Edward, Author of'The London Spy\] Ward's writings in Ned Ward of Grubstreet Apollo's maggot in his cups: or, The whim- (1946). The title-page with the imprint as sical creation ofa little satyrical poet. A lyrick given above was probably intended for cancella- ode, etc. London: printed and sold by the book- tion; another issue is recorded which is identical sellers of London and Westminster, 1729. 8°: except that the title-page has T. Warner's name A-G* H*. included in the imprint. The copy listed here includes this second title-page bound at the An attack on Pope's Dunciad. Ward's author- ^"*^ ^"'^ apparently conjugate with H4. ship is revealed in the postscript, and H. W. Foxon W 47, 48. Cup.403.bb. 12. Troyer includes the title in his bibliography of Guerinot, pp. 177-9.
Department of Printed Books
German popular literature as seen in some recent antiquarian acquisitions
By D. L. Paisey
Systematic acquisition of foreign literature for the British Museum library began in 1834 with regular Government funding, and, particularly under Panizzi, the attention paid to current material was extended also to supplementing the existing holdings of older books on as wide a scale as possible. His declared aim to make this the best library for foreign literature outside the countries concerned was to an extent achieved as an intel- lectual manifestation of British imperial dominance at its Victorian zenith. Under his direction, antiquarian purchasing, limited only by what came on to the market, was vigorously pursued, and so-called 'popular' literature was acquired as readily as the products of high culture, a necessary development in view of the fact that the foundation collections had represented overwhelmingly establishment interests. For literature, though mostly only for the literate, has from the beginnings of printing catered for various audiences, not merely for the ruling class and its clerical and scholarly servants. The other classes, as they joined and scaled the ladder of literacy, have had books directed at them, in accordance with what society at any time has seen as their needs, more par- ticularly when they became a substantial market, and they also produced their own authors. Thanks largely to Panizzi, therefore, the earlier foreign collections in the British Library have an extraordinary depth. Generations of scholars have had reason to be grate- ful to him, and his modern successors recall that the quality of the historical scholarship in all disciplines which can be carried on here is conditioned to an important degree by the range and representative nature of the collections. 91 We are still able to make important additions to our holdings, though modern market conditions and the richness of what we already have combine to reduce the scale of the operation. In recent years we have acquired early editions of works by some of the 'big names' of the German-speaking world (Luther, Melanchthon, Opitz, Zesen, Gessner, Schiller, Fichte, Kleist, and Keller, for example), but these represent only a small part of our range of accessions of German antiquarian material, as indeed they represented only a small corner of the written culture of their time. I choose instead to describe twelve items either directly from, or reflecting and influencing the opposite end of the social scale, listed chronologically to illustrate the proposition that literature should be seen, not in isolation, but as part of social dynamics. In so doing, I intend both to draw attention to the depth of our collections, which provide a rich context for all these works, and to pay a personal tribute to our greatest librarian in the year of his centenary.
