This fascinating book by Georg Conrad Horst is titled Zauber Bibliothek, and it is a German book about the occult. The book was published in Mainz by Florian Kupferberg in 1821, it is an anthology of ancient German grimoires - a textbook of magic, spells, rituals and instructions for summoning spirits, angels, and demons, it served as a manual for practitioners of magic - and it was highly sought after by collectors of occult literature.
The earliest known written magical incantations came from ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), the ancient Egyptians also employed magical incantations, while the ancient Greeks and Romans believed that books on magic were invented by the Persians, and the advent of printing in Europe meant that books could be mass-produced for the first time and read by an ever-growing literate audience. Switzerland and the German states were Protestant regions not dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, so grimoires were published in Germany, and many historians published extracts of grimoires like this one in their own books on the history of magic. Perhaps the most notable of these was the Protestant pastor and theologian Georg Conrad Horst (1767 - 1832), who wrote a six-volume set of texts on magic between 1821 and 1826, and Zauber Bibliothek was considered one of the "three great classics on spirits" from the Goethe era.
We don’t know if the book is a first edition, but it was published in Mainz by Florian Kupferberg in 1821, the same year the first book of the six-volume set came out, and the text is entirely in German.
The title page reads “Zauber - Bibliothek oder von Zauberei, Theurgie und Mantik, Zauberern, Hexen, und Hexenprocessen, Damonen, Gespenstern, und Geistererscheinungen”, which means “Magic Library, or sorcery, theurgy and manticism, witches and witch trials, demons, ghosts, and apparitions”, so it dealt with magic, summoning demons, incantations, spirits, and vampirism.
Theurgy was the attempt to establish a connection between people and the spirit world and a connection with demons, and manticism was the practice and belief in divination and prophecy, i.e. the art of foretelling the future or gaining supernatural insight about the future. (It came from the Greek word “mantikos”, meaning "prophetic" or "of a seer”.)
Below the author’s name on the title page, it reads “Omnibus aequa”, which means “equal to all”, a motto related to the concept of death, and in some ways, the book was written in the same vein as earlier emblem books were written, to show that death happens to all of us, regardless of our status, actions, or beliefs, and this was a common moralizing lesson from ancient times up to the Baroque period - everyone shares the same fate - so the book has a somber, philosophical tone.
The book has brown boards, a black label with a gilt title and gilt rules on the spine, “G Friedrich Kloz” in gilt at the bottom of the spine, blank endpapers with a pencilled note on the front flyleaf, then the title page, with “Gottleib Friedrich Kloz” signed towards the bottom (Kloz was probably the owner of the book) and “published in Mainz in 1821 by Florian Kupferberg” in German, a six-page Preface by Horst (“Vorrede”), a four-page Table of Contents, and the first part of the book is 387 pages long, with one section about theurgy, then black magic, ghosts and apparitions, writings and hypotheses about vampires, hauntings from 1626, and Luther’s Diabolology and Demonology. The second part of the book is 440 page long, with sections on occult pneumatology (“Pneumatologia occulta et vera”) and an excerpt from Goethe’s Faust (“Hexen-Kuche”, or the “Witch’s Kitchen”), which was a dialogue between Faust and Mephistopheles, the title page is repeated after 440 and you can see the signature of Gottlieb Friedrich Kloz clearly towards the bottom of the page, followed by a list of subscribers interspersed with perspectives on superstition, magic, and witchcraft by Ruland, Cicero, and a figure named Thomasius, and finally excerpts about historical literature related to witchcraft trials and magic, the book is illustrated with signs and symbols of different demons and rituals, and there are numerous footnotes throughout.
The book is in good condition for its age. It measures 8 1/2 x 5 inches wide, with a tight binding, wear at the heel and crown of the spine, the gilt on the rules of the spine are a bit faded, there’s modest rubbing along the edges of the boards and at the tips, Gottlieb Kloz’s name is worn on the first title page, there are corner creases, brown spots, and waters marks on some pages, the illustrations are rather clear and clean, and overall the book has held up well for its age.
WorldCat shows there are seven six-volume sets from 1821 to 1826 in Special Collections around the world: at the University of Basel and the University of Bern in Switzerland, the University of Glasgow in Scotland, the National Library of France in Paris (Bibliotheque Nationale de France), Cambridge in the UK, Wissenschaftliche Stadtbibliothek in Mainz, and MIT in Boston, and the set at Cambridge is actually six volumes-in-three from 1821 to 1822 - and two more sites supposedly had the sets in their collections, but when we checked, the sets were no longer listed in their holdings (the National Library of Scotland and the University of Pisa in Italy), so the sets are rare, as well as the individual title here.
There aren't many auction or sales records for the book. Invaluable sold a three-volume set (six volumes in three bindings) for €1200 in 2010 (about $1600) and a six-volume set for €2600 in 2021 (about $3100), and the rare book website we use is selling just two of the six-volume set from 1821 to 1826 for almost $400, one volume from the set of six from 1821 to 1826 for $215, two seven-volume sets from 1979 are selling for $216 and $294, and we are starting the bidding low for this unique piece of German occult literature to get things going.
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