About the cover:

Full leather binding Cover in fawn-brown goatskin, five 8 mm wide vertical blind lines on both covers and two 2 mm wide gold lines on each edge, all running across the edges. Four strong double bands, each with two wide, adjacent blind lines, and a wide gold line at the top and bottom. Title in real gold on the spine and front cover. Gold-edged top, beige hand-cut headband; mirror and flyleaf in beige Roma handmade paper, mirror edged with a fine gold line; leather-bound slipcase covered in dark brown handmade paper.

About the content:

FAUST A tragedy by Goethe

Droemerische Verlagsanstalt, Munich, 1949, with a handwritten dedication on genuine parchment to Hans-Robert Bortfeldt for his services to the National Theatre in Weimar.

In ‘Faust I’, the scholar Faust makes a pact with the devil Mephistopheles, who promises him all the pleasures of the world if he surrenders his soul to him in the end. This agreement forms the starting point for Faust's quest for knowledge and fulfilment, which leads him deep into human suffering and guilt, especially through his relationship with Gretchen.

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.