Rare Books Berlin - Internationale Messe für Bücher und Graphik

Kleist, Heinrich von

Erzählungen. 2 Theile in 2 Bänden. Berlin, Realschulbuchhandlung, 1810. 8vo. 1 Bl., 342 S.; 1 Bl., 240 S. Hldr d. Zeit. m. dezenter Rückenvergoldung u. RSchild. Gelbschnitt.

Sachgebiete: Erstausgaben, Literatur bis ca. 1900

28.07.2026 - 19:23

Antiquariat Düwal

Robert Wiene

Still from “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (Ca. 1920.). Original, vintage black and white photography. 215 × 155 mm. Notes and marks in blue crayon, traces of the mounting on verso. Trace of folding to the upper left edge. Small damage at lower right corner. Overall a very good copy. Vintage still from the legendary German Expressionist horror movie, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”. The image shows the scene when the scary looking, black clothed Cesare (Conrad Veidt) is kidnapping Jane (Lil Dagover) who is sleeping in a white night gown. “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” is a 1920 German silent horror movie, written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer and directed by Robert Wiene.

Sachgebiete: Film, Moderne Kunst, Photographie

28.07.2026 - 19:15

7000,- EUR

Foldvaribooks

(Kleist, Heinrich von)

Die Familie Schroffenstein. Ein Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen. Bern und Zürch (Zürich), Heinrich Gessner, 1803. 8vo. 1 Bl., 265 S. Halblelder d. Zeit. m. Rückenschild. Gesprenkelter Schnitt.

Sachgebiete: Erstausgaben, Literatur bis ca. 1900

28.07.2026 - 19:13

8800,- EUR

Antiquariat Düwal

DIX, Otto.

Der Krieg. Berlin: Karl Nierendorf, 1924. ¶ Folio. Comprising 51 etchings with drypoint and aquatint, in 5 paper wrappers, with tissue guards. In the five original grey cloth boxes, string-ties, front covers lettered in black. All housed in a custom purple quarter morocco solander box by the Chelsea Bindery. “Soldat und Nonne” print with residue from mounting, all other plates, wrappers, and boxes in fine condition; some creasing to tissue guards. ¶ First edition, number 57 of 70 portfolios, comprising the full published suite of 50 etchings and the additional 51st print, “Soldat und Nonne”, all signed by the artist; in the five original paper wrappers (each signed and numbered) and boxes as issued. Der Krieg is perhaps the most significant artistic response to the First World War, the 20th-century equivalent of Goya’s Disasters of War. Published on the tenth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, the sequence was based on Dix’s service as a front-line gunner in the German Army from 1915 to 1918. “The fifty etchings of this cycle represent Dix's central achievement as a graphic artist... nihilistic landscapes, brutalised soldiery, obscene prostitutes and decaying corpses transmuted into figures of Death, are portrayed with a merciless candour. One print, “Soldat und Nonne”, depicting a nun endeavouring to repel a soldier intent on raping her, was evidently too disturbing and had to be withdrawn from the published edition... Critical acclaim for the prints was enormous, and the portfolios were exhibited in Berlin, Vienna, Breslau, Wiesbaden and elsewhere. More than any other comparable publication, it was regarded as capturing the traumatic experiences of the First World War, which had been horrific, bitter, revolting and occasionally wryly humorous, but never glorious” (Carey, p. 184). It met with fierce resistance from German nationalist circles; in 1937, a complete set was included in the Nazi “Degenerate Art” exhibition. ¶ The “Soldat und Nonne” print is numbered 56 of 70; they do not typically match the portfolio number. ¶ Provenance: Richard Harris, collector of works on death and mortality, who acquired it from C. G. Boerner of Düsseldorf; exhibited at the London Wellcome Collection’s “Death: A Self-Portrait”, 15 November 2012 to 24 February 2013 and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “World War I and the Visual Arts”, 31 July 2017 to 7 January 2018; sold at Harris’s sale at Bonhams, 9 May 2023, lot 6. ¶ Karsch, Otto Dix: Das graphische Werk, 70-120. Frances Carey, The Print in Germany, 1880-1933, 1984.

Sachgebiete: Deutschland, Geschichte, Illustrierte Bücher, Moderne Kunst, Weltkrieg

28.07.2026 - 19:11

450000,- EUR

Peter Harrington

DACIER, Anne Lefèvre (trans.); HOMER.

