Selected Writings: Volume 1 - 1913-1926 and Volume 2 - 1926-1934; 2 Volume Set
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996 / 1999.
First Editions. Hardcover.
The first two volumes of Harvard’s four-volume collection of Walter Benjamin’s selected writings. First Editions, First Printings per Zempel – with date of publication on title page and no identification of later printing on copyright page on both volumes. Translated by Rodney Livingstone and others.
Volume 1 brings together essays, academic treatises, reviews, fragments, and privately circulated pronouncements from 1913, when Benjamin was an undergraduate in imperial Germany and president of a radical youth group, through 1926 when he emerged as a critical voice in Weimar Germany’s most influential journals.
Volume 2 covers the years 1926 to 1934 during the final years of the Weimar Republic and brings together previously untranslated writings on major figures such as Brecht, Valery, and Gide, and on subjects ranging from film, radio, and the novel to memory, kitsch, and the theory of language. Benjamin muses on new modes of perception brought out by photographic enlargement and cinematic montage, on the life and work of Goethe at Weimar, on the fascination of old toys and the mysteries of food, and on the allegorical significance of Mickey Mouse.
Item #902796ISBN: 0674945859/0674945867
6-1/2 x 9-1/2", black cloth with spine titles in silver and teal vertical lines from head to heel, gray endpapers, vii, 520pp, ix, 870pp, with notes, chronology & index each volume.
Volume 1 – clean of owner’s marks, square, corners crisp, titles bright, fine in rubbed dust wrapper with a little wear to tips at flap folds (including a 1/16” tear to upper corner front wrapper), in protective mylar.
Volume 2 – light crimping to heel of spine, 5 marginal black ink brackets to emphasize text selections in chapter on Franz Kafka, with brief notes on two of the selections and one underlined phrase (appears to be the only chapter read by a previous owner), else a clean copy, square, corners crisp, titles bright, with the exception of the inked emphases, the book is near fine in a rubbed dust wrapper with light crimping to extreme edges and a single 1/16” tear at upper front panel / spine fold, in protective mylar.
Price: $150.00