About the binding:

Full leather binding Black Morocco goatskin; smooth spine; gold-tooling on both cover boards and the spine of partially crossing lines, which are continued on the cover board sides and the inside; title letters on the front board and the spine consisting of several parallel gold lines; gilt head edge, sewn endbands; doublure and flyleaf Japanese wood veneer. Leather-edged slipcase covered with dark brown laid paper.

Note: My father served an internship with Otto Dorfner in Weimar in 1937.

About the content:

BUDDHA Auswahl aus dem Palikanon

With book decorations by Marcus Behmer.

Copy no 215 of 251 on Zanders vat paper.

Brandus’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin, 1922. Buddha Siddhartha Gautama’s own experience of suffering and ancient wisdom led him to enlightenment and to developing his teachings, the Dharma. This selection from the Pali Canon is the oldest collection of the Buddha’s discourses to have survived in a coherent form.

About the artist: Otto Dorfner was appointed to the Grossherzoglich-Sächsische Kunstgewerbeschule Weimar by Henry van de Velde in 1910. From 1919 to 1922, he was “Werkmeister der Buchbinderei” and gave classes at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar. He later became self-employed but continued to work for the Bauhaus. Dorfner ran a publishing house for graphic and bibliophile editions.

From the mid-1920s onwards, the Otto Dorfner bindery in Weimar produced almost all the bindings for Harry Graf Kessler’s fine press Cranach-Presse, also in Weimar. Over the years, Otto Dorfner taught several hundred students at his private school for arts and crafts bookbinding. He shaped the German art of bookbinding for almost half a century and set new standards. His artistic skill, combined with master craftsmanship, made him one of the most distinctive German bookbinders. Dorfner’s work is characterized by leather bindings designed with ingenious font developments and geometric line compositions, a style referred to as “Linienstil” (line style) or Dorfner style.