MENDELSSOHN, Moses (1729–1786)

Phädon, oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele, in drey Gesprächen. Carlsruhe: in der Schmiederischen Buchhandlung, [c. 1780].

Details

Undated Carlsruhe Schmieder printing of Moses Mendelssohn's Phädon — also searchable as Phaedon or Phadon — his celebrated Enlightenment dialogue on the immortality of the soul, inspired by Plato's Phaedo. With engraved frontispiece portrait of Mendelssohn, title-page printed in German blackletter with woodcut ornament, and the imprint "Carlsruhe, in der Schmiederischen Buchhandlung."

Octavo, approximately 17 cm. Engraved portrait frontispiece; [xii] preliminary pages in this copy; Leben und Charakter des Sokrates, pp. [1]–52; Phädon, pp. [1]–224, including the Anhang. Einige Einwürfe betreffend, die dem Verfasser gemacht worden sind. The volume is sometimes summarized as an engraved frontispiece portrait with [xii], 224 pages of Phädon text, but the present description also records the separately paginated Socrates section that precedes the dialogue.

Mendelssohn's Phädon first appeared in 1767 and became one of the defining philosophical works of the German Enlightenment. The work recasts the death of Socrates and the question of the soul's immortality for an eighteenth-century public, joining rational philosophy, moral instruction, and religious argument in one of Mendelssohn's most influential books.

The separately paginated Leben und Charakter des Sokrates is integral to the design of the volume. It frames Socrates not merely as Plato's speaker, but as the moral exemplar through whom reason, virtue, death, and immortality are dramatized. The Carlsruhe printing thus preserves the full moral-philosophical architecture of the work: Socrates first presented as character and example, then as the central figure of the dialogue.

The title-page bears the formula "Mit allerhöchst-gnädigst Kayserl. Privilegio." This copy belongs to the eighteenth-century German Nachdruck economy, in which major Enlightenment texts were reprinted and redistributed beyond their original publishing centres. The privilege formula is a striking reminder of the territorial character of German book privileges before the consolidation of modern copyright.

Later green patterned cloth, covers with blind-stamped floral design, spine ruled in gilt and lettered "Mendelssohns Phädon." The binding is later, probably nineteenth century, and should not be described as the original eighteenth-century binding.

Bibliographical Note

Corresponds to H.M.Z. Meyer, Moses Mendelssohn Bibliographie, no. 148, by the diagnostic setting of the preliminary Vorrede leaf, signed 2 and with catchword "Men-." Meyer distinguishes this issue from Meyer 147, also a Carlsruhe Schmieder issue, in which Blatt 2 has sixteen lines of text and the catchword "nes."*

Meyer records no. 148 with the series title Sammlung der besten deutschen Schriftsteller und Dichter. Hundertster Teil. Mendelssohns Schriften. That series title leaf is not present in this copy. The copy should therefore be described as corresponding to Meyer 148 by setting, apparently lacking the series title leaf recorded by Meyer.

Provenance

William and Marianne Salloch, New York and Ossining, N.Y., with their engraved bookplate to the front pastedown. The Salloch provenance is a significant modern association for this copy. William and Marianne Salloch were German émigré scholar-booksellers and founding members of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America. William Salloch later served as ABAA president from 1970 to 1972 and as a member of the ILAB committee from 1975.

Their biography gives the ownership particular force. William Salloch was trained in medieval language and literature in Germany, and Marianne Blum Salloch was also a scholar. William's expected career in the German scholarly-library world was blocked after 1933 because Marianne was of Jewish origin; the couple emigrated to the United States in 1936 and founded William Salloch. Old, Rare and Scholarly Books in New York in 1939. Their firm became one of the distinguished postwar American antiquarian houses, especially associated with incunabula, manuscripts, Renaissance and Baroque literature, humanism, religious thought, and scholarly books.

The Sallochs' catalogues were themselves an important part of their legacy. They issued hundreds of catalogues, many of which became reference tools rather than merely sales lists. Christie's later sold a large run of Salloch catalogues, including speciality catalogues on subjects such as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Humanism, Music, and Religious Life and Thought. That bibliographical world gives this copy a fitting afterlife: a German Enlightenment text on Socrates, reason, and immortality preserved in the library of booksellers whose professional practice was devoted to the description and transmission of European learned culture.

The connection is especially resonant for Mendelssohn. Phädon is one of the central works of the German Enlightenment, recasting Plato's account of Socrates' death into an eighteenth-century argument for the immortality of the soul. In the Salloch provenance, Mendelssohn's world of reason, moral philosophy, toleration, and Jewish participation in German literary culture meets a later history of exile, scholarship, and the transplantation of European book culture to America.

The Salloch association also touches the twentieth-century afterlife of Enlightenment thought. During the wartime émigré circulation of Horkheimer and Adorno's Philosophische Fragmente, the preliminary form of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the Institute for Social Research considered selling copies through "Salloch or other agents," and correspondence about the project involved Marianne Salloch. This does not connect the present copy directly to Horkheimer or Adorno, but it gives the Salloch bookplate unusual intellectual resonance: an eighteenth-century work of Enlightenment rational religion later owned by booksellers who also stood near the émigré circulation of Enlightenment's twentieth-century critique.

After the deaths of Marianne in 1989 and William in 1990, Salloch material was dispersed through Christie's sales in 1991. Their remaining stock and personal collections were offered at Christie's South Kensington in the sale Printed Books; The Salloch Collection, 31 October–1 November 1991, while other Salloch books appeared in Christie's New York sales earlier that year. The present Phädon has not yet been traced to a specific Salloch sale lot, and is therefore described here by the secure evidence of the bookplate rather than by an unproven auction-lot history.

Old ownership signature to front free endpaper.

Literature

H.M.Z. Meyer, Moses Mendelssohn Bibliographie, no. 148; cf. no. 147. For the southwest-German Nachdruck context, see Bernd Breitenbruch, "Der Karlsruher Buchhändler Christian Gottlieb Schmieder und der Nachdruck in Südwestdeutschland im letzten Viertel des 18. Jahrhunderts," Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, vol. 9.

Condition

In age-consistent antiquarian condition, with legible text and a structurally sound binding; contents spotted and browned.

Significance

A compelling copy of Mendelssohn's Phädon, joining three histories in one object: the German Enlightenment's recasting of Socrates and the immortality of the soul; the eighteenth-century Nachdruck trade that widened access to major philosophical texts; and the modern antiquarian afterlife of European learned culture in the library of William and Marianne Salloch.

In short: a German Enlightenment Nachdruck with a German émigré scholar-bookseller provenance — Mendelssohn's eighteenth-century culture of reason preserved in the twentieth-century exile republic of books.