Die Verwandlung.. This item is unavailable.Die Verwandlung.

Leipzig: Kurt Wolff Verlag. [1915]. 8vo. Publisher's green printed boards, printer's device to upper board, top-edge stained blue; pp. 72, [1 (blank)], [5 (advertisements)], [1 (blank)]; woodcut printer's device to title, title within triple-filleted border; wanting the pictorial dust-jacket by Ottomar Starke, as often (see below), spine bumped and somewhat chipped, corners slightly worn; small mark to title, else a very good, clean copy; erased contemporary ownership inscription 'Lieber .' to front free endpaper. First edition in book form of Kafka's Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), issued simultaneously in boards and in wrappers. Leipzig publisher Kurt Wolff, at the suggestion of Franz Werfel, had been in touch with Kafka about the manuscript of Die Verwandlung as early as 1913, and the work's first appearance in print would be as pp. 1177-1230 in the journal Die weissen Blatter in October 1915, which had resumed publication after a pause at the start of the First World War. The journal was, 'at the time, if not legally, then de facto an organ of the Wolff publishing house . The first volume of Die weissen Blatter (1913/1914) already contained essays and poems by the Prague group and their friends' (Dietz, trans.). The first separate edition was simultaneously issued in December 1915 in boards with a pictorial dust-jacket by Ottomar Starke, and in wrappers with the same illustration, both the dust-jacket and wrappers dated 1916. Kafka had explicitly warned Starke not to illustrate Gregor Samsa's altered form: 'the insect itself cannot be drawn. It cannot be shown even from a distance' (trans.) Dietz 26; Flores, p. 4; Hemmerle, p. 21; Smolen 22/23.1.B; Wilpert/Guhring II, 4.…