Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
18th February 2020
Of the Werther-related items in Anglo-German Cultural Relations, item 37 stands out as particularly striking and visual: a group of three etchings with stipple by Bartolozzi after Bunbury and Ramberg, each illustrating a scene from the novel. Goethe’s influential novel first appeared in English, via a French translation, in 1779, and soon grabbed the attention […]
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4th February 2020
A major theme of this latest catalogue, Anglo-German Cultural Relations, is, perhaps predictably, translation. One of the most significant examples in the catalogue is an English translation of Benedikte Naubert‘s historical novel Alf von Dülmen (1791) or, as it is titled in English, Alf von Deulmen [sic]; or, the History of the Emperor Philip, and […]
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26th November 2019
In our recent e-list, we featured what the great William Trevor once called ‘The jewel at the heart of English comic literature’, and one of our favourite recent acquisitions: George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody. This copy is the first edition in book form, first issue (with the final leaf of adverts […]
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16th October 2019
We have just released a new e-list relating to Anglomanie, or the madness for all things English in 18th-century France, and figured we would share with our readers one of our favourites from the list: Nancy, published in 1767 by François-Thomas-Marie de Baculard d’Arnaud (1718–1805). Our copy is bound with another of his novels, Lucie […]
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2nd March 2016
Regular readers will know of my interest in the history of the reception of English literature abroad. But I’ve never come across this before: a case of the translation preserving a text, when the English original is lost. This is the first edition in German of The Man of Honour, or the History of Harry Waters […]
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24th September 2015
A couple of years ago, I wrote about a piece of music written in celebration of Russia’s victory over Napoleon in 1812. Here’s another book produced in the wake of the campaign, but this time it’s a novel. In fact, according to Anthony Cross (The Russian Theme in English Literature, p. 23), it’s the first English […]
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