Natursystems geordnet (Berlin: 1819), an extra twelve-page Linnean index for those who appreciate fine linneans with 400 thread-count. 

Upcoming: my review of Kim Jong-un's new book, The Juche-Inspired Socialist Birds of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea Are the Masters of the Country's Development: A Field Guide For The Education Of The Masses Yearning To Eat. It's a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection.

In answer to Angel Louy, Ph.D of Stamps, Arkansas: I know why the caged bird writes: the Met turned me down, the fools. Luciano Pavarotti? You haven't lived until you've heard me as Canio croon the intro verse of Vesti la Giubba - obviously written with a parrot in mind* - with typically psychotic psittacine chuckles passing for sorrowfully ironic laughter: 

Recitar! Mentre preso dal delirio,
non so più quel che dico,
e quel che faccio!
Eppur è d'uopo, sforzati!
Bah! Sei tu forse un pappagallo?

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

 Lo sono un pagliaccio!
 Lo sono un pagliaccio!
 Lo sono un pagliaccio!
 Lo sono un pagliaccio!
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*Act! While in delirium,
I no longer know what I say,
or what I do!
And yet it's necessary... make an effort!
Bah! Are you not a parrot?
I am a clown!

With apologies to Leoncavallo.
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FRISCH, Johann Leonhard. Vorstellung der Vögel in Deutschland und beiläufig auch einiger Fremden nach ihrer Eigenschaften beschrieben.Berlin, Nicolaische Buchhandlung, 1817[-1820]. Third and most complete edition. 14 parts in 1 volume. Folio. With engraved frontispiece with a portrait of Johann Leonhard and Ferdinand Helfreich Frisch, 255 contemporaneously hand-colored engraved plates (31 x 20 cm.

Anker 155. Nissen  ZBI 339. Wood, p. 349. Zimmer I, pp. 233-234. Sitwell, p. 67, 76.
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Images courtesy of Asher Rare Books / Antiquariat Forum, currently offering this title, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

The Writing Parrot On Rare Parrot Books.

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Meet John Guttemberg, Printer

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1657, London stationer William Lee issued the fifth (sixth) edition of Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives. of the Noble Greeks and Romans. In addition to the usual suspects, Lee added twenty biographies of people Plutarch never wrote a word about, including (in translations mostly by the playwright George Gerbier d’Ouvilly) Aristotle, Homer, Sappho, Charlemagne, Tamburlaine, Atabalipa King of Peru, and Johann Gutenberg, with a two-page paean celebrating his life and "the Excellency of the Art of Printing."

"Amongst the rarest and laudablest Inventions which were derived by the Ingenuity of man, we must needs confess, The Art of Printing may at present justly claim the best and highest esteem; whereby all the other Arts and Sciences are so plainly and accurately rendered unto us; and whereby two men, in one day, may dispatch and Print off more Books then several men could before have written in a whole year. This Art (as it is generally believed) was first invented in Moguntia, or Mentz, a City in Germany, in the year of our Lord one thousand four hundred forty and two, by John Guttemberg, a German Knight from honorable Family; who first of all did there make the experiment of the said Art, so did also make the first trial of that Ink which to this very day is used by the Printers: Although some other Writers do affirm that John Faustus, and Yves Shefey, two years before invented this said Art, and so gave them praise of it; And only say that this John Guttemberg, John Mantel, John Pres, Adolph Rusch, Peter Shesser, Martin Flache, Uldric Hen, John Froben, Adam Peter, Thomas Wolff, and others did all at once very much perfect this said Art of Printing, which they did spread throughout all Germany and the adjacent Countries. And indeed Conradus did use this Art at Rome, in the year fourteen hundred. In the beginning of which Profession on the grounds of it were known but to a very few persons; for at such times as they had any thing to Set, they brought their Characters with them in bags, and when they had done, they carried them back again. And in those daies, both the Printers, and such as did make the Letter-Moulds, were in great repute, wealthy and opulent, and reverenced as Noble personages, making a vast profit by the said Art.  But at present, by reason of the infinite multitude of Books which are printed, and that all men are permitted to profess that Science, although they have never so little insight in it; it so fals out, that both the composers and Printers, reap thereby neither profit no praise, but only imply their labour and time to the benefit of the Publick, with a very little profit or Thanks to themselves…"  

Encouraged "to venture upon a new and fifth impression,"  Lee, desirous to render it "both acceptable to the present Age, and famous to Posterity,"  added  the "quintessence" of André Thevet’s Pourtraits et vies des Hommes illustres Grecz, Latin, et Payens (Paris, 1584), as they were "the very marrow of his observations during his twenty three yeers travails and Peregrinations, throughout the chiefest and remotest parts in the world … (never as yet extant nor seen in English)."

Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch, first appearing in 1579 and immediately celebrated, was a major resource for Shakespeare, providing the background material for Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, and Coriolanus. More than that, however,  North's "long passages of … magnificent prose" were so impressive that Shakespeare rendered them "into blank verse with little change" (F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion). Halliwell-Phillipps asserts of North's translation that “it is one of the books that can positively be said to have been in [Shakespeare's] own hands.”

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PLUTARCH.  The Lives of the noble Grecians & Romans, compared together by that grave learned Philosopher & Historiographer Plutarch of Chæronea. Translated out of Greek into French by James Amiot … With the Lives of Hannibal & Scipio African; translated out of Latin into French, by Charles del’Escluse, and out of French into English by Sir Thomas North, Knight. Hereunto are added the Lives of Epaminondas, of Philip of Macedon, of Dionysius the Elder, Tyrant of Sicilia, of Augustus Cæsar, of Plutarch, and of Seneca: with the Lives of nine other excellent Chieftains of Warre: collected out of Æmylius Probus, by S. G. S. and Englished by the aforesaid Translator. And now also in this Edition are further added, the Lives of twenty selected eminent Persons, of ancient and latter Times; translated out of the Work of that famous Historiographer to the King of France and Poland, Andrew Thevet …   London, Printed by Abraham Miller, and are to be sold by William Lee … 1657.

Folio, mostly in sixes, pp. [16], 443, 446-1031, [27], 76, [34], with an engraved title, dated 1656, designed by Francis Barlow, and integral engraved portrait vignettes.  Title printed in red and black. Separate title pages for ‘The Lives of Epaminondas [etc.]’, dated 1656, and for ‘Prosopographia: or some select Pourtraitures and Lives … by Andrew Thevet’, dated 1657 (mistakenly bound before the ‘Notes and Explanations’ at 3T1); with an advertisement leaf and thirty-four pages of index.

Wing P 2633.
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Image courtesy of Bernard Quaritch Ltd, currently offering this title, with our thanks.

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Goethe's Great Book On Color

By Stephen J. Gertz

[Goethe] delivered in full measure what was promised by the title of his excellent work: data toward a theory of colour. They are important, complete, and significant data, rich material for a future theory of colour. He has not, however, undertaken to furnish the theory itself; hence, as he himself remarks and admits on page xxxix of the introduction, he has not furnished us with a real explanation of the essential nature of colour, but really postulates it as a phenomenon, and merely tells us how it originates, not what it is" (Schopenhauer, On Vision and Colors).

Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors), written by poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1810, is his work concerning the nature of color and how humans perceive it.

In it, Goethe, who was motivated by his interest in painting, describes, in some of the earliest published accounts, colored shadows, refraction, and chromatic aberations.

Goethe, in contrast to Newton, was not concerned with the physics of color, analytic measurement and the cold math. He concentrates on how we see it.

"Along with the rest of the world I was convinced that all the colors are contained in the light; no one had ever told me anything different, and I had never found the least cause to doubt it, because I had no further interest in the subject.

"But how I was astonished, as I looked at a white wall through the prism, that it stayed white! That only where it came upon some darkened area, it showed some color, then at last, around the window sill all the colors shone... It didn't take long before I knew here was something significant about color to be brought forth, and I spoke as through an instinct out loud, that the Newtonian teachings were false"

Goethe's color wheel.

He does not bother with color as a physical phenomenon to be dissected. The book presents, to the contrary, Goethe's philosophy of color and how it is perceived in various situations.

Philosophers and psychologists embraced Zur Farbenlehre; physicists rejected it.

Wittgenstein, for instance, distinguishes between the science of optics, as developed by Newton, and Goethe's phenomenology of color:

"Goethe's theory of the origin of the spectrum isn't a theory of its origin that has proved unsatisfactory; it is really not a theory at all. Nothing can be predicted by means of it. It is, rather, a vague schematic outline, of the sort we find in James's psychology. There is no experimentum crucis for Goethe's theory of colour" (Remarks on Color).

Goethe talks about light and darkness, boundaries, the light and dark spectra, and the history and influence of color on the arts, in philosophy, and, of all things, on Latin American flags.

If any of the gorgeous plates in the book, such as the above, seem vaguely familiar, it is because Zur Farbenlehre had a major influence upon modern art, i.e. no Goethe, no Kandinsky, et al.

