The Agra Publications is releasing two remarkable novellas by Stefan Zweig centered around bibliophilia, collection, and memory during the time of war in Vienna and hyperinflation in Germany in the 1920s.
MENDEL, a Jew from Galicia, is an antiquarian book dealer who has used the Viennese café Gluck as his office for over twenty years. He is an 'invisible catalog', a 'titan of memory', with unmatched knowledge of prices, editions, and the circulation of books. However, this emblem of bibliophilia made a terrible mistake against the authorities of his country. During World War I, he wrote to a French – enemy – bookseller, asking to learn about subscriptions to magazines, which led him to concentration camps.
The antiquarian bookseller Mendel, first published in 1929, is a story about bibliophilia and educated people and how their art and culture become useless when confronted with the harsh realities of the twentieth century.
The INVISIBLE COLLECTION, first published in 1927, tells a story about a dealer in rare books and engravings in Germany during the hyperinflation of the 1920s, when the prices of goods were rising daily and banknotes were essentially worth no more than the paper they were printed on. The antiquarian decides to seek out some of his old clients to see if, in these difficult times, they are willing to sell back to him what they had previously purchased from him.
What he discovers with an elderly blind man leaves him astonished and offers Zweig the opportunity to create a splendid narrative that reflects Goethe's maxim that 'collectors are happy people.'
