Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. Erster und zweiter Theil. Leipzig, Weygand'sche Buchhandlung, 1774.
Second printing of the first edition, issued in the same year, two parts in one volume. It is the Doppeldruck of the first edition recorded by Hagen, which corrects all the printing errors listed in the first printing and, in place of the errata notice on the final page, carries a woodcut of a scythe with a winged hourglass. Small octavo (160 × 93 mm).
Contemporary blond calf, the spine richly gilt with floral tooling (front joint slightly cracked; otherwise a very good copy).
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For the history of the novel and the significance of the 1774 first edition, see our listing of the first printing.
This copy belongs to that first year of reception, before Werther had become a classic, a school text, or a monument of German literature.
It was still a contemporary work moving rapidly through the hands of readers eager to encounter the book everyone was discussing, and the contemporary blond calf gives it a distinctly eighteenth-century presence, an object rooted in the year of publication and the reception that immediately followed.
PROVENANCE
The Heribert Tenschert Collection.
REFERENCES
Hagen 80 (the D1a Doppeldruck); Goedeke IV/3, 163; Kippenberg I, 3039; Hirzel A 60; Speck 794.
J. P. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe; M. Swales, Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther (Cambridge, 1987); T. J. Reed, The Classical Centre (Oxford, 1980).