"Goethe's colour theory has in many ways borne fruit in art, physiology and aesthetics. But victory, and hence influence on the research of the following century, has been Newton's" (Werner Heisenberg).

"Can you lend me [Goethe's] Theory of Colors for a few weeks? It is an important work. His last things are insipid" (Ludwig van Beethoven, Conversation-book, 1820).

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GOETHE, Johann Wolfgang von. Zur Farbenlehre. [with] Erklärung der zu Geothe's Farbenlehre gehörigen Tafeln. [with] Anzeige und Uebersicht des Goethischen Werkes zur Farbenlehre. 

First edition of the text volumes of Goethe's work on color theory, second editions of the companion volumes Erklärung and Anzeige (plates). Tübingen (and Vienna): J.G. Cotta, 1810 and 1812. Two octavo and one quarto volumes.

Dictionary of Scientific Biography V, pp. 442-446. Hagen I, 347, 348b, 348c.

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Images courtesy of Asher Rare Books, currently offering this item, with our thanks.

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A Rare And Revealing Erotic Movable Book From 1846 (May Be NSFW)

By Stephen J. Gertz

It's as rare a book as you will find, if you can find a copy. There are no auction records. There are no copies found in institutional libraries worldwide. It is not found in any of the usual and unusual bibliographies of erotica, nor in any of the major and minor dealer or auction house catalogs devoted to erotica that I know of.  I've reached out to other scholars in the field. Though they are charmed by it nobody has ever seen this delightful piece.

It is Variations de l'Amore, a suite of nine numbered, gilt-bordered watercolors, image size 115 x 160 mm,  with overlaid slips that was clandestinely issued c. 1846 (that date appearing on one of the plates), likely in Germany, with captions in German and French.

It is not the earliest work of erotica in movable book format, innocent scenes whose overlays, when lifted, reveal graphic sexual situations. I have seen two other erotic movable books with overlays, Moeurs de Paris 2eme Livraison, with illustrations by, amongst others, Achille Devéria, published c. 1835 in London (i.e. Paris), and Les Portes et Fenêtres, paru en livraisons (Paris, 1835) with plates by Henri Monnier, Devéria, etc., its "doors and windows" providing an eyeful when opened.

That there are erotic movable books may come as a surprise to those who associate the form exclusively with childrens literature. The reality is that, until the mid-19th century, movable books were primarily created for and marketed to adults, and "adult content" was not unknown. 

Yet few erotic movable books have survived, certainly intact with all of their, by nature, fragile overlays or other movable parts present, working, and in collectible condition. They were handled by adults with the same gusto as those meant for children, which is to say, vigorously. There are few virgin erotic movables extant; most that have survived were assaulted and sullied, to one degree or another, by hands animated by desire; their maidenhead is ancient history. Which is why this example is so extraordinary. It's as if the original owner was too shy and inhibited to peek beneath the overslips, the knowledge of what might be revealed enough to excite his imagination.

This little gem, unearthed who knows where, is currently being offered, along with another suite of six erotic movable watercolors, for a low five-figure British pound sum. If you collect movable books in general it's a must-have and worth every American penny, if you have at least 1,000,000 pennies. There was surely only a small number produced and this may be the only surviving example.

If you collect movable books meant for children and are put-off by erotic content, consider that human erotic activity is a playground where adults can relax and enjoy uninhibited fun, a refuge from the harsher realities of adulthood, the sexual arena a sandbox for mature children with sex-toys as pail and shovel .

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Images courtesy of Shapero Rare Books, currently offering this item, with our thanks.
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Bauer's The Holy One (Red Point): 1939 World's Fair Influence

By Stephen J. Gertz

This lithograph, currently being offered by William Reese Co., is by Rudolf Bauer (1889-1953) who was closely associated with Hilla Rebay, director, and Solomon Guggenhiem, founder, of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Guggenheim financed Bauer's gallery in Berlin.

This bold composition is an adaptation of Bauer's 1936 oil painting and was used for the cover of the Guggenheim's catalog for the Second Charleston Show in 1938.

It has been cited as the likely inspiration for the Trylon and Perisphere theme-structures for the 1939 New York World's Fair.

