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Sunday 25 June 2017

Another false early German Brontë novel, or my discovery of C. Bell’s "Der Sturmvogel - eine Seegeschichte"

An American collector of Charlotte Brontë’s literature asked me some weeks ago 
to help him with the search for old prints in German language; he needs them 
for a book he is preparing in the future. I live in Hannover, Germany and I love books, but it was a long time ago that I read the Brontës. So it was very thrilling to whisk again into their world and I tried to remember what we learned many years ago at school about Acton, Ellis and Currer Bell. I was surprised to see how many different translations into German happened in the middle of the 19th century and later after 1950 - and how few there were during the two wars.

Looking at websites like Booklooker, Justbooks or viaLibri I found out that it is still possible to get rare books from private booksellers if you patiently try different spellings of names and titles.
So suddenly I found MY BOOK!  Or better, a part of MY BOOK: C. Bell’s Der Sturmvogel - eine Seegeschichte. Vom Verfasser des Rockingham

Title page of my Der Sturmvogel

That it states “Vom Verfasser des Rockingham” (by the author of -) makes it implicitly an Acton Currer Bell book, it appeared from an article on this blog about this author. It refers to Rockingham oder Der Jüngere Bruder, published in 1851 in Leipzig. I posted a comment to the article and I quickly got a response from the author - and it was quite easy to find the original novel!