Gothic Supernatural Horror Fantasy Hoffman Leather Limited Ed. Romantic Era 1950
HOFFMAN (1776 - 1822) was a GERMAN ROMANTIC author of FANTASY and GOTHIC HORROR, composer, music critic and artist. Beyond his horror tales he is most remembered for his novella THE NUTCRACKER and the Mouse King, on which TCHAIKOVSKY's ballet The Nutcracker is based. His stories form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which Hoffmann appears (heavily fictionalized) as the hero. Hoffmann's stories highly influenced 19th-century literature, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement. Translated by various hands, edited and with an introduction by J.
Published by Theodore Brun Limited in conjunction with The Bodley Head, London, 1950. This Limited de Luxe Edition is published by special arrangement with Messrs. John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd. London, and appears simultaneously with their first edition. Two hundred copies have been printed for sale.
In addition, ten copies, numbered I to X, have been struck off as presentation copies. Very good, front hinge cracked but holding well, clean unmarked text, no signatures. Gilt illustration on front board and spine, top page edges gilt, sewn in ribbon bookmark, marbled endpapers, in text illustrations by Gavarni. Contains 5 stories: The Golden Pot; The Sandman; The Deed of Entail; The Story of Krespel; Mlle de Scuderi. From the original SPECTATOR review: The illustrations by Gavarni which adorn the volume are reproduced from a French edition of the eighteen-forties-though adorn is scarcely the word, for the artist has entered so completely into Hoffmann's twilight world, in which nightmare grotesques and visions of strange beauty intrude without warning upon sober day- light reality, that his drawings are an integral part of the stories themselves. Hoffmann's interest for his contemporaries lay precisely in this power to make the supernatural and the macabre credible by such a strong admixture of realism, such a wealth of circumstan- tial detail, that the reader is never quite sure on which plane he finds himself. He left his traces on the work of Edgar Allan Poe : his Fraulein von Scudery is the first detective story. But it is not so much as the inaugurator of the mystery-story and the thriller that he fascinates us today, but rattier as the forerunner of Kafka and of the Rilke of Mahe Laurids Brigge. Cohen puts it in his admirably brief but informative introduction, the first of the hallucinated. His belief that the fantasies of our waking hours are intimations of a higher reality should commend him. To addicts of our present-day " metaphysicals, " as should his preoccupa- tion with problems of consciousness to the Freudians. GOTHIC SUPERNATURAL HORROR FANTASY HOFFMAN LEATHER LIMITED ED.