Books - Comments by xiphophilos

Books - Comments by xiphophilos

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Member	Item		Review/Comment
xiphophilos 15th Feb 2024		Book Maximilian Böttcher - Die Wolfrechts (1940)	The publisher is called Antäus (not Intäus)-Verlag, after the Giant that challenged all passers-by to wrestling matches and defeated them. The name makes sense for a press that published Maximilian Böttcher's Blut und Boden-type fiction because Antaeus was a son of the Earth who regained new strength from his mother whenever someone wrestled him to the ground. It also seems an unintentionally ironic choice, given that Antaeus ended up losing against Hercules, the representative of human decency and civilization, when Hercules lifted him up into the air and crushed him to death. The press, however, survived the end of the Nazi regime. It was active from the early 1920s into the 1950s.
xiphophilos 5th Feb 2024		Book Gaius Julius Caesar - Commentarii (1576)	Uploaded a scan of my own copy now.
xiphophilos 25th Sep 2022		Book Quintus Curtius Rufus - De Rebus Gestis Alexandri Magni (1650)	If I've deciphered the inscription on the very last page correctly, the former owner could be Edward Mardon, baptized in Moreton (Hampstead, Devon, England) on November 14, 1695 (father: Thomas Mardon). It is difficult to say for sure because there were a confusing number of men named Edward Mardon in that area of Devon in the 17th and 18th century.
xiphophilos 10th Jun 2022		Book Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Roman in neun Briefen (1920)	This book has beautiful typography. Must make reading it even more of a pleasure.
xiphophilos 21st Nov 2020		Book Edward Young (Poet) - The Complaint: Or, Night-Thoughts On Life, Death, And Immortality (1792)	Love the illustration!
xiphophilos 18th Oct 2020		Book William Shakespeare - Shake-Speares Sonnets (1609)	To be sure, though, at the time this quarto came out, it was the buyer's responsibility to have it bound. Only in the 19th century did publishers begin to sell books that were already bound: https://lib.msu.edu/exhibits/historyofbinding/early19thcentury/
xiphophilos 18th Oct 2020		Book William Shakespeare - Shake-Speares Sonnets (1609)	Your instinct was right, it's not a paperback book: The title page image belongs to the W. Aspley copy owned by the Folger Library. I've changed it to Hardcover.
xiphophilos 18th Oct 2020		Book William Shakespeare - Shake-Speares Sonnets (1609)	This is the first-ever edition of Shakespeare's "Sonnets." The image of the title page was taken from the Wikipedia entry "Thomas Thorpe". Clearly, none of the users here owns it, or they could have provided their own image. Considering that only thirteen copies of this quarto are known to exist at all, this is probably not too surprising. This particular variant, which lists bookseller W. Aspley, exists only in 4 copies (source), all four of which are linked in this blog post.
xiphophilos 18th Oct 2020		Book Nicolaus Clenardus - Institutiones Linguae Graecae (1655)	The owner's initial, H., looks exactly like the first letter of his last name. Couldn't it be Havers?
xiphophilos 1st Oct 2020		Book Quintus Curtius Rufus - De Rebus Gestis Alexandri Magni (1650)	It's a neat little book. I treasure it, not least because it was given to me many years ago by a dear friend. I doubt it's very valuable because it is not the first edition from 1633, which came with a nice map, but only the less impressive (no map) and far less expensive second edition of this book from 1650. The leather covers are also quite worn. Still, I like it because it was clearly used and loved. The story of Alexander the Great's life is a gripping yarn, and I imagine it to be the kind of book a gentleman might have carried along in his vest pocket for entertainment while traveling.
xiphophilos 30th Sep 2020		Book Quintus Curtius Rufus - De Rebus Gestis Alexandri Magni (1650)	The flyleaves seem to be pages from a book by Claudius Berigardus (Claude Guillermet de Bérigard), Circulus Pisanus, seu de veteri et peripatetica philosophia in Aristotelis libris de ortu et interitu, Udine, 1643, an attempt to defend the teachings of the Ionian philosopher Anaxagoras against the later beliefs of Aristoteles.
xiphophilos 24th Sep 2020		Book W. E. Johns - Biggles Lost Het Op (1962)	What makes this a Farsi rather than a Dutch book?