PUBLISHER’S PINK SILK – PRINTED AND GILT
DEUBER, A. X.
Poetische Versuche.
Bamberg, [cover: ‘im Komptoir der Zeitung’,] 1804.
8vo, pp. 84; printed on blue paper; a few very slight spots, but an excellent copy; bound in publisher’s printed pink silk over paper-cased boards, spine gilt in compartments, edges gilt, marbled endpapers; spine and edges worn, boards sunned.
First and only edition, very rare, preserving the original binding of printed and gilt pink silk.
The earliest work of the young historian and philosopher Franz Xaver Anselm Deuber (1781–1850), this collection is a fine example of the tradition of amateur poetry in Enlightenment Germany, with poems on joy, reason, and spring mornings placed alongside translations of ancient and modern works, a companion piece to Voltaire’s ‘Les trois manières’, and poems on contemporary events: the war in the Vendée, the French looting of Italy, and Napoleon’s elevation to Emperor in 1804.
Deuber would later publish Die Geschichte, philosophisch dargestellt (1809), neo-Latin and Greek poems on Napoleon’s defeat (1815) and other occasional verse, a translation of Pindar (1816), and histories of Atlantic navigation (1814) and of the German Peasant’s War (1833).
Printed by the local newspaper office, the volume was almost certainly intended for private distribution and attractively bound for presentation within the author’s circle.
OCLC finds only two copies worldwide, both in Bavaria (BSB and Bamberg).