ALTHAMER, Andreas. Catechismus. Das ist Vnderricht zum Christlichen Glauben. Nurmberg: getruckt durch Kumgund Hergotin, 1530. 8^A-C8. This was the first German catechism to be so called, though there were earlier ones not called Catechismus, and earlier works with that name ©as lit \noerricbt (or Catechesis) which were not catechisms. In requiring individual reading of the Bible, the Reformation had a profound effect on popular education, and reading, writing, and the cate- chism were the staples of general schooling for Ounu centuries. The present text was composed as £t\ichc a result of an ecclesiastical inspection carried CoUccteit ot»«c gc out under Margrave Georg of Brandenburg- Ansbach, as an officially approved version intended for use by less learned pastors unable to write their own. Althamer (born c. 1500) was an active literary supporter of Luther, and at this time a preacher in Ansbach. His co- I inspector Hans Rurer collaborated with him on the text, and in their joint preface they enjoin, in the most lively language, that the first in the British Library's collection, children be educated, in the interests of seems to be otherwise unrecorded: it was religious and social conformity: 'He who learns unknown to Ferdinand Cohrs, who in Die nothing can do nothing; a goose swimming off evangelischen Katechismusversuche vor Luthers across the sea comes back a goose.' Enchiridion (Berlin, 1901, Bd. 3, pp. 12-13) The work was first printed in 1528 by lists five editions of 1528 and 1529, and one of Friedrich Peypus of Nuremberg, and all early 1543- editions are of the greatest rarity, because they The Hergot press in Nuremberg was an were presumably read to pieces. This edition. unusually striking witness to the dangers for 92 booksellers and printers of too close an identifi- cation with non- or anti-establishment ideas. Hans Hergot, Kunigunde's first husband, was a bookseller, who also printed from 1524 to 1527. He was a supporter of the Reformation (though Luther objected to Hergot's unauthor- ized reprints of some of his vernacular pamphlets, whose tone was, incidentally, deliberately cast in a popular mode for pro- paganda purposes), as well as of more radical developments of the time. His distribution of Von der newen wandlung eynes Chrtstlichen lebens, a Utopian communist pamphlet which he may or may not have had a hand in writing himself, dangerously soon after the conclusion of the Peasants' War, was considered so revo- lutionary an act that he was publicly executed in May 1527 in the Leipzig market-place. German printing history is not full of such severe penalties, particularly in peacetime, but it is full, for legal reasons, of printers' widows carrying on their dead husbands' businesses (early examples of female economic emancipa- and Low German elements in the language. tion), and often entering into dynastic re- There were a number of earlier printed versions marriages with other printers. Kunigunde (see Die Katharinen-Passie, ed. Hermann therefore carried on printing until 1538 (under Degering and Max Joseph Husung, Berlin, her own name, though she married the printer 1928, pp. 42 ff.), but the British Library had Georg Wachter soon after her first husband's hitherto only modern editions. death), also producing vernacular works of Margaret was the patron saint of women in Luther and many small popular items such as childbirth, and the text ends with two rhymed songs. Our new catechism, meant for the prayers to be addressed to her. The work is widest possible audience, fits logically into such thus aimed at a broad audience of Catholic a programme. women. The old-fashioned text is here matched by a strikingly old-fashioned woodcut, which is in fact a close, if coarsened, copy of blocks used by earlier Cologne printers, first the incunable MARGARET, Saint, Virgin and Martyr. Senct printer Johann Koelhoff the younger, passing Margrate Passie. [Cologne:'\ gedruckt durch to Ulrich Zell in 1503 (see Albert Schramm, Anthonium Keyser, [c. 1550?]. 4": A B+. Die Bilderschmuck der Friihdrucke, Leipzig, A popular version, in verse, of the legend of 1920, etc., Bd. 8, nos. 835 and 81) and then to St. Margaret. The poem probably dates back Heinrich von Neuss, who printed from 1505 at least to the early fourteenth century, to the to 1522. Tbe bottom right quarter of the block lower Rhine region (see Oskar Schade, Geist- was interchangeable to allow the representa- liche Gedichte des XIV. und XV. Jahrhunderts tion of different female saints by the substitu- vom Niderrhein, Hannover, 1854, pp. 71-99), tion of attributes (a wheel for St. Catherine, for and its origins are apparent in the archaisms example). 