L’Iliade [and] L’Odyséé, traduite en françois, avec des remarques. Paris: Rigaud, 1711-16. ¶ 2 works in 6 vols, duodecimo (158 x 89 mm). Engraved frontispiece to first vols. of both works by Antoine Coypel, Iliad with 25 engraved plates after Bernard Picart, 2 folding plates depicting Achilles’s shield (one after Vleughels), Odyssey with 24 engraved plates after Coenraad Farret and Wouter Jongman, printer’s device of the Imprimerie Royale to title pages, woodcut initials, head- and tailpieces. Near-contemporary red morocco, spines lettered in gilt, compartments filled with a repeated sprig tool, the initial “B” tooled at foot of spines, triple gilt fillet with corner rosettes to boards, gilt inner dentelles, blue coated endpapers, edges gilt, blue bookmarkers. Front inner hinges of vols IV and V cracked but firm, ink mark to fore edge of vol. I pp. iii-xii, lower corner of vol. VI p. 543 chipped, no loss to text. A very good set indeed in the period binding. ¶ First Dacier editions, extra-illustrated, in beautifully preserved early 18th-century morocco bindings. This exceptional set features the full suite of Picart plates, not issued in all copies of the Iliad, two folding plates depicting the Shield of Achilles from Boivin’s Apologie d'Homère (1715), and the plates issued in the Amsterdam 1731 edition of Dacier’s Odyssey. Dacier’s celebrated translation into French of the Homeric epics, the first by a woman, cemented her place among the foremost classical scholars of her day. The only daughter of the noted Hellenist Tanneguy Lefèvre, Dacier (c.1654-1720) began translating classical works from an early age, beginning with Callimachus and progressing to versions of the poems of Anacreon and Sappho. In 1683 she married her father’s protégé André Dacier, who was a member of the French Academy and who also produced a number of translations, though acknowledged to be of inferior quality to his wife’s works. She was a staunch champion of Homer in the Ancients and Moderns debate, in which she defended his works against what she saw as the contemporary decline in standards of taste. Despite her literary feuds with fellow figures such as Antoine Houdar de la Motte and Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe, and her differences with Alexander Pope, with whom she fundamentally disagreed on how best to approach translating Homer, she was held in extremely high regard by her contemporaries. Even those with whom she fell out “demonstrably regarded her as the eminent authority she deserved to be” (Weinbrot, p. 1). Her professional accomplishments and fine translations were referred to whenever an argument was made in favour of scholarly female education, and she is one of the “distinguished women” featured in Mary Hay’s Female Biography (1803). ¶ H. D. Weinbrot, “Alexander Pope and Madame Dacier's Homer”, Huntington Library Quarterly 62, no. 1/2, 1999.

Sachgebiete: Antike, Altphilologie, Griechenland, Illustrierte Bücher, Literatur bis ca. 1900

28.07.2026 - 18:51

9000,- EUR

Peter Harrington

CHAGALL, Marc.v

Cirque. Paris: Tériade Éditeur, 1967. ¶ Folio. Complete with 38 original lithographs, including 23 in colours on vélin d’Arches paper, 3 double page. Sheet sizes: 42.5 x 32.5 cm or 42.5 x 65 cm. Text in French. Original cream wrappers covered in glassine, lettering to front cover in black, sheets loose as issued. All housed in the original cream cloth chemise with slipcase, lettering to spine gilt and further housed in a dark blue flat-back cloth box by the Chelsea Bindery. A couple of light marks to the slipcase, otherwise a fine copy. ¶ First edition, number 239 of 250 copies signed by the artist; a complete copy of one of the most beautiful illustrated books of the late 20th century. The spectacle of the circus was central to Chagall’s personal mythology. “A circus is disturbing. It is profound”, he wrote. “A timeless dancing game where tears and smiles, the play of arms and legs take the form of a great art” (quoted in Baal-Teshuva). Chagall first produced a suite of circus artworks at the behest of his publisher, Ambroise Vollard, himself a great aficionado of the circus. Vollard offered Chagall the use of his personal box at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris and Chagall was “childishly delighted” with the experience. “The distortions, the violations of normalcy, the clowns... the equilibrists, flying angels, pathetic monsters - all these creatures seemed to have crept out of Chagall’s pictures into the ring. They were naturally Chagallian” (Sidney, p. 292). The 19 gouaches produced for Vollard formed the basis of Cirque, a masterpiece of colour lithography with text written by Chagall, published by Efstratios Eleftheriades, one of Paris’s premier tastemakers. “These clowns, bareback riders and acrobats have themselves at home in my visions”, reminisced Chagall. “Why? Why am I so touched by their make-up and their grimaces? With them I can move toward new horizons. Lured by their colours and make-up, I can dream of painting new psychic distortions” (quoted in Baal-Teshuva). ¶ Cramer Books 68; Mourlot 490-527. Alexander Sidney, Marc Chagall: a Biography, 1978; J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, 1995.

