A rare first edition of Grimms' Fairy Tales (originally known as Children's and Household Tales) was just auctioned in Cologne for a new record price, and now the Brothers Grimm are making headlines again. In this case, however, not on the banks of the Rhine, but on the banks of the Warta River in Poznań, Poland.
See also: Once Upon a Time in Cologne: A World Record for the Brothers Grimm
After six months of research, last year in the library of the Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU), Professor Eliza Pieciul-Karmińska and librarian Renata Wilgosiewicz-Skutecka came across 27 books that had once been part of the private library of the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. This discovery followed an earlier one in which six volumes formerly owned by the Grimms were discovered in the university library's Incunabula collection in 2002. The current find also consists of incunabula, i.e. books from the early days of printing, as well as old prints and books.
Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) were primarily folklorists and linguists who assembled an extensive private library with around 8,000 volumes from various eras over their many years of joint research. After Wilhelm Grimm's death, his son left his father's and uncle's collections to the library of the Humboldt University in Berlin. Most of these books are still there today, but not all of them.
There are various possibilities for how the 27 rediscovered volumes came to Poznań. Some of them could be part of the donations that the Humboldt University made to the then Kaiser Wilhelm University in Poznań in the late 19th century. Others were added towards the end of the Second World War when Berlin relocated significant stocks for fear of air raids. Even after the end of the war, shipments of books continued to arrive from Berlin.
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"The find has enormous scientific, material and cultural value," explains Prof. Eliza Pieciul-Karmińska, a researcher at the AMU and translator of the Grimm fairy tales into Polish.
The books from Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's private library are an important source of information about the brothers' working methods, as they annotated the volumes with handwritten notes that they used for their research. A rarity of the 27 rediscovered books is the first edition of the picaresque novel Simplicius Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen published in 1669.
The books are now being digitised and thus made available to the public and further research. And perhaps more exciting rediscoveries will follow soon...