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Image courtesy of William Reese Co., with our thanks.
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Old "New" Map Charts Europe's Current Financial Woes

by Stephen J. Gertz

Seignor Italy continues to  enjoy la dolce far neite despite obvious pressures to do something, anything; niete has gone too far. Señora Spain is smoking a cigarette during  a siesta, off to the side as if the Pyrenees offer protection from the rest of Europe's woes. As a measure of how lame it has become, Greece is lumped in with and indistinguishable from the Balkan nations and is crushed under the weight of her prosperous neighbors to the north, France and Germany, who dominate the Continent as Ottoman Pashas in tricorn and Pickelhaube. Speaking of which, Turkey calmly watches from the sidelines as a houri in repose lazily smoking a hookah. Debt is not the only thing higher than a kite; ambitious pipe-dreams cloud the upstart's waking hours. Great Britain, by the way, is  an island with its own problems and glad to not be a part of Europe's.

2012? 

No, 1870.

In that year, French illustrator and caricaturist Paul Hadol (1835-1875) created Nouvelle carte d'Europe dressée pour 1870, a biting satire of the Franco-Prussian War that has endured as a comic masterpiece representing the ferocious power politics of contemporary Europe, caricaturing the Continent's national stereotypes. While the map is undated, it was undoubtedly published in the wake of the fall of Louis-Napoleon III and the Second French Empire in September 1870 after  his surrender to the Germans at the Battle of Sedan.

Only 20 centimes at the time of its publication, a genuine copy (not reprint) in very good condition of the 1870 first issue now costs approximately $3,000.

Got the shorts? Borrow the money from Greece. If they can't loan it to you, ask Angela Merkel. If she's not home, call Sarkozy. If he's cozy with Carla, give Ben Bernanke a buzz. If Big Ben's a bust, there's always Warren Buffet. He won't bail you out but he's got a rule, so if there's any fairness left in the world you'll have a little extra dinero in your pocket at his and Donald Trump's expense.

In Hadol's map, Trump's the guy with the weird hair posing as the King of Denmark and firing everyone, another delusional monarch whose time has come and gone.

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[MAP - POLITICAL SATIRE - EUROPE]. Nouvelle carte d'Europe dressée pour 1870. Paris: Imprimerie Vallee, n.d. [1870]. Hand-colored lithographed map, 24.5 x 38.5 cm, on sheet with text (42 x 58.5 cm). 

See: Dormeier, Humoristisch-Satirishe Europakarten von 1848 bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg..., pp. 525-542, no. 3.

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Image courtesy of Asher Rare Books, with our thanks.

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The Bauhaus Bird Paradise of Carl Ernst Hinkefuss

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1929, graphic designer Carl Ernst Hinkefuss (1881-1970) published, Mein Vogel Paradies (My Bird Paradise), a tie-bound modern block book for children featuring stunning color lithographs depicting abstracted forms of birds reduced to their fundamental forms, accompanied by verse about each individual bird, both text (printed in silver ink) and images printed on black paper. A two-page introduction by Hinkefuss encourages children to create their own pictures based upon his simple designs.

Carl Ernst Hinkefuss was a popular Bauhaus illustrator known for modernist graphic design work that integrated art with commercial values. He did a great deal of advertising design for Hamburg Amerika oceanliners. Hinkefuss was also the editor of the design periodical Qualität, 1920-1932.

He "trained as a painter, graphic artist, and architect at the Königliche Kunstschule and the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Berlin at the turn of the century. While still a student, Hinkefuss became interested in the idea of artists collaborating with the business world, and after graduation he became a commercial graphic designer. From 1905 to early 1910, he worked in the advertising and publicity departments of several firms in Berlin and Dessau, and then later in 1910 set out as an independent publicist in Berlin" (Online Archive of California). 

He ultimately partnered with Wilhelm Deffke (1887-1950) in Wilhemwerk, their commercial design house.

Prospectus for Mein Vogel Paradies, 1929.

According to the prospectus for the book, it was produced using a fifteen color offset-lithography process. The prospectus also mentions a gift box but, apparently, it was never produced; no copies in a publisher's gift box have ever been seen.

Mein Vogel Paradies is an extremely rare book. OCLC/KVK note only four copies in institutional holdings worldwide. According to the ABPC Index, 1923-2011, no copies have ever come to auction. Fine copies, if you can find them, now sell in the low five figures.

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HINKEFUSS, Carl Ernst. Mein Vogel Paradies. Gesamtwerk von Karl Ernst Hinkefuss. [Berlin: Verlag International GMBH / Internationale Propaganda für Qualitatserzeugnisse], 1929. First edition, limited to 1500 copies signed by the artist. Quarto (11 5/8 x 8 1/4 in.). [14]  leaves on black paper printed in silver and fourteen other colors. Color lithographs. Color pictorial wrappers side-stitched with black string.

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Book images courtesy of Aleph-Bet Books, with our thanks.

Image of prospectus courtesy of Wilhelmwerke, with our appreciation.
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