Category Archive: Bookseller

A few years ago, I wrote about an early piece of English lithographed music, from the 1820s. As I said at the time, British music publishers largely neglected lithography in the first four decades of the nineteenth century, but it did serve its purpose well for William Hawkes Smith’s privately-printed music with his own illustrations […]

Last year, I was delighted to be able to join the Grolier Club, America’s oldest bibliophilic society. Every year, the Club runs an exhibition for new members, an opportunity for other members, and the wider world, to a get a glimpse into a wide range of private collections. Due to the pandemic restrictions, it was […]

I had a very nice response to last week’s post, on Anna Akhmatova. This week, I thought I’d write about another poet I have translated: Gottfried Benn. I originally came across his first published poem sequence, Morgue (1912), when I was at university and had always been disappointed at other English translations which, to me […]

As many will know, ephemera has been an interest of mine since I set up the business (ten years ago this year!). Recently, I discovered a genre of which I was previously unaware: fancy printed greetings cards from eighteenth-century Germany, using colour and silk. Here is a New Year’s card, the etching printed in blue, […]

Among the Faust–related items included in our Anglo-German Cultural Relations catalogue, item 214 may be the most charming. Faust and ‘Phisto is a cheeky example of Victorian Goetheana that appeared in the Sixteenth Season of Beeton’s Christmas Annual (London, Ward, Lock, and Tyler, 1875). ‘In “Faust and ’Phisto” Goethe’s famous creation will be adapted and […]

German interest in folksongs began in the middle of the eighteenth century, stoked in no small part by the Europe-wide mania for Ossian.  Thomas Percy’s influential Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) was also much admired, and the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who had been sent a copy by Rudolf Erich Raspe (of Munchausen fame) […]