DER GOLEM: EIN ROMAN. Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1916. Octavo, pp. [1-6] 7-500 [501] [502: blank] [503: colophon] [504: blank], original quarter red leather and marbled boards, spine panel tooled in gold, black leather spine label, t.e.g., other edges untrimmed, white ribbon marker. First edition. One of 100 numbered copies. Meyrink's first and best novel "prefigures that disastrous climax [World War I] to a century of growth and change. The phantasmagorical, threatened Prague of this novel -- its wainscots haunted by a Golem who is more like a psychic fog than an actual entity, and the false polder of its ghetto withering under the baleful light of a new century -- makes THE GOLEM into a pure urban fantasy: a tale whose setting, like some vast subterranean edifice, seems literally alive, organic, all-encompassing, Gothic. It is, however, like most twentieth-century urban fantasies distinguished from its Gothic ancestors through a sense that the fall of the city will be a bad omen for its inhabitants, not a release. At the same time, the pending destruction of Prague (and all of Europe itself) is treated by Meyrink with a deep ambivalence, and his next novels all tend to present the apocalypse as an occult cleansing of the material world so that higher unions of the spirit can be achieved." - Clute and Grant (eds), The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997), p. 642. "Key work of German Expressionism." - Barron (ed), Horror Literature 3-148. Bleiler, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction 1173. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p. 157. Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature II, pp. 628-30. Bleiler (1978), p. 139. Reginald 10095. Leather spine label rubbed, a bit of rubbing along outer joints, a very good or somewhat better copy with fine interior. Not issued in dust jacket. (#139364).
Price: $4,250.00
No statement of printing.