93 Anyone familiar with German books printed the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which for a popular audience cannot fail to have must have been sold in quantities at fairs and noticed an archaizing tendency in the pre- markets and by itinerant hawkers. The newness sentation of the whole genre, most obviously of the songs proclaimed in so many cases on the in the style of the woodcuts with which so title-pages cannot always be taken for granted, many popular works are illustrated. Whether but real or apparent novelty has always been a the conservatism of taste implied is a true spur to sales. A minority contain music (this reflection of class culture in its audience, or one does not), but most have small woodcuts how far it was imposed by the producers of this on the title-page, woodcut illustrations being literature, is a question which demands much cheaper than the engravings which in the investigation. seventeenth century were being increasingly C used to illustrate books for a higher-class market. Though the attractive and simple cuts here are probably new enough, the typography ZwEY sch6n newe Lieder . . . Das erste: O and layout are by this date more traditional than angst vnd not, o kummernuss gross . . . Das contemporary, and seem unchanged from ander: Schons Annelein, mein Annelein. printed songs of fifty years before. This [Augsburg?: Johann Ulrich Schdnig?\ 1617. example came from the library of Karl 8^ A*. Wolfskehl (1869-1948), poet and collector of Two popular songs, the first lamenting a dead early texts, and the ascription to the Augsburg lover, the second an unfaithful one. This press of Johann Ulrich Schonig is his: certainly publication is apparently otherwise un- Augsburg was one of the main centres of recorded, but is quite typical of the sacred and popular song-text production. The British secular song-texts, particularly numerous in Library has a notably fine collection of such works, including a high proportion of rarities, and it is to he hoped that it will attract specialist attention. ^ mm / fo t?o;mal^ npnnn •Drucfau^^an^eii. <: O an^fHnO not/C fum> H EIN S, Valentinus. Abyssus. Mercatorio- 9 3 fi(D non inon fatnmtr an/IaiDtr b(c arithmetico-problematica . . . Eine gantz Neue . . . Informations-Art in der Kauff- mannischen Rechnung. Hamburg: gedrukkt bey Hinrich von Wiering; in verlegung des Auctoris, 1698. 8°: pp. 614. A commercial arithmetic for schools, dedicated to the city council of Hamburg. Valentin Heins (1637-1704), the son of a Hamburg linen- weaver, had left school at 14 and started earning a living through his skill in this subject, though he subsequently went to university and became a schoolteacher, first of Latin, then of calli- graphy, arithmetic, and what was called 'Italian book-keeping'. From 1661 to 1672 he 94 ABTSSUS. ERCATORIO - ARITHMETICO- PROBLEMATICS, per Novam INFORMA^JDI METHODUM CX Rei^ula Alligationis dctc(5la. O&er: INFORMATIONS Srt
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in unb iwp bf[n|Tli>ci lu ftnbm. also worked part-time as accountant for a awareness of the importance of new methods in Hamburg company trading to West Africa. an old subject. He was a member ofa Hamburg Apart from some little-known writing-books, society founded in 1690 with the title 'Kunst- he published five textbooks of commercial Rechnungs- lieb- und iibende Societaet', in arithmetic, at least one of which had extra- which the development of mathematics was a ordinary success (see Hans Schroder, Lexikon prime aim, and which, like the grander German der hamburgischen Schriftsteller, Bd. 3, Ham- Academia Caesarea Naturae Curiosorum, burg, 1854-7, pp. 153 f.)-This is the first of his founded in 1672 on the model of our Royal works to enter our collections, perhaps partly Society, also exemplified the seventeenth- because schoolbooks, like catechisms, were century shift towards more systematic exploita- read to pieces and so do not survive in large tion of science and technology for practical numbers. The printer, Heinrich von Wiering, ends. The members of this little society was previously unknown as such, though he is adopted names reminiscent of those in the recorded as a 'Formschneider' (i.e. a maker of mainly aristocratic literary and linguistic society woodcuts). founded in 1617, the 'Fruchtbringende Gesell- Hamburg, which owes its development to schaft': Heins was called 'der Hoifende', but international trade, is an appropriate place in the similar forms merely underline the utter which to observe how the growing power of the difference of function, for which the develop- bourgeoisie was forcing educational reform in ment of commerce was responsible. the direction of more practical instruction, and Heins's dedication in this book makes plain his 1509/3364- 95 und Wein zu verzehrn / Dem g'meinen Mann zur Freud darbey.' It is instructive to contrast this work with another verse celebration of the same event, one of the great rarities of German literature, of which the British Library has the only copy known to me (a nineteenth-century acquisi- tion), the passionate young Silesian poet Jobann Christian Gunther's Aufden zwischen Jhrer R6m. Kays. Majest. und der Pforte geschlossenen Frieden, 1718 (pressmark ii50i.k.14.(4.)), which is a folio panegyric on Prince Eugene in the most elevated literary style (it begins: 'Eugen ist fort; Jhr Musen, nach!'), but which unfortunately failed in its object of winning Eugene's approval. Our new popular Friedens-Lied may be as rare, since I have so far failed to find a record of it. 1568/5506.
