Antiquariat

IT WAS APPARENT TO ME IN 1921, AGAIN in 1924 and increasingly so on my recent study-tour in a half-dozen European countries that the so-called culture of Europe is in the museums and in the antiquariats.

Antiquariats and second-hand dealers furnish the life blood of any good music library, but when an attempt was made a few months ago to persuade librarians to join in compiling a list of dealers who had proved to be especially satisfactory the project came to nought. […] The Library of Congress does, of course, receive many catalogs, but there is no reason to suppose that it will receive all of them. This is particularly true of foreign antiquariats and of some of the smaller dealers that only issue an occasional music catalog.

My interest in the acquisition of rare books strongly competed with my interest in research. There were so many auctions, secondhand bookstores, antiquariats, and libraries to go to.

Even after 80 years this treatise [by Wilhelm Lilljeborg] remains the single most important work on Cladocera. For several decades it has been unavailable commercially, except rarely through antiquariats, and because of a small initial printing it is sparsely represented in institutional and individual libraries.

In 1981 someone compiled a listing of European music antiquariats, and a sadly short listing it was, too. A brief perfunctory descriptive line was devoted to the few remaining shops in Germany, France, Hungary, and Holland, but a whole paragraph was given over to Doblinger: “the best organized, constantly new inventories, perusals possibly by advance appointment (many first editions and early printings from the 19th century).[…]”

The collector had to hunt patiently for titles in Prague and Brno, with their well stocked antiquariats, and even smaller towns where choice items might occasionally be found.

“I even went searching through the antiquariats in his old neighborhood – they were filled with old photographs of the people around there, and I would search and search – but what for?” she said, raising her eyebrows. “I’ll never know. He died more than twenty years ago.“

Jünger spent his days as a flaneur on the streets of Berlin, visiting old books shops and antiquariats, and his nights in his small apartment on the Hohenzollenstrasse, reading and writing or gazing into a microscope.