Maggs Bros.

Very good, covers and spine unusually bright and clean, endpapers with a strip of glue residue presumably from a protective cover, short tear to foredge of vol. 1. pp. 5-6.

Published three years before Count Harry Graf Kessler founded his own Cranach Press, Die Odyssee was an early attempt ‘to produce a book as perfect as possible’ using the trade printing workshops and materials available to the established Insel Verlag publishing house. ‘As an intellectual and spiritual achievement Kessler’s edition of the Odyssey, though strictly speaking not yet a Private Press book, was of singular importance… like Wagner’s Lohengrin that paved the way for The Ring… Kessler’s Odyssey had the charming vigour of youthful adventure while already displaying many traits of a masterpiece, although it remained in itself a work almost as perfect as it could have been’ (John Dieter Brinks, The German Homer in The Book as a Work of Art, 2005).