EuLENSPiEGEL,TylI.LustigeHistorien,oder HoCHST-erfreuliches Friedens-Lied, wegen Merckwurdiges Leben, Thaten und Reisen des zwischen . . . Carl dem Sechsten, und den des weltbekandten Tyll-Eulenspiegels. Turcken glucklich-getroffenen Friedens. s.L, [Dresden: Gottlob Ghristian Hilscher], 1736. 1718. 8°: four unsigned leaves. 8°: pp. 368; plate. A popular song in forty-six stanzas (first Hne: Till Eutenspiegel, the irrepressible joker, was 'Jauchtzet, stimmet Freuden-Lieder'), written one of the most popular of German folk-tale to an existing well-known tune ('Doris gieng in heroes, and there were numerous editions of ihren Garten') to celebrate the Peace of his exploits from his appearance at the begin- Passarowitz, concluded between the Holy ning of the sixteenth century. Popular litera- Roman Emperor and the Turks after a cam- ture such as this embodied values different from paign brilliantly led on the Austrian side by those of the establishment, and was repeatedly Prince Eugene of Savoy. In make-up, the work subject to criticism and attack from the latter's is still in the tradition of the songs of the pre- moral guardians. This edition is remarkable vious two centuries and would have been sold in because it is an attempt to make a popular the same way as the 1617 songs described above. novel suitable for the salon, that is to say The post-rider in the small woodcut on the acceptable for a middle-class audience. There title-page was a long-established symbol for can be no doubt that it is not aimed at the com- 'news'. The work's format predicates a popular mon man, because the text is burdened with audience, and 'the common man' for whom it semi-learned, would-be witty notes, larded was intended is appropriately celebrated in the with Latin tags, which seek to impart moral rough-hewn text: 'Desswegen aus Belgrad viel lessons. The preface, by the anonymous Hob'n / Nach Passarowitz sich erhob'n, / Den adapter and author of the notes, makes it clear Frieds-Cermon zu wohn'n bey. / Die Bott- that even the work's method of distribution schaffter und gross' Herren / Gab'n Ochsen (presumably through the established book- ©tAnben burd) unb bur* &fti
trade) is different from that of all previous A book for the self-education of millers' editions, which had been sold hy bookbinders apprentices, containing a possibly obligatory and colporteurs. It will also be noted that the minimum of moralizing, but overwhelmingly frontispiece is engraved, and not woodcut in practical in intent, and acknowledging the value traditional Volkshuch style. to society of the miller's trade. Such literature This edition seems to me a product of the was probably a development of the ubiquitous middle-class intellectuals' uncertainty in deal- calendars and almanachs meant especially for ing with the common man and his culture at peasants, which usually contained advice on the beginning of the Enlightenment: the rising seasonal cultivation, care of farm animals, and bourgeoisie felt it necessary to draw a line the like. This example is full of technical terms between itself and those beneath. Efforts began and advice gained from experience (for to be made to extend the education of the lower example, on various difficulties arising between classes, without any thought of providing social millers and their peasant customers), which advancement for them, but not until much later could suggest a miller as author. The pill of in the century did it become considered safe in instruction is sugared by variety in the text, academic circles to admire aspects of their with the inclusion of anecdotes and passages in culture for their own sake. CQ\ C dialogue and verse, while the book's physical 1568/906. make-up is the now familiar one of cheap EiN NEUES Muller-Buchlein, fijr die lieben market-literature for a popular audience. The Lehr-Jungen des sch6nen und Iustigen little woodcuts (storks on the title-page, a horse, Muller-Handwercks. 5./., 1771. 8'^: pp. 31; cow and ass on the last page) probably came illus. from the printer's general stock and would 97 ill Mci'mi 3iit)t. 177'. often have been used unspecifically: the more surviving edition of this prose version dates technical descriptions of machinery in the text from 1726, and it is thought unlikely to be cry out for illustration, but commissioning much older. The claim that it is translated from woodcut diagrams would no doubt have forced the French is false, and was presumably a sales up the price of the little work. Our copy is gimmick. There were many editions in the exceptionally well preserved, being simply eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the sewn, with a strip of decorated paper pasted whole complex showing the remarkable