Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892—27 September 1940) German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, philosopher, aesthetic and cultural critic, flaneur, luftmensch, dabbler in Qabbalistic mysteries, eater of hashish, modernist, Ur post modernist, Francophile, psycho-geographer, translator of Proust and Baudelaire, victim of the Nazis and general European brainbox, egghead, polymath, hero, lover and genius. He is enjoying a fruitful afterlife on the net and in bookshops. His 'Arcades Project' book is a very large unfinished collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, concerned with the iron-and-glass covered "arcades" (known in French as Passages). It has much on Baudelaire, Balzac,Poe, Saint-Simon, Hugo, Fourier, Marx and Engels, Gautier - also commerce, fashion, photograpy, the flaneur, prostitution and Haussmannization. A great work of scholarship and speculation - for dipping into rather than reading for hours on end, in my experience. He left this manuscript with Georges Bataille at the Bibliotheque Nationale when he fled Paris in 1940. He died in slightly mysterious circumstances, possibly suicide, on the Spanish border later that year. It is thought that he felt (with some justification) that the perfidious Spanish douaniers were about to hand him over to the Gestapo.

One passage interested me as I was looking at my paperback copy this morning -a piece about the general dealer Fremin:

'' " We have no speciality" - this what the well known dealer in secondhand good, Frémin, "the man with the head of gray," had written on the signboard advertising his wares in the Place des Abbesses. Here, in antique bric-a-brac, reemerges the the old physiognomy of trade that, in the first decades of the previous century, began to be supplanted by the rule of the specialité. The "superior scrap- yard" was called Au Philosophe by its proprietor. What a demonstration and demolition of stoicism! On his placard were the words: "Maidens do not dally under the leaves!" And: "Purchase nothing by moonlight!"'

That is all we get about this oddball trader Fremin, apart from Google Books citing this passage the web knows him not. Possibly there is more info on him buried in the Bibliotheque Nationale, where Benjamin researched the work. The lives of dealers generally go unrecorded apart from listings in directories and occasional mentions in newspaper, diaries and memoirs. Benjamin's father was a dealer in antiques in Berlin (at one time rich) and may have talked of Fremin. Pic of Palace des Abbesses below--now a very trendy area of Paris. As a generalist (albeit within the speciality of books) I salute him across the years. I used to see a notorious general dealer, possibly Irish, around at Phillips 2 when it was at Bayswater (occasionally accompanying Bob Geldof, then an antique dealer and known in the trade as 'dirty Bob' on account of his unkempt look). It was said that he would deal in absolutely anything and once bought 5000 tins of catfood as well as 500 cat books in the flat of a deceased catlady.

Collecting Benjamin? 'The Arcades Project' as a fine US first in hardback from 1999 can be had for $50 or less. Benjamin' s 1928 doctoral thesis 'Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels' (Origin of German Tragedy) published by Rowohlt can go for $1000 and a lot more in d/w. One dealer has his second publication from 1923 'Charles Baudelaire/Tableaux Parisiens', a rare 12 page book, said to be beautifully produced, at a gamey $6000, although it is 'as new.' A very nice find. He will, I hope, continue to be collected, read and savoured until Armageddon and beyond.

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.1922

“Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train”. John Maynard Keynes on Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge in 1929.


Ludwig Wittgenstein. TRACTATUS LOGICO - PHILOSOPHICUS. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. London, 1922.

Current Selling Prices
$1250-$2800 /£650-£1400

PHILOSOPHY
A regular looking OUP 1920s book of 189 pages published in navy blue cloth lettered gilt. Not impossible to find - I have had 3 copies since the Falklands war. I was reminded of the book recently when Lord Paddy Ashdown quoted Wittgenstein when being hounded by the press over his refusal of a job with Gordon Brown. In a typically British way he prefaced the quote with '...I think it was Wittgenstein who said' and then trotted out the final sentence of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus word perfect:

'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.' ("Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.")

The BBC said that he quoted an obscure Austrian philosopher, which can't be right... Wittgenstein has been mentioned on Monty Python ('Wittgenstein was a beery swine / Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel') and is one of the greatest philosophers since the European Enlightment of the 18th century. My congratulations to Paddy--normally the British are so afraid of being thought pretentious they would not dare quote a philosopher to a pack of rabid hacks.

Wittgenstein is of course a bloody difficult read - the Tractatus is written in an aphoristic style and is best swallowed in small chunks. LW's story is well known -- Jewish descent, went to the same school as Hitler, fabulously wealthy parents, studied Maths, had mystical experience as a soldier on the Eastern Front after reading Tolstoy, met Russell, outshone him, open necked shirts, gave away all his money, gay, recited Tagore facing a wall, furnished his room at Cambridge with deck chairs - the stuff of legends. The book starts off stating a metaphysic where the world consists entirely of simple or elementary facts none of which is dependent on one another; the job of language is the stating of facts, which it does by picturing the facts...after this it gets difficult and Finnegans Wake is probably an easier read; however aphorisms such as this are perfectly palatable- 'the limits of my mind mean the limits of my world' (also translated as 'the limits of my language mean the limits of my world') and his later gnomic pronouncement- 'If God looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of'.

The book is in German and English and the English was translated by the remarkable C.K. Ogden. It is preceded by the 1921 German edition. There is a point of sorts on the book--in the ads at the rear other, later titles in the series the 'International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method' edited by C.K. Ogden can be present in true first editions up to the mid 1920s and there are ads dated as late as 1931. The price is not radically affected by this.

VALUE? The U.S. edition from Harcourt (also 1922) can be had in nice condition for $1000 or less--it follows the U.K. ed and was printed with the original British sheets. The UK edition can top £1000 or $2000 if it is a decent copy which it rarely is. A 'a very good firm copy' sits right now in London with a carriage trade dealer at a remarkable £2500. Several association copies have turned up, in 2002 we had philosopher J.N. Findlay's copy -not bad because he wrote a book on LW. More spectacular was F. P. Ramsey's copy, with Wittgenstein's autograph notes which made £4200 in 1981. Ramsey while still in his teens had assisted the polymath Ogden in his translation and later visited Wittgenstein in Austria. It is hard to imagine a better association copy. Of the German edition I can find no prices and assume it is 1000 euros or more but as to it's true value at present, this is a matter that 'we must pass over in silence.'

TRIVIA. A book, not thin, came out a few years ago trying to show that Wittgenstein knew Hitler at school and Hitler had become anti-semitic as a result. The book was Kimberley Cornish's' The Jew of Linz' and it's thesis has been fairly roundly rejected- illustration left. However the teacher whom Hitler commends in Mein Kampf for teaching him German history and making him into a fanatical German nationalist, one Dr Leopold Poetsch, also took Wittgenstein's class on overnight excursions - tenuous, but conspiracy theories have been built on less. Further Trivia-- one of the drop-in attendees at Wittgenstein's Cambridge classes in the 1940s was a black USAF sergeant fom a nearby American base (Lakenheath?) possessed, it is said, of a cheerful face and disposition. Ludwig was apparently inconsolable when, due to pressures of war and work, he no longer came by. Who was that man? There's a book right there.