Daemonic and Incommensurable
Goethe is the most completely documented author in the Elysium of world literature, yet every additional line of his written and spoken greatness we read diminishes our comprehension of how one life could have contained such a panoramic, all-encompassing mind. Goethe himself could only accept the mystery behind his genius as part of what he called “daemonic” — “something which manifests itself only in contradictions”. For him, greatness in genius and in poetic works always embraced the unknowable, as Eckermann records:
“I am rather of the opinion that the more incommensurable, and the more incomprehensible to the understanding, a poetic production is, so much the better it is. … Then they come and ask, ‘What idea I meant to embody in my Faust?’ as if I knew myself and could inform them. … It would have been a fine thing, indeed, if I had strung so rich, varied, and highly diversified a life as I have brought to view in Faust upon the slender string of one pervading idea.”
How can the twenty-four breathtaking survivals of Goethe’s work presented in this catalogue not bring forth what Goethe in Faust called “the finest portion of mankind”: awe?
The Inspiration for Goethe’s Faust: Three 16th Century chapbooks
As Goethe himself said "One does not get to know works of art when they are finished; one must catch them in their coming-into-being if one is to understand them even to some extent." These books preserve Faust before Goethe made him his own: anonymous, moralizing, and bound to the confessional fears of late sixteenth-century Germany. What began as a warning against necromancy and the Devil’s pact later became the source tradition from which the modern Faust myth was transformed. Goethe first encountered the legend through puppet theatre, but the printed chapbook tradition supplied narrative matter behind scenes such as Auerbach’s cellar.
Rarity is exceptional. Even the 1587 Spies first edition survives in only a handful of copies, mostly imperfect. The 1589 Faust is recorded in only two or three copies. The 1597 Faust is known to VD 16 from this copy and is listed by USTC among lost editions. The 1596 Wagner book is, so far as record goes, likewise a unicum. Together, the three volumes are among the earliest and rarest witnesses to the Faust Volksbuch tradition.
“The rarest of all his writings” — uncut, unopened, and almost certainly the only copy in private hands
First edition of Goethe’s legal theses, printed for his public defence at the University of Strasbourg on 6 August 1771. Strictly, not Goethe’s lost dissertation itself, but the printed theses that stood in its place after the Strasbourg faculty refused the original work. Goethe was then twenty-one and at the final stage of his legal studies. His rejected dissertation, written in church law, argued that the lawgiver could determine public worship and that the state had authority over the form of religion. Its implications were considered dangerous: the dean Johann Friedrich Ehrlen suppressed it, and the theologian Elias Stöber denounced Goethe as a despiser of religion. The dissertation is now lost.
In its place Goethe defended these fifty-six Positiones Juris and was admitted to the Licentiate of Law, a degree that allowed him thereafter to sign himself Dr. Goethe. No record of the spoken defence survives, making this printed text the only first-hand witness to the examination. This copy is exceptional for both rarity and preservation, still in its original temporary wrappers.
The first edition of Goethe’s Werther: Among the finest copies imaginable
This is the true first printing of Goethe’s Werther.
Werther appeared in 1774, when Goethe was twenty-five, and immediately made him one of the central literary figures of Europe. It lifted an ambitious young lawyer from Frankfurt to the front rank of living writers, and its hero soon became a figure readers imitated, defended, condemned, dressed like, pitied and feared. Based in part on the Wetzlar circle of Charlotte Buff and Johann Christian Kestner, and on the 1772 suicide of Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, the novel turned private experience into one of the defining works of European sensibility and Sturm und Drang literature. The first edition was also immediately controversial. The book was banned in Leipzig in 1775 and elsewhere soon after, amid fears that it encouraged imitative suicide. The later term “Werther effect” derives from this reception history. Napoleon famously admired the novel and told Goethe he had read it several times, making Werther one of the rare literary works to move from private sensation to European political and cultural myth.
See also: THE SECOND PRINTING OF THE FIRST EDITION OF WERTHER
Götz von Berlichingen and Stella bound together by an early reader
The volume was assembled by an early reader, Johann Adam Heinrich von Clement, a Rhenish cloth manufacturer, whose manuscript ownership inscription it carries. The pairing is therefore not a modern collector’s construction, but an eighteenth-century act of reading. Together, the two works show Goethe at the centre of the Sturm und Drang: Götz challenging dramatic form and historical representation, Stella challenging emotional convention.
Das Römische Carneval: ‘The most luxurious edition of a single work produced during Goethe’s lifetime’
Goethe first saw the Roman Carnival during his Italian journey and returned to it with the same observational intensity he brought to architecture, ritual, nature, and daily life. The book records the annual Carnival not as antiquarian spectacle but as a living civic event. Printed in only 318 copies, it sold out at once, and Goethe himself later complained that too few copies had been made. Having given away his own copy, he could not reacquire another and was even outbid for one at auction. The present copy preserves the book in its most desirable state: contemporary interim boards, both illustrated wrappers, full uncut margins, and the complete sequence of twenty hand-coloured plates, substantially as its first subscribers received it in 1789.
See also: Das Römische Carneval: from the library of the statesman Carlo Schmid
The first separate edition of Faust: Ein Fragment. A pristine copy in a luxury doublure binding
This is the first Faust to reach the public, and the work that would occupy Goethe from youth to old age.
Torquato Tasso: The “elevated Werther”
Published in the same year as Faust. Ein Fragment, Torquato Tasso stands at another threshold in Goethe's development. If Werther made him famous and the Italian journey changed how he saw the world, Tasso is the work in which those experiences were subjected to a new discipline, among the earliest and most complete expressions of the classical ideal that would define the Weimar years.
