Adding Layers to the Onion: Collecting the Books of W.G. Sebald
Like many other American readers, I first discovered Sebald around 1996 when New Directions published him for the first time in America in a translation of his second work of fiction The Emigrants (originally titled Die Ausgewanderten when it was published in Germany in 1992). The Emigrants frankly puzzled me the first time I read it. The fiction writers that I read and collected most avidly at that time were a handful of American post-modernists like Robert Coover, Walter Abish, and Joseph McElroy. I admired (and still admire) the way these authors boldly restructured the concept of narrative and openly played games with the traditions of modernist fiction.
In time, I came to deeply appreciate the many subtleties of The Emigrants. But looking back, it probably wasn’t surprising that it failed to grab me at first. The book consists of four separate narratives of people whose lives had in one way or another been shattered by Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The only thing these narratives had in common was their narrator, a likeable, largely self-effacing man who seemed to be pretty much like W.G. Sebald. On first reading, Sebald’s prose struck me as muted and vaguely antiquarian and somehow too muted for the sadness, despair and horror that lurked beneath the surface of the lives he was describing. Later on, however, I would come to see that what Sebald was doing was slowly and almost painfully extracting history from the lives of people who no longer could or no longer wished to remember.
In 1998, New Directions came out with Sebald’s next volume of fiction The Rings of Saturn (originally Die Ringe des Saturn) and it was this book that made me a rabid fan of his work. Arguably Sebald’s most popular book, The Rings of Saturn ostensibly describes a walking journey around the eastern coast of England, but the narrator (again much like Sebald himself) delves deep into local history, European history, literature, nature and the environment, and much more. Here, the full richness of Sebald’s work was immediately apparent – his great descriptive powers, his ability to synthesize disparate elements into an unlikely whole, his broad-ranging scholarship, and his passion for the wonderfully obscure. The book weaves discussions of such oddball topics as silk cultivation, the history of the herring, and the mystery of Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, into sections involving more familiar topics like Rembrandt, Joseph Conrad and the Second World War. I loved it, immediately re-read it, and wanted to know more about Sebald and his books.
I also now wanted to make sure I had first editions of Sebald’s literary works. But what exactly constituted a first edition for a writer who wrote in German, published his books first in Germany, but lived in England where the English-language translations first appeared? At some point the obvious solution presented itself: namely that I would try to get first editions of the German, British and American versions of each book of Sebald’s prose fiction and poetry. With only two books published in English, the task seemed easy.
For the first time as a book collector, I could no longer depend on finding first editions in the bookstores that I personally visited or through a handful of dealers catalogues that I received. I had to look abroad, which meant I had to use the Internet to find the German and British first editions. But doing so not only helped me locate first editions, it added to my knowledge and my options as a collector. Dealers were selling signed copies of this little-known writer’s books, often for the same price as an unsigned copy. Before long I had three books signed by Sebald.
When Sebald shockingly died in December 2001 in a one-car automobile accident (most likely caused by health incident), the list of books he had published had scarcely grown and my goal of owning the German, British, and American first editions seemed suddenly too easy. I expanded my want list to include Sebald’s books on German language literature, none of which had been translated into English yet. I began to do more research. I set up a search at Abebooks.com to be notified whenever a book by or about Sebald was added to their huge virtual inventory.
What I soon learned was how little I really knew about the publishing history of Sebald’s books. But I quickly gained a number of important insights that led me to search for new volumes for my collection. For example, it turned out that limited editions existed for several of his German titles, increasingly expensive editions that rarely came on the market in Europe and never in the US.
Sebald’s British and American publishers added yet another direction to my Sebald collecting: proof copies or advance review copies, which were sent out to reviewers and book buyers in advance of the publication date. Locating and examining proof copies became a fascinating sideline, because they were often issued months before the final editing and layout was settled on, and thus it was occasionally possible to find intriguing differences between the proof copy and the first edition. Sometimes this amounted to a typesetting error that would ultimately be found and corrected, but other times the changes pointed to more substantial alterations in a book’s layout or a revised translation (Sebald was well-known to have been intimately involved in helping with the translation of his books into English). The most notable change occurred in the book The Emigrants, where two images in the book were removed sometime between the issuing of the proof copy and the final publication date. It turned out that Sebald felt he needed to do a better job of obscuring the fact that one of his characters was loosely based on the living British artist Frank Auerbach, and so he removed two tell-tale images that were originally included in the German edition and further altered the name of the character.
Currently, my shelf of Sebald editions runs to about thirty-five inches and more than forty various volumes by Sebald. But each time that I neared my goal of having every first edition I found a new way to expand my collection further. I’ve now added several more shelves of books about Sebald and books in which he can be found as a contributor. I even started collecting the handful of books for he wrote a cover blurb. Perhaps the most unusual group of books I have in my Sebald collection – at least for an American collector – deals with German literary awards. During his lifetime, Sebald was given several important literary awards. The awards were often celebrated with speeches, ceremonies, or symposia, and these events, in turn, were occasionally documented in publications. As a result, volumes like Der Berliner Literaturpreis 1994 and Verleihung Des Heine-Preis 2000 Der Landeshauptstadt Dusseldorf an W.G. Sebald are part of my collection.
As I once again began to see an end to collecting books by and about Sebald, I found yet another logical direction to take. For me and many other readers, one of the most intriguing aspects of Sebald’s fiction is his quirky and endlessly fascinating use of photographs embedded in the text. So I now collect first editions of any work of fiction that includes photography as an essential part of the “text,” starting with Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Mort, published in Paris in 1892 and continuing on to novels issued this year. My bibliography of such books currently exceeds seventy titles, but so far my collection only includes about half of those. Instead of making a discovery by peeling away layers, I feel that I’m learning more by continually adding new layers – and I’m on the lookout for the next layer.
© Terry Pitts
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
December 2009
Terry Pitts runs the excellent and authoritative blog Vertigo: Collecting & Reading W.G. Sebald. It's an excellent and exhaustive resource for any W.G. Sebald fan and covers both collecting his books and understanding them. Terry has also put a great deal of effort into researching the photographers involved with Sebald's publications so you'll find a very well-rounded knowledge base. You can find his blog at http://sebald.wordpress.com/
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