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Foreign Literature

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This department specialises in rare and important works of French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and South American literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Here you can find first editions and signed or presentation copies of authors as diverse as Akhmatova, Balzac, Borges, Camus, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Goldoni, Hugo, Kafka, Leopardi, Lorca, Manzoni, Pirandello, Pushkin, Schiller, Tolstoy, Zola, and many others. Among the important works which have passed through our hands are the original working manuscript of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, now in the Pushkin House in St Petersburg, the only known copy of the first edition of Brecht's first play, Baal (1920) with his working notes, and an extraordinary collection of Pushkin first editions.

 
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  1. [ALMANACK.]

    Velhagen & Klasings Almanach. Ein Biedermeier-Jahrbuch.

    [Leipzig, Fischer and Wittig for] Berlin, Bielefeld, Leipzig, and Vienna, Velhagen & Klasing, [1927].

    A literary almanack for 1927 with stories by several notable German, Austrian, and Swedish authors with a distinctly nineteenth-century flavour, illustrated with several handsome neo-Romantic coloured plates and illustrations.

    £175

  2. BUQUOY, Georg Franz August de Longueval, Freiherr von Vaux, Graf von.

    Anregungen für philosophisch-wissenschaftliche Forschung...

    Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1825.

    First edition, rare, of a comprehensive discussion by the author of his personal philosophy, with c. 50 pages of his poetry thrown in at the end for good measure.

    £950

  3. [GOETHE.] 

    REICHARDT, Johann Friedrich.  Goethe’s Lieder, Oden, Balladen und Romanzen mit Musik von J.F. Reichardt.  Erste...

    Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, [1809–11]. 

    Very rare first complete edition of Reichardt’s musical settings of Goethe’s poetry, comprising 128 settings of which thirty-nine appear here for the first time. 

    £6500

  4. [GOETHE, Johann Wolfgang von.] ECKERMANN, Johann Peter; Dmitry Vasilievich AVERKIEV, translator.

    Разговоры Гете,...

    St Petersburg, A. S. Suvorin, 1891.

    First edition in Russian, very rare, of Eckermann’s famous Gespräche mit Goethe (1836-48). A professor of English and German at the University of Jena and later librarian at Weimar, Eckermann was Goethe’s companion and unpaid secretary from 1823 until Goethe’s death in 1832, and he actively...

    £1500

  5. GOETHE, Johann Wolfgang von.

    Stella. Ein Schauspiel für Liebende in fünf Akten.

    Berlin, August Mylius, 1776.

    First edition, scarce, of Goethe’s early play about a man caught between his love for two women, which ends with reconciliation and a mariage à trois.

    £1800

  6. GOETHE, Johann Wolfgang von; Thomas HOLCROFT, translator.

    Herman and Dorothea. A Poem, from the German …

    London, Biggs and Cottle (Bristol), for T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1801.

    First edition in English of Hermann und Dorothea (1798), translated into verse by the radical, novelist, and friend of Godwin, Thomas Holcroft. Goethe’s epic, set against the background of the French Revolutionary Wars, was immensely popular in its day; Goethe praised Holcroft’s rendition...

    £350

  7. GOETHE, Johan Wolfgang von; Boris Leonidovich PASTERNAK, translator. 

    Тайны [Tainy; ‘Die Geheimnisse’ or ‘The...

    Moscow, Izdatel’stvo Sovremennik, 1922. 

    First and only edition, very rare, of Pasternak’s early translation of Goethe’s epic fragment Die Geheimnisse (The Mysteries); with a long introductory note by Professor Grigorii Rachinskii.

    £1200

  8. GRASS, Günter.

    Gleisdreieck.

    Darmstadt, Luchterhand, 1960.

    Rare first edition of this volume of poems with Grass’s own drawings.

    £100

  9. GRASS, Günter.

    Onkel, Onkel. Ein Spiel in vier Akten. Mit neun Zeichnungen des Autors.

    Berlin, Klaus Wagenbach, 1965.

    First edition.

    £75

  10. HARINGER, Jakob.

    Die Einsiedelei. Ein Stundenblatt. Nr. VIII-XV [Poems].

