Lieder. Darmstadt, Ernst-Ludwig-Presse for the Kurt Wolff Verlag, Munich, 1920.

One of 350 copies on handmade paper, printed in red and black as the second Stundenbuch für Kurt Wolff. 135 pp. Octavo (181 × 120 mm).

Blue original morocco with multiple gilt fillets and gilt title to the upper cover, all edges gilt (wonderfully preserved; the morocco notably fresh, gilt and edges in excellent state).

In 1920 Kurt Wolff launched Die Stundenbücher, a series of finely printed literary books whose title evokes the medieval Book of Hours. Instead of prayers, the volumes offered poems and literary texts by Goethe, Trakl, Tagore, Jammes, Eichendorff, Mörike, Hölderlin and others.

Wolff, the Munich publisher associated with Kafka and Expressionism, here turns from the avant-garde toward canonical possession, presenting Goethe's songs not as a trade text but as a perfected bibliophile object. The Ernst-Ludwig-Presse was one of the central German private presses of the early twentieth century; Friedrich Wilhelm and C. H. Kleukens shaped its typographic identity and Emil Preetorius supplied the binding design, modern German book art applying its full ceremonial apparatus to Goethe's lyric canon. 

The rich blue morocco binding is among the edition's defining features. Yet copies are almost invariably encountered with faded leather and dulled gilt. Here the colour remains remarkably vivid and the gilt exceptionally fresh, preserving the visual effect on which the whole conception of the Stundenbücher depended.

PROVENANCE

The Heribert Tenschert Collection.

REFERENCES

Julius Rodenberg, Deutsche Pressen (Zurich, 1925), pp. 74, 77 (the second of the ten Stundenbücher für Kurt Wolff); C. H. Kleukens, Dreissig Jahre Ernst-Ludwig-Presse 1907–1937; Neue Deutsche Biographie, s.v. Friedrich Wilhelm Kleukens and Emil Preetorius; standard bibliographies of the Stundenbücher für Kurt Wolff.