RILKE, Rainer Maria.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Das Stundenbuch. First deluxe edition, number 238 of 440 copies of this lavish production of Rilke's first major work. His English translator, Edgar Snow, praised the Stundenbuch as "one of the strongest inaugural works in all of modern poetry. It arrives as if out of nowhere and seems to want to wipe the slate clean" (Snow, p. 623). The first edition was published by Inselpresse in 1905.This edition was printed by Poeschel & Trepte using 18th-century gothic type that Carl Ernst von Poeschel (1874-1944) unearthed in England and had recast. Walter Tiemann, the later co-founder of Janus-Presse with Poeschel, designed the title page. The aestheticism of Rilke's "Book of Hours" is also reflected in the stylized, art nouveau binding of this attractive edition. Rilke wrote the neo-romantic triptych of poems between 1899 and 1903 in Germany and Italy. Their mystic, self-reflexive mode reflect Rilke's experience of touring Russia in 1899 with the psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937).

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