    Amsterdam, Christof Brundel Verlag, [1930].

    First edition, rare, of a collection of several short pieces by the Expressionist poet Jakob Haringer. It includes: ‘Chinesische Strofen’, ‘Unbekannter Dichter/ Werke für einen Freund’, ‘Werke aus dem ägyptischen’, ‘Lieder von den Salomo-Inseln’, ‘Werke nach Ronsard’ and ‘Werke...

    £250

  11. HESSE, Hermann.

    Siddhartha. Eine indische Dichtung.

    Berlin, S. Fischer Verlag, 1922.

    First edition of Hesse’s most celebrated work, the beautiful story of a young Brahmin’s search for the meaning of life on earth at the time of the Gautama Buddha.

    £1200

  12. HOFMANNSTHAL, Hugo von.

    Die Aegyptische Helena. Oper in zwei Aufzügen.

    [Leipzig, Mainzer Presse for Insel-Verlag, 1928.]

    First edition of Hofmannsthal’s text for Richard Strauss’s opera, one of 200 numbered copies – Hofmannsthal himself considered it to be his finest libretto.

    £750

  13. [KAFKA, Franz, Max BROD, et al.]

    Das bunte Buch.

    Leipzig, Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1914.

    First edition of this literary almanack, containing Kafka’s short story Zum Nachdenken für Herrenreiter. The story had been published as part of Kafka’s first collection, Betrachtung, earlier in the year.

    £250

  14. KHARMS, Daniil Ivanovich, translator. BUSCH, Wilhelm.

    Plikh i Pliukh [Plisch und Plum].

    Moscow, Detizdat, 1937.

    First edition in book form, very rare, of Daniil Kharms’s Russian free verse translation of the children’s story by Wilhelm Busch about two mischievous dogs, second only in fame to his Max und Moritz. The translation had been first published in the children’s magazine Chizh in 1936 (nos. 8-12),...

    £3000

  15. [LA ROCHE, Sophie von.] 

    Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim.  Von einer Freundin derselben aus Original-Papieren und andern...

    Leipzig, bey Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1771. 

    First edition of Sophie von La Roche’s (1730–1807) bestselling epistolary novel, a bestseller featuring kidnapping, travels from Germany to Scotland, and a false wedding ceremony, a direct forerunner to Goethe’s Werther.

    £750

  16. LESSING, Gotthold Ephraim, and Viktor KRYLOV (translator).

    Natan mudryi. Dramaticheskoe stikhotvorenie … perevod...

    St Petersburg, Stasiulevich, 1875.

    First edition in Russian of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, very rare.

    £2000

  17. MANN, Thomas.

    Tristan. Sechs Novellen …

    Berlin, Simon Fischer, 1903.

    First edition, first printing of Thomas Mann’s third book, a collection of stories including his principal early novella Tonio Kröger, critical to Mann’s development of the figure of the artist and of the Doppelgänger as well as representations of queer desire, an important forerunner...

    £1500

  18. MUSIL, Robert.

    Vinzenz und die Freundin bedeutender Männer. Posse in drei Akten.

    Berlin, Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, 1924.

    Rare first edition of Musil’s early farce, featuring an abduction, extramarital affairs, and a staged murder, an important precursor to his most famous work, the unfinished modernist novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities).

    £500

  19. NICOLAI, [Christoph] Friedrich. 

    The Life and Opinions of Sebaldus Nothanker.  Translated from the German … by Thomas Dutton,...

    London: Printed by C. Lowndes, and sold by H.D. Symonds, 1798. 

    First edition in English, very scarce, of Nicolai’s Das Leben und die Meinungen des Herrn Magister Sebaldus Nothanker (1773–6), ‘probably the literary bestseller of the German Enlightenment’ (Selwyn), translated into many languages and much re-printed.  It is sometimes considered the...

    £2750

  20. PICKERING, Amelia.

    The Sorrows of Werter: a Poem …

    London, T. Cadell … 1788.

    First edition of this retelling of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, here giving a voice to Charlotte, preceded by a list of nearly one thousand subscribers, largely from Bristol and London.

    £1200