along the spine, and must look much as it did staying-power of folk-tale over several on the original hawker's tray: I do not imagine centuries. many copies have survived. From internal I am grateful to John Flood of King's College evidence, it could come from Switzerland or London for the information that this new south Germany. acquisition is an apparently unique copy of an otherwise unknown edition, which he pro- visionally dates to the second half of the eighteenth century, and believes almost cer- SIEGFRIED. Eine wundersch6ne Historie von tainly to have come from the same press as an dem geh6rnten Siegfried . . . Aus dem edition in tbe University Library at Halle Franz6sischen ins Deutsche ubersetzt, und (shelfmark Dd 2037P), which it predates. The von neuen wieder aufgelegt. s.L, [c. 1775?]. text is characteristically illustrated with nume- 8°: pp. 8o;illus. rous heterogeneous and crude woodcuts, some A popular story of adventure and fantasy, repeated, and some whose appositeness to a deriving from the Germanic legend of Sieg- specific passage is only approximate. The fried by way of the sixteenth-century popular historically uneducated audience could pre- narrative poem on the subject. The earliest sumably accept the incongruity of a Siegfried now (on the title-page) in a variety of Renais- lEiiu sance Roman stage armour, now (in the text von Urn cuts) in full medieval armour or in contempo- rary frock-coat and three-cornered hat. The numher '5' at the hottom right-hand corner of the title-page denotes the book's position in a printer's or publisher's series of such products, and these serial numbers are a feature of much fdjr tenf»flr5i« unb tnit Cufl popular fiction from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. A bibliography of these series is badly needed, but, most regrettably, scholarship has so far concentrated on the genre in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The British Library has important collections which should be taken into account in any such undertaking. C.143.CC.20(1).
HuELFREiCH, Erdmann, pseud, [i.e. Baron Joseph Michael von Ehrenfels]. Erdmann Hiilfreichs Unterricht fur Bauersleute uber
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i t n I 8 o I. Xiea. 9(j4bilh»lfr am . im btuif 99 die Zucht und Wartung ... der Pferde, des A Saxon decree forbidding the sale at fairs and Hornviehs, der Schafe und Schweine. Sechste markets of popular songs and other writings . . . Auflage. Wien: Aloys Doll, 1801. 8": which had not been approved by the official pp. 198. censor and did not bear the name and place of the printer: many such works considered A handbook for farmers on the care of their harmful to 'common people' had been reported animals. Again efforts have been made to clothe in circulation, and unless published in accord- practical instruction in elements the audience ance with the present decree, were to be con- would find familiar: the author's comforting fiscated. Annexed is a list of eighty-two pseudonym (literally 'Earthman Helpful') and folk-songs published in Leipzig by Carl invented portrait as an old and therefore August Solbrig's widow, which had actually experienced peasant; the Volksbuch-style been confiscated in the previous year. woodcut on the title-page showing a farmer There can be no clearer example of the reading aloud to probably illiterate colleagues, which is how the precepts of this book and establishment s fear of popular literature which Otherothers like it would gain currency amongst the " f neither provided nor approved. ^ , 1 1 .• J ^1 , ^- r ,u Some of the sonffs hsted (unfortunately with texrurat l inpopulation partly narrative; and th, partle presentatioy dialogune oformf the. extreme ,brevity • )^ may ,hav e ,ha d1 a ,"directl• y This time, however, the author is definitely not extremsubversive ebrevity or satirica) mal politicay havel contenthad a , directbut thle what he seems. Baron Joseph Michael von majority must have caused offence on moral Ehrenfels (1767-1843) was a landowner in grounds. It would be a particularly rewarding Lower Austria, especially remembered for his task to identify the texts concerned (some nationally important practical and theoretical appear from their opening words to be well contributions to sheep-rearing, and author in known: 'Ach, du lieber Augustin', 'Ein Jager his own name of books on other aspects of aus Kurpfalz') and investigate precisely why farming such as bee-keeping and veterinary they fell foul of the censor, but the task would medicine, as well as of a series of pseudonymous also be immensely difficult, because the biblio- books for farmers and their wives which sought graphical groundwork has not yet been done. to raise the