Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm Karl

Kinder= und Haus=Märchen. Gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm [-Zweiter Band]. Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1812 & 1815



8vo (7 x 4 1/16 in.; 178 x 103 mm). I: XXVIII, 388, LXX pages, 1 leaf ("Druckfehler" bound before the LXX), II: XVI, 298, LI, [1] pages; lightly browned, occasional marginal spotting, light stains on page 95 of vol. 1. Contemporary half calf over tan boards, gilt-stamped red leather title and volume labels on spines; joint of vol. 1 cracked and backstrip loose on one hinge only, head and foot of spines chipped, corners torn, covers and spines rubbed with small damp stain on upper cover of vol. 1. Reproduction of the 1826 dedication inscription to Amalia ("Malchen") Hassenpflug pasted in to front pastedown of vol. 1.

Leopold Hirschberg (1867-1929, bookplate, his sale Stuttgart, Müller & Gräff, 5 May 1931, part of lot 559)

See Osborne (1975) II, p. 600; Paul Schroers, "Die erste Ausgabe der Grimmschen Märchen"  Philobiblon 9 (1965), pp. 263-269; see B. Hürlimann, Three Centuries of Children's Books in Europe (1967), pp. 31-36; Siegfried Neumann, "The Brothers Grimm as Collectors and Editors of German Folktales," The Reception of Grimms' Fairy Tales, Donald Haase, ed. (1993), pp. 24-34

lightly browned, occasional marginal spotting, light stains on vol. 1, page 95. Contemporary half calf over tan boards, gilt-stamped red leather title and volume labels on spines; joint of vol. 1 cracked and backstrip loose on one hinge only, head and foot of spines chipped, corners torn, covers and spines rubbed with small damp stain on upper cover of vol. 1.
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First edition, second issue, with story 86 occupying pages 387-388 and with an additional section of notes (pp. lxi-lxx) added at end, preceded by a leaf of "Druckfehler zum ersten Theil"; this issue was not published until 1813 (see Schroers).

The stories known today as Grimm's Fairy Tales were collected from oral traditions by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, philologists and pioneer folklorists, who spent much of their lives as librarians at the Ducal Library at Kassel. Growing up in a Germany occupied by the French, patriotic fervor led them to pursue a quest for the pure springs of their nation's linguistic heritage. They began collecting folk tales around 1806, concentrating on the oral traditions of Hassia and Westphalia. Their work was not intended to be for children, but simply to document the stories of children. By 1810 they had produced a manuscript collection of several dozen tales, which they had recorded by inviting storytellers to their home and transcribing what they heard. Although they were said to have collected tales from peasants, many of their informants were middle-class or aristocratic, recounting tales they had heard from their servants.

In 1812, the Brothers published the first volume of 86 German fairy tales with the title Kinder- und Hausmärchen ("Children's and Household Tales"). A second volume of 70 fairy tales appeared in 1814 (postdated "1815" on the title page), which together make up the first edition of the collection, containing 156 stories. The Brothers Grimm were the first workers in this genre to present their stories as faithful renditions of the kind of direct folkloric materials, rather than didactic adaptations for children. They often provided the same tale type in two or three versions, sometimes even under the same heading. The Grimms had a pedagogical purpose, the book was supposed to become a "manual of education," but the problematic content (violence, horror) and awkward narrative style of certain texts, limited its appeal and very little of the edition of 900 copies of the first volume were sold. Wilhelm exerted a stronger editorial hand in the second volume, and stories were selected with a more artful shape, to present a more appealing text. Yet the second volume sold as poorly as the first. A second edition appeared in 1819 rewritten and adapted for children, accompanied by a third volume of commentary (Anmerkungen) published in 1822.

"For adult readers the versions of the fairy tales given in the original edition are especially valuable, for they reproduce most strongly the verbal rendering of the original source. There is not a single superfluous word in this first edition; everything stands clearly delineated as in a woodcut with only the meagrest of necessary detail" (Hürlimann, p. 32).

One of their informants was Amalia ("Malchen") Hassenpflug and her sister Jeanette, girls of a neighboring bourgeois family in Kassel, at whose home the Grimms were often dinner guests. A copy with dedication inscription to "Malchen" was famously sold at a Berlin auction (Perl, 25 February 1907) for Reichsmarks 280 (about USD 1200 at that time). Written up in the Vossische Zeitung (1 March 1907, page 5), the inscription was no doubt reproduced and a copy pasted into the present copy.

The first edition is of extraordinary rarity. OCLC lists only one copy in the U.S. (Houghton Library=second issue) and one in Europe (Württemberg), but the GBV lists 4 other copies in Germany. There is no copy in the Osborne collection. The last copy sold at auction appeared in 1982.