Foreign Literature
Contact Donovan Rees
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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[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
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GRASS, Günter.
Gleisdreieck.
Darmstadt, Luchterhand, 1960.
Rare first edition of this volume of poems with Grass’s own drawings.
£100
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GRASS, Günter.
Onkel, Onkel. Ein Spiel in vier Akten. Mit neun Zeichnungen des Autors.
Berlin, Klaus Wagenbach, 1965.
First edition.
£75
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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
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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
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[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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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RUFIANDER, Fabius Jocosus, pseud. [Friedrich Julius ROTTMANN].
Curiöse Inaugural Disputation von dem Recht / Natur /...
‘Teutschland, Gedruckt in denen Hundes-Tagen, 1716.’
First edition, very rare, of this satirical academic disputation on melancholy, dedicated to the author’s ‘unpleasant and universally despised’ peers in the hope of cheering them up (p. [4] trans.).
£675
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SHAGINYAN, Marietta Sergeevna.
Gëte [Goethe].
Moscow and Leningrad, Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1950.
First edition of Marietta Sergeevna Shaginyan’s (1888–1982) scholarly work on Goethe, which particularly examines Russian (and Soviet) appreciations. The great German writer was Shaginyan’s (or Shaginian’s) idol, as attested by Puteshestvie v Veimar (Journey to Weimar).
£350
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[VOLTAIRE.]
Das Mädchen von Orleans. Ein komisches Heldengedicht in zwölf Gesängen nach Voltaire frei bearbeitet.
Neustadt, ‘im Verlags-Comptoir’, n. d. [mid nineteenth century].
A good copy of this very rare German rendition of Voltaire’s La Pucelle d’Orleans. Fromm gives the date as around 1865 (and the place of publication as Hamburg), the online Staatsbibliothek catalogue (the only copy listed by KVK) as c.1830. The translator remains anonymous.
£100