general level of agriculture. There The Leipzig firm of Solbrig seems to have was a considerable literature in the late specialized in popular literature, and is known eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to have printed folk-tales including Eulen- directed from above at the lower classes, offer- spiegel and Der hbrnerne Siegfried, but so much ing advice and education in practical and moral of the genre appeared without imprint to avoid matters. How far it was in the interest of the licensing procedures that it would be difficult enlightened classes to be so philanthropic is a to sort out the responsibility of specific firms material question, if a vast and complex one. for surviving examples. While there were undoubtedly printers who made their entire This book, here in its sixth edition (the first living from the popular market, it should not be was published in 1790), obviously had a great thought that high-class publishers always success. Our copy is bound with another work turned up their noses at it if there were profit to by 'Erdmann Hlilfreich' on the care of crops be made: thus Hartknoch in Riga, publisher of (Vienna, 1807). Kant and Herder, also brought out editions of 1509/3102(1). folk-tales. C. i30.i. 15(6). SAXONY, the Electorate. [Laws.—lW.] Begin. Von Gottes Gnaden, Friedrich August, Her- MAUS, Isaak. Poetische Briefe. Mainz: ge- zogzuSachsen. [17 May IHOT,.] Dresden, 1803. druckt bei Florian Kupferberg; auf Kosten des folio: four unsigned leaves, the last blank. Verfassers, 1819. 8°: pp. xxvi, 357. 100 These are letters in verse, written to friends of BERLIN.—Arbeiter-Kongress. Beschlusse des the author who styles himself 'Bauersmann zu Arbeiter-Kongresses zu Berlin. Vom Badenheim', and subsequently collected and 23. August bis 3. September 1848. Berlin: published by subscription. Occasional verse of J. C.Fuchs, 1848. 8°: pp. 26. this sort had hitherto been largely the province Here we enter the modern world, where of academic amateurs, and while Maus (1748- emancipation is sought for the whole working 1833) was not a poor peasant (the term 'Bauers- class through the organization of labour. 1848, mann' is vague) but rather a small farmer, who the year of bourgeois revolutions, also saw the had inherited his Rhineland farm and spent his first national meeting of German workers' life cultivating it, he was without formal literary representatives, and this rare document records education, and learned from wide reading, often its outcome. It begins with a manifesto following the advice of friends; he confesses to addressed to the Constituent Assembly meet- spending small sums on books 'out of ambi- ing at Frankfurt (which significantly contained tion'. He developed a true facihty, and it is not no working-class representative) deploring the surprising that his elegant and interesting absence in that body's constitutional proposals verses won him a modest reputation. His of any attention to the social question, and quietism relishes country life: though an early requesting recognition of the place in society supporter of the French Revolution, its later of the worker whose only property is his manifestations put paid to his republicanism, labour. Of the detailed resolutions which and he suffered from the French occupation of follow, those making demands on the state are the Rhineland and its reconquest by German progressive but unrevolutionary (see Veit troops, 'We sow and reap, thresh and bake in Valentin, Geschichte der deutschen Revolution the midst of armies', he wrote in 1796, His first von 1848-4^, Berlin, 1930, 31, Bd. 2, poems were published in 1786, and he also pp. 237 f.), and the main weight is given to a wrote on agriculture and an apologia for national organization of labour and its self- Germans forced to take an oath of allegiance to help activities, including financial ones: the France. He felt that poetry raised man socially, workers are to 'free themselves from the fetters thus that partaking in the culture of a 'higher' of capital' with the help of 'capital' (i.e. funds) class was emancipatory for the individual, of their own. There are also demands for though he never left his farming milieu. It is specific educational reforms, notably in respect not as surprising as it might seem, therefore, of technical education and above all for that the eighteen-page hst recording the names, secularized state education: we have indeed addresses, and occupations of those subscrib- come a long way from the catechism of 1530. ing to this volume should range from the King And even more than that of the Saxon decree of of Bavaria to numerous peasants in small 1803, the typography here is entirely business- villages. hke. 1509/3417- IOI