Mystery Promotional Copy of Sebald’s Vertigo

I now own a mildly mysterious copy of W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo as published by New Directions.  An alert reader of this blog noted that elsewhere I had written: “Curiously, Vertigo is the only one of Sebald’s major books for which I have never seen a British or American proof or advanced readers copy offered for sale. I wonder if one even exists.”   He saw just such a title advertised for sale and let me know so that I was able to buy it for my collection.

New Directions published the first American edition of Vertigo sometime in 2000 (the New York Times reviewed it June 11, 2000).  More than a year later, when they finally decided to release a soft cover edition, New Directions seems to have sent out an unknown number of advance promotional copies to promote the forthcoming soft cover version – using copies of the hard cover edition.  They simply took a jacket-less hard cover copy, slapped a small image of the book’s cover and two pre-printed stickers on the front cover, and then stapled a single page from their October newsletter into the front endpaper.  Unfortunately, it probably isn’t possible to know if this copy is from the first or second New Directions printing, because New Directions places information about subsequent printings of hard cover editions on the dust jacket – not in the book itself as most publishers do.  Note that the upper sticker misspells the name of the British publisher Harvill.

The mini-book cover for Vertigo that is pasted onto the promotional copy above presents another – admittedly minor – puzzle.  Semadar Megged’s front cover designs for the hard cover and soft cover editions of Vertigo (shown below) are essentially the same with only minor changes to adjust for the smaller cover area of about three quarters of an inch in both directions.  Although it is closer to the dust jacket of the hard cover edition since it does not reproduce the blurb by Richard Eder that appears in the final design of the soft cover edition, the cover shown above differs from the final designs of both hard cover and soft cover.   If you look closely you will see that the relationship between the text and the photograph of the volcano does not match the final designs and we see a second peak to the left of the spewing volcano.

Left: hard cover

Right: soft cover

Reading Sebald With Scissors

Here’s a must-read over at The Morning News: Reading with Scissors by Elizabeth Kiem.  A nice account of one writer’s growing obsession for the books of W.G. Sebald.

W.G. Sebald First Editions Price Lists

It was good news to learn that Book & Magazine Collector has published an overview of the published works of W.G. Sebald by Chris Griffiths in its January 2009 issue, complete with estimates of current price ranges for both first editions and limited editions.  But the bad news is that, according to the publisher’s website, the issue is already out of print and, hence, has become a collector’s item in itself.  So this becomes one more thing for serious Sebald collectors to try to track down.

Griffiths gives a concise summary Sebald’s life and then walks the reader through all of Sebald’s published monographs.  Along the way he provides some useful new information, particularly regarding the print runs of several hard-to-find Sebald editions.  Sebald provides intriguing challenges and choices to the book collector.  First there is the question of which country of origin should one collect: German, British, American or all three?  With rare exceptions, nearly all of Sebald’s books first appeared in German, but English-language collectors often prefer the English-language first editions – which are always British and are often the most expensive of the three choices.  Then there is the fact that Sebald’s first three books were literary criticism aimed at small German-language audiences.  The collector who wishes to go beyond Sebald’s volumes of prose fiction and poetry will have to spend several hundred dollars for these elusive works.

Griffiths provides current price estimates for first editions from all three countries of origin with and without dustjackets (whenever this is applicable). But unless he is referring to a signed, limited edition publication, Griffiths stays away from pricing autographed or inscribed copies of trade first editions, as well as proof copies.  For the most part, I think his price ranges are fair, albeit occasionally on the low side.  I, for one, would be delighted to find a first edition of Radical Stage: German Theatre in the 1970s and 1980s, which Sebald edited and contributed to, for the suggested price range of £25-£30.

If you can’t locate a copy of Book & Magazine Collector, the only other published source for pricing Sebald’s books is to download the Sebald Author Price Guide  issued by the book dealers Quill & Brush.  They currently list well more than 200 individual authors in their price guide series for first editions.   The Sebald guide is $3.75 and comes as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file.  It was issued in 2007 and, in general, reflects the slightly lower prices that one could expect two years ago.  It also avoids pricing several editions the authors hadn’t seen in book dealers catalogs yet.

Rilke’s Bookseller

From Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1910 novel Malte Laurids Brigge (in the old translation by M.D. Herter Norton):

Occasionally I pass by little shops – in the rue de Seine, for example.  Dealers in antiques or small second-hand booksellers or vendors of engravings with overcrowded windows.  No one ever enter their shops; they apparently do no business.  But if one looks in, they are sitting there, sitting and reading, without a care; they take no thought for the morrow, are not anxious about any success, have a dog that sits before them, all good nature, or a cat that makes the silence still greater by gliding along the rows of books, as if it were rubbing the names off their backs.

Ah, if that were enough: sometimes I would like to buy such a full shop-window for myself and to sit down behind it with a dog for twenty years.

Amen.

An Illustrated “Restitution”

Verlag Ulrich Keicher in Warmbronn, Germany has recently issued a wonderful edition of W.G. Sebald’s Zerstreute Reminiszenzen, the speech he gave on November 17, 2001 at the opening of the Stuttgarter literaturhauses.  This was published as An Attempt at Restitution in The New Yorker (December 20-27, 2004) and was anthologized in Campo Santo. What makes this publication is fun are the illustrations and the loose inserts.

The illustrations include many of the things mentioned by Sebald, from the Quelle mail-order catalog that his father showed him for Christmas 1949 to newspaper clippings (above) and photographs from the Sebald archive in Marbach.  A few sections of Sebald’s own typescript of the speech are reproduced.

To add to the fun, two facsimiles are tucked into a small pocket on the final page.  The first is a postcard of from Sebald’s collection referred to when Sebald recounts his memories of the “angular brutalist architecture” of Stuttgart Central Station (designed by Paul Bonatz).  Sebald mentions a postcard he owns

written by an English schoolgirl of about fifteen (judging from the clumsy handwriting) on holiday in Stuttgart to a Mrs. J. Winn in Saltburn in the county of Yorkshire on the back of a picture postcard, which came into my hands at the end of the 1960s in a Salvation Army junk shop in Manchester, and which shows three other tall buildings and Bonatz’s railway station…

The second inserted facsimile is Sebald’s very first entry in the literary world – a 1961 student literary magazine called Der Wecker, co-edited by Sebald and his friend Jan-Peter Tripp.  (Cover photograph below by Tripp.)  All sixteen pages are reproduced including articles on Algeria and Albert Camus and ads for beer and Coca Cola.

This small pamphlet was issued in September in an edition of 800 for only 16 Euros, but seems to be available only from the publisher.  [Note: a reader clarifies that the pamphlet is only available for purchase through the bookshop at the Stuttgart Literaturhaus - contact info@literaturhaus-stuttgart.de or fax Frau Leutner 0711-2842905.]