Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Tauchnitz
Nearly finished reading a fascinating little find at the bookshop next to Earlsfield Station; well worth the £1 I paid for it and fits in well with the current fad for things old German. 'The Lugwigs of Bavaria' by one Henry Channon and being volume 5,216 in the Tauchnitz Edition collection of British and American authors, published in 1934. Dedicated to Diana Cooper, presumably the famous Diana Duff-Cooper of that era. This particular example originally sold in 1943 in Frankfurt (M), presumably the one on the Main rather than the other one, and to someone who appears to think that the place is spelt 'Frankfürt', a point on which Google, for once, is agnostic.
Apart from being an interesting read about the later and often eccentric (or worse) Wittelsbachs, the wrapping of the book is a mine of information in itself.
Point 1, the Germans must have been a cultured bunch to be reading so much stuff in English. Hard to imagine an English publisher knocking out a 6,000 volume collection of books in German. The French too, as Librairie Gaulon & Fils of Rue Madame in Paris, had a license to sell the things in France. There is, however, an instruction that the book is not to be introduced into the British Empire or the USA. The 'and U.S.A' of the original being a rare lapse. Perhaps I should report the man in Earlsfield to the trading standards people.
Point 2, despite it being 1943, it was still possible to buy a book in Germany which in the catalogue of the collection at the back, included a couple of books by one Israel Zangwill and some more by a chap called Oscar Wilde. Even some D. H. Lawrence. I had thought that all mention of people of this sort had been expunged from the bookshops of the Third Reich.
Point 3, while the catalogue does include real books by the likes of Shakespeare, the bulk of it appears to be pot boilers, murder stories, romances and such like. Books which probably sold millions in their day and would now be hard to get hold of. The back cover features Winnie-the-Pooh with the original illustrations and 'The Techniques of Marriage' by Mary Borden, the distinguished novelist of the US of A.
# posted by Jim @ 3:16 AM 
