Tag Archive: 0germany

Kaspar Hauser (d.1833) was a foundling who became legendary in early nineteenth-century Europe; ‘the enigma of [his] origin, childhood, and early youth, and the known facts have aroused sustained interest … on the purely human, psychological, and social, as well as political, level’ ever since (Oxford Companion to German Literature). The author of this book, […]

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Notgeld. Everyone knows, or thinks they know, the catastrophic German hyperinflation of the early 1920s, thanks to photographs of people pushing wheelbarrows full of money, or burning bundles of worthless banknotes as fuel.  But there was another pecuniary phenomenon to come out of those years: Notgeld, or ‘emergency […]

During the lockdown, I started work on some larger cataloguing projects.  One of them is an extraordinary collection of German Notgeld, the ‘emergency money’ which originated, out of necessity, during the First World War, but which later became a way for towns to try and make some money in the early Twenties (before hyperinflation took hold) […]

Who doesn’t love a good wedding? And, more importantly, who doesn’t love a good party favour? Here’s a fun party favour of sorts we’ve recently stumbled across, and included in our latest e-list: the Hochzeitszeitung, or ‘wedding newspaper’. It is a genre of occasional printing found in German-speaking countries. Normally they are bespoke, something to […]

As I write this the sun is streaming in the window of our Chesham office. Spring, it seems, is finally upon us, which means something even more exciting is just around the corner: the 2019 New York Antiquarian…

There’s nothing better than finding a cheeky marginal doodle or two, and that’s what we found when we picked up an otherwise nondescript copy of Julius Stinde’s Buchholzens in Italien at a recent fair. First published anonymously in Berlin in 1883, Stinde’s satirical…