Sachgebiete: Handzeichnungen, Expressionismus, Illustrierte Bücher, Moderne Kunst

28.07.2026 - 18:40

210000,- EUR

Peter Harrington

BENJAMIN, Walter.

Einbahnstrasse. Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt, 1928. ¶ Octavo. Original photomontage wrappers with flaps over blue card, printed in red, white, and black. Housed in custom black quarter morocco chemise with grey board sides, and grey board slipcase, by Devauchelle. Wrappers bright, a couple of shallow chips to edges, small puncture to rear wrapper, front joint and front flap fold partially split, brown spot to fore edge. A very good copy of this fragile publication. ¶ Scarce first edition of the philosopher’s literary reflections, his only non-academic work that he lived to see published. “In its typeface and format - a photomontage by Sasha Stone adorns the cover - as well as in its fragmentary style, it is demonstrably one of the most significant products of the German language avant-garde in the 1920s” (Witte, p. 91). This work denounces the “pretentious, universal gesture of the book” to champion the immediacy of language in flitting fragments of text - street signs, leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. The medium of Einbahnstrasse reflects this message: the typography and layout are inspired by Bauhaus and constructivist aesthetics, while the street-scene cover design has become the most famous work of the Russian-born photographer Sasha Stone. Since writing his postdoctoral work The Origin of German Tragic Drama in 1925, Benjamin had became a prominent cultural critic and “a prolific book-reviewer, travel-reporter, and radio-scriptwriter, forsaking his more esoteric diction for an often disconcertingly concrete language, metaphysical for more topical terrains” (publisher’s note, 1997, p. 33). “The pivotal position of One-Way Street within Benjamin’s work, however, is not due only to its compact register of the sudden mutation in his critical, aesthetic, and political opinions in the mid-twenties. It above all lies in the fact that in the same swift movement with which Benjamin passed from the banks of tradition to those of the avant-garde, he also discovered the heuristic method that was to be peculiarly his thereafter - ‘the attempt to establish,’ as he would later write, ‘the image of history even in its most inconspicuous fixtures of existence, its rejects’. The kaleidoscope of urban objects, warnings, buildings, amusements, signs was designed to throw sudden light on the modern epoch” (publisher’s note, 1997, p. 35). The one-way street Benjamin leads the reader through acts as a panorama of 1920s Germany, terminating at the planetarium, “a space from which to look up - whether to the heavens or the cosmos - and recall what we cannot see” (Wallace, p. 284). Among this montage’s flashes of essays are “Fire Alarm”, "Imperial Panorama", “Monument to a Warrior”, and “Principles of the Weighty Tome, or How to Write Fat Books”. This copy is from the significant collection of Pierre Bergé (1930-2017), the co-founder of Yves Saint Laurent, with his book label loosely inserted. ¶ “Publisher’s Note”, One-Way Street, and Other Writings, 1997; Jack Wallace, “Book Review”, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 101, No. 1, February 2015; Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, 1991.

Sachgebiete: Deutschland, Literaturwissenschaft, Literatur ab ca. 1900, Philosophie

28.07.2026 - 18:35

15000,- EUR

Peter Harrington

Fallada, Hans

Der junge Goedeschal. Ein Pubertätsroman von Hans Fallada. Zweite Auflage. Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, 1920. First edition(?). Association copy, inscribed by the author to his sister. Bookplate of Margarete Bechert (supposedly Fallada’s niece) on the front flyleaf. In contemporary half cloth. 340 [2] p. In contemporary or slightly later half-cloth binding, with the original printed paper wrapper mounted on the front panel. Water stain at the gutter on the first leaves; the fourth leaf reinforced with fabric tape. Otherwise in fine condition. Fallada’s debut novel, inscribed to his sister; from the collection of the author’s niece. Inscribed by Hans Fallada to his sister, “Meiner Schwester Dete” (Margarete Bechert), and signed as “R. H. Ditzen-Fallada” (his real name was Rudolf Ditzen). Although “Zweite Auflage” (second edition) is printed on the title page, it is known that due to the novel's lack of success, Rowohlt did not reprint it after the initial run of 2,000 copies. Instead, they masked this by using fictitious edition statements, as noted by Dünnebier: “da dem Roman wenig Erfolg beschieden war und nach der ersten Auflage von 2000 Exemplaren nicht wieder nachgedruckt wurde, kaschierte Rowohlt den Mißerfolg mit fingierten Auflagenangaben” (Dünnebier).

Sachgebiete: Literatur ab ca. 1900

28.07.2026 - 18:24

5000,- EUR

Foldvaribooks