Publication Date: February 2020
Standard Edition
Sewn bound paperback with wrapper.
Printed 4-color offset on Mohawk Superfine.
Edition of 500 copies | 169 pages with photos & illustrations.
First 175 orders will include a letterpress printed card by Jon Beacham.
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A Shelter for Bells: From the Writings of Hans Jürgen von der Wense
Translated by Kristofor Minta and Herbert Pföstl; edited by Kirston Lightowler and Herbert Pföstl.
Composer, translator, folklorist, wanderer, aphorist, encyclopedist, poet, and consummate mystagogue of the landscape Hans Jürgen von der Wense was born in Ortelsburg, East Prussia, on November 10, 1894. His father, Adolf Friedrich August von der Wense, was in the military and died while on duty when Wense was seven years old. Only a few months later, his mother, Louise, was admitted to the first of many psychiatric clinics throughout her life. During the times of her hospitalization and treatment, Wense was placed under the care of distant elderly relatives. Of the time before his father’s death, Wense writes that some of his earliest memories included lightning, shooting stars, nasturtiums, a fire in the stove, bad spots in an apple, eggshell in the mouth, the rattling of sabers when his father came home, and a song by Schumann beginning with a throng of dark notes, which sent him fleeing in fear to a place beneath the piano—a refuge and small sanctuary from where he would carefully study an atlas of the world.
One day before his seventy-second birthday, Wense died in a small attic apartment in the university town of Göttingen. He was nearly unknown to the literary and arts community, yet he left behind a magnificent legacy and would come to be considered one of the most eccentric, radical, and enigmatic literary figures of his generation. At the time of his death his apartment housed what could be described as a personal atlas—the charting of a life in letters, the mapping of a mind in an archive of numerous diaries and scrapbooks, hundreds of annotated survey maps and musical compositions, three thousand photographs, six thousand letters, and thirty thousand loose sheets of writings. These loose sheets contained his writings on natural history, mineralogy, astrology, astronomy, poetry, folklore, and music, to name but a few of the many subjects that formed the bedrock of his life and work. From these splinters I build my firm land, wrote Wense as a footnote in a letter to Wilhelm Niemeyer, and there was indeed an entire world in his room. His writings were filed in hundreds of binders, arranged alphabetically, and comprised three major works: Epidot, a collection of fragments and aphorisms; the Wanderbuch, on landscape and walking; and the All-book, an encyclopedia that was to be a total inventory of the earth.
A brilliant polymath, Wense planned to create the All-book from his extensive multidisciplinary research and writings. An encyclopedia arranged by keyword, it would collate his aphorisms, adaptations, and translations from more than one hundred languages, including those of the Middle East, Africa, Asia, South America, and Oceania. It would also include his detailed interpretations of the myths, poetry, and philosophy of ancient cultures. The folders for the All-book, as well as for the Wanderbuch and Epidot, were in a constant state of reworking and regrouping, part of an endless process of editing and expansion. They functioned as an archive and included the most minimal traces, excerpts, bibliographic information, newspaper clippings, apercus, marginalia, preliminary studies, and title-brief jottings. Wense considered and embraced everything—from a register of the items in the bedchamber of Alcibiades to a text fragment on singing crickets and a treatise on earwax. As Wense scholar and archivist Reiner Niehoff has noted, the library was Wense’s true birthplace. This great outsider of German literature carried his ecstasies of reading from the library into nature, and from there—in a wondrous mixture of pantheistic scribal-obsession, analytical ordinal-fury, and flight of ideas—back into his own works.
Wense’s move to Kassel in 1932 marked the beginning of his life as an ecstatic wanderer and writer of the Wanderbuch. The move was precipitated by a life-changing event—his discovery of the Hessian and Westphalian highlands, a landscape for which he was to develop a deep and lasting love. Wense had seen the Desenberg—a striking elevation in an otherwise predominantly flat and treeless landscape—by chance, during a railway journey, and the impression overwhelmed him to such a degree that he decided immediately to move to Middle Germany. The rest of his life would be dedicated to a comprehensive and profound survey of the landscape between the “poles” of Soest, Hildesheim, Eschwege, and Marburg. The Wanderbuch was to be a survey of this landscape in the greatest of detail—micro-territorial reappraisals of closest proximity. A radical, tireless, nearly obsessive walker (not unlike his Swiss contemporary Robert Walser or German compatriot W. G. Sebald), Wense averaged ten to twelve hours of hiking each day. He pushed himself physically to the very limit, covering great distances at a rapid pace, and was known to walk up to 40 kilometers a day. It is believed that he walked nearly 42,000 kilometers, or the equivalent of once around the earth, within just one hundred square kilometers of the Highlands. Consequently, he experienced intense states of exhaustion. His walks and methods were a mixture of geologic acumen and metaphysical drunkenness—as he attempted to place meteorological and geophysical phenomena in relation to cosmic ones. He transformed the traversed landscape with scientific precision into script. He roamed the land in order to become invisible.
A Shelter for Bells is the first book of Jürgen von der Wense’s writings published in English.