The first edition of Faust I, in original boards
If the 1790 Fragment lets us watch Faust in the act of becoming, the first edition of 1808 presents the completed tragedy, the form through which Faust entered the literary imagination of Europe. Eighteen years separate the Fragment from this edition, across which Goethe reshaped the material into a single dramatic structure and completed the Gretchen tragedy. Asked what “idea” the work embodied, Goethe denied that there was one: “From heaven, through the world, to hell,” he told Eckermann, “would indeed be something, but this is no idea, only a course of action.”
The first edition of Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Goethe's
novel of elective affinities
Wahlverwandtschaften, “elective affinities,” was a term from chemistry for the tendency of substances to leave one combination and form another. The German also shows its parts: Wahl, choice, and Verwandtschaft, kinship. The novel unfolds in the space between them, asking whether human bonds are governed by choice or by attractions with the force of natural law.
Goethe had spent decades in the sciences, from botany and anatomy to optics and mineralogy, and here, a year before Zur Farbenlehre, he turned a scientific concept into one of the most daring literary experiments of the age. He later singled it out to Eckermann as “the only production of greater extent in which I am conscious of having laboured to set forth a pervading idea.”
See also: The first edition of Die Wahlverwandtschaften, in splendid
signed Stroobants master bindings
Zur Farbenlehre: an uncut first edition of Goethe's most
important and most controversial scientific work
Zur Farbenlehre is Goethe’s longest scientific work and, in his own estimate, his finest achievement. It is the culmination of the optical studies he had begun with the Beyträge zur Optik of 1791, and one of the grandest material productions in his lifetime bibliography. This copy is especially desirable in its physical state: a complete three-volume set, uniformly bound, entirely uncut, and retaining the original wrappers bound in. The separate plate volume is the part most often lacking, and a complete copy must include it.
The first edition of the first version of Wilhelm Meisters
Wanderjahre
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre is not a simple sequel to the Lehrjahre but something stranger and more radical.
Illustrated Prachtausgabe of Hermann und Dorothea
The illustrated royal-8vo Prachtausgabe of Herman und Dorothea with four copperplates after Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the Younger, engraved by Martin Esslinger. In a signed dark-blue grained-leather Kunsteinband by Karl Ebert, München.
The posthumous first separate edition of Faust II, completed by Goethe shortly before his death
Faust II is the close of Goethe’s longest imaginative labour, a project begun in the 1770s and completed only near the end of his life. Finished in the summer of 1831, it was withheld and issued only after his death. Goethe told Zelter that the Second Part was now complete in itself and that he would put a seal on it; he never saw it as a separate printed book. The 1833 Cotta edition is therefore the first separate appearance of his last dramatic act.
The Doves Press Faust, both parts among only twenty-five sets on vellum
This vellum set is the Doves Press answer to Faust as world monument. By the time Cobden-Sanderson printed it, the press had already placed Dante, Milton and the English Bible within its canon; this Faust is, beside the Bible, among the principal achievements of the Doves Press, and to add Goethe was to make a world-literary claim of the first order.
The West-östlicher Divan: One of only 100 copies
Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan is the most concrete poetic embodiment of his idea of Weltliteratur. To Eckermann in 1827 he declared that the epoch of world literature was at hand; in the Divan itself he wrote that Orient and Occident were no longer to be separated. This copy was printed for Richard Laukhuff in Cleveland, whose bookstore became a conduit for modern and avant-garde European literature in the American Midwest. The binding, signed by Carl Sonntag Jr. of Leipzig, is original vellum with gilt fillets and gilt title to the cover.
See also: Die West-östlicher Divan in Carl Sonntag Jr. Morocco Binding
The Doves Press: Iphigenie auf Tauris
Few Goethe texts better suit the Doves ideal, Iphigenie auf Tauris is his most serene classical drama, Greek myth turned into a play of restraint, humane reason and reconciliation. The Doves Press, founded by Cobden-Sanderson with Emery Walker, pursued an equally severe ideal of pure typography and proportion. Cobden-Sanderson's principle that "the Book Beautiful" must be beautiful as a whole finds an exact embodiment here.
The Doves Press Auserlesene Lieder: one of only ten on vellum
Unlike the great Goethe editions that preserve a single work, Auserlesene Lieder, Gedichte und Balladen is a posthumous anthology conceived by the Doves Press itself. Rather than reproducing an earlier collection, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson selected and arranged Goethe's lyric poems, songs and ballads into what he called "Ein Strauß"–a bouquet–forming a single artistic composition rather than a mere gathering of favourite poems. The volume presents Goethe as the supreme lyric poet, whose songs, meditations and ballads accompany the reader through every stage of life.
The Ernst-Ludwig-Presse Lieder
Goethe's Lieder, printed by the Ernst-Ludwig-Presse for Kurt Wolff in 1920, presents Goethe's lyric poetry in the intimate format of the Stundenbücher series. One of 350 copies on handmade paper, this example is especially desirable for its remarkably fresh original blue Morocco binding, whose colour and gilt decoration are usually found faded.
The Bremer Presse Urfaust: one of 270 copies.
This is neither the completed Faust nor the 1790 Fragment, but the earliest stratum of the work, the pre-classical text that survives only because Luise von Göchhausen, a lady-in-waiting at the Weimar court, made a private copy of Goethe's early manuscript: the original was lost, and the Göchhausen copy was rediscovered in 1887. When the Bremer presse published the Urfaust in 1920, the rediscovered text had been known for little more than thirty years.