Last week I read a little blurb in the paper about a “bucherbazaar” or used books sale up at Schloss Trautenfels. The Schloss is a former palace turned museum and it’s just up the road from us. We got in the car and drove up there where our minds were promptly blown by the incredible things we found.
In addition to a bunch of 1930s botanical textbooks, I got two encyclopedias called “Der Wunder der Natur” – The Wonders of Nature – that were published in 1913. They were totally falling apart, but I didn’t buy them to read. I bought them to take the pictures out to use in collage. Today we went back for a second round when I realized I had insufficent human figures to juxtapose against the giant birds of yesteryear. I had no architecture to adorn the totally incongruous landscapes. I bought a bound edition of a 1908 Italian arts and culture journal and my needs were pretty well met.
I also bought four 1905 Baedeker guide books that are full of gorgeous fold out maps. I have a terrible map fetish so I near had a heart attack when I saw them just sitting there, minding their own business. The Riviera guide has ticket stubs and restaurant tabs stuck in between the pages and I can not help but imagine the lives of the people who swanned about on Mediterranean beaches nearly 100 years ago.
We also picked up two 1918 medical references, complete with fold out anatomy guides. They’re spectacular, the fold-outs are, and the title pages refers to them as “40 color prints”. That means they ran 40 plates of color for each image, can you imagine? No cheap four color for these folks, no sir.