Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald

I recently upgraded my collection of books by W.G. Sebald by acquiring two rather hard to find copies of his 1990 book Schwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo). The first volume is one of the limited edition of 999 specially bound copies. These were done in a pale green leather and accompanied by an even paler green cardboard slipcase. This edition was issued simultaneously by Eichborn Verlag with the trade edition which had an initial print run of 10,000 copies. Internally, the only difference is the final page of the limited edition, which is hand numbered in ink but not signed by Sebald.

I also acquired a fine copy of the trade edition that includes the Cellophanschuber, or cellophane slipcover. My first copy of this book didn’t have one and now I understand why: it is an extremely fragile, almost transparent thing that probably got tossed or torn most of the time. The cellophanschuber boldly proclaims the enclosed book to be a first edition (erstausgabe). More intriguing, however, it also provides Sebald’s first work of prose fiction with a brief description or blurb that does not seem to have been used anywhere else:

Vom leisen Inferno der Depression und von der Unheimlichkeit des Glücks.

In my humble and no doubt amateur translation, this reads something like “From the quiet inferno of depression and the eeriness of fate…” (Anyone want to take a better shot at this?)

It appears to me that German booksellers use various terms for this kind of transparent paper slipcase, including Pergaminschuber and Rückenschild.  [The Rückenschild, I am told, is the pasted label on the spine.  Thanks, Claus.]

Last year I wrote about the various first editions of Schwindel. Gefühle and Vertigo here.

Grant Wood, February, 1941 (lithograph)

I should have posted this a few days ago but somehow got distracted. Must have something to do with the fact that we’ve received more than forty inches of snow this winter and our old snow blower is getting a real workout.

Bookride is a fascinating blog about book selling, book collecting, and rare book prices operated by the folks who run the bookstore called Any Amount of Books on Charing Cross Road, deep in the heart of London. It describes itself as a guide to the most wanted and collected books. There is some evaluation of why the book is wanted, what it is worth - with a range of selling prices, some trivia, apercus and bon mots, a few anecdotes, so called jokes and occasional rants.

On February 7, to topic was the British first edition of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. If you take a look, also scroll down to see the long list of other book collecting links.

Some books are just friendlier than others. They feel good in the hand, they have wonderful paper and a typeface that lets the eye glide. Someone has given them a thoughtful page design and maybe a useful amenity like a ribbon bookmark. A few days ago at Dovegreyreader, I greatly enjoyed the short homage to the reader-friendly editions of the Everyman’s Library:

It just remains to put all unfinished books onto a reading hold over Christmas and become a one-book wonder this week because Bleak House is proving to be positively all-consuming.I’ve opted for the Everyman’s Library edition with the lovely smooth paper, the lush burgundy cover and the ribbon bookmark.You know how easily impressed I am by a ribbon in a book.Then that beautiful little inspirational quote ‘ Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side.’ I have a growing collection of Everyman’s Library, I’m starting to gather my most favourite reads in this very special edition.

Endpapers from Everyman’s Library, 1912.

This reminded me of the final pages of W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo, when the narrator leaves London’s National Gallery, where he was studying Pisanello’s painting of St. George, and wanders for miles to the western edge of the city. Tired, he enters the nearby underground station, which he likens to the entrance to Hades. As the train pulls out “past the soot-stained brick walls the recesses of which have always seemed to me like the parts of a vast system of catacombs,” the narrator contemplates his fellow passengers - “a defeated army” - and the dismal city where they work. Then, hoping to change his mood, he takes up his book. “Idly I turned the pages of an India paper edition of Samuel Pepys’s diary, Everyman’s Library 1913.” As he reads he starts to drowse and the London of Sebald and the London of Pepys blur together. He suddenly imagines that he is fleeing the Great Fire of London:

Is this the end of time? A muffled, fearful, thudding sound, moving, like waves, throughout the air. The powder house exploded. We flee onto the water. The glare around us everywhere, and yonder, before the darkened skies, in one great arc the jagged wall of fire. And, the day after, a silent rain of ashes, westward, as far as Windsor Park.

And so the book ends. (I love the over-punctuated, breathless phrasing.)

I have long looked for a 1913 Everyman’s Library edition of Pepys, but I’m beginning to feel that Sebald made up that particular edition. 1913 is a symbolic year in Vertigo and Sebald manages to find any number of ways to reference that specific year, some of them rather suspect. In the end, I settled for a two-volume 1912 Everyman’s Library edition, which is, technically speaking, a reprint of the 1906 edition (London: J.M. Dent and New York: E.P. Dutton). I’d like to think that this was the edition that Sebald’s narrator held in his hands as his train plowed into the year 1666.

As Dovegreyreader notes, the Everyman’s Library continues to produce books that like to be read. Now published by Random House’s distinguished Alfred A. Knopf imprint, their pages of warm creamy paper are sewn and bound in tactile cloth. The one I pulled off the shelf, not surprisingly, was printed and bound in Germany. In fact, I think I’ll just move to the couch and re-read Gabriel Josipovici’s Introduction to Kafka’s Collected Stories.

I credit Robin Kinross for pointing out that one image from W.G. Sebald’s book Die Ringe des Saturn disappears when the book comes out in English as The Rings of Saturn. In an essay in his book Unjustified Texts (London: Hyphen Press, 2002) called Judging a Book by its Material Embodiment: A German-English Example (pp. 186-199), Kinross makes a close physical comparison of the German version (Frankfurt: Eichborn Verlag, 1995) and its British equivalent (London: Harvill, 1998). In doing so, he discovered that the first image in the German chapter 9 does not appear in the Harvill edition (nor does it appear in any later English-language edition).

The image, which appears on page 301 of Die Ringe des Saturn, is a photograph of what seems to be a rural house and the drive that leads up to it. Given the placement in the text, my guess is that the house is supposed to be “Chestnut Tree Farm,” the home of “Thomas Abrams”, the one-time farmer who, when the narrator visits him, has devoted the last twenty years of his life to building a scale model of the Temple of Jerusalem. Perhaps the real Thomas Abrams, whose name is Alec Garrard, preferred not to have his Suffolk residence published. More on Alec Garrard in a subsequent post.

I imagine that any self-respecting W.G. Sebald book collection will have to include a copy of the May 2007 issue of The Believer. Where else will you find flow charts depicting the “action” in The Rings of Saturn? Remember flow charts? Order a back issue today (it will help independent publisher McSweeney’s, which needs support) and when it arrives, enjoy the lead-off article by Rick Moody called A Short Walk Through The Rings of Saturn (pages 3-15), in which he confesses to a textual compulsion for Sebald and - fellow writer that he is - discusses his utter fascination for the structure of Sebald’s meandering texts. Accordingly, Moody provides flow charts for chapters one, two, four, five, and ten of The Rings of Saturn. And for comparison he flow charts a short story by Robert Coover called The Babysitter.Personally, I don’t think the flow charts demonstrate anything new. At most they serve to confirm the circularity that every Sebald reader encounters in his prose works. But somehow, the sheer futility of converting a book like The Rings of Saturn into flow charts strikes me as an appropriately Sebaldian homage.

True to his claim of textual compulsion, Moody proves himself well aware of the critical literature that’s building up around Sebald. The result is not another book review, but a glimpse of one writer exploring and dissecting a book by one of his favorite authors. Recommended, as they say.