Maurizius Forever

One of Henry Miller's rarer titles — an extended essay on Jakob Wassermann's Maurizius Case trilogy, the German novels that Miller encountered and became obsessed with in the 1930s and '40s. He first wrote about them in 1945 at his cabin on Partington Ridge in Big Sur (the dedication page records his gratitude to Keith and Virginia Evans of Carmel for the use of that cabin during 1944 and 1945). The essay is vintage Miller: associative, passionate, philosophically wayward, ultimately about justice and the human capacity for self-deception as much as about Wassermann.

The first edition was a Colt Press hardcover limited to 500 copies, printed at the Grabhorn Press in San Francisco in 1946. This is the 1959 Fridtjof-Karla Publications edition — a small Indiana press that produced one of the few subsequent reprintings of the text — in the original blue pictorial wraps with the striking woodcut illustration. Fridtjof-Karla was a tiny operation, and this printing is itself uncommon. One of Henry Miller's less-traveled corners, and a genuinely interesting object.