Der Wanderer und Sein Schatten (The Wanderer and His Shadow)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Chemnitz, 1880
 
First Edition, First Issue in Original Wraps. UNCUT and complete!
 
Wrapper edges and spine darkened. Old paper repair to verso of upper wrapper. Upper spine and front corner through the first few pages chipped. Old seller pencil notes on rear wrapper and title page. Interior pages brightly beautiful. Very Good and an amazing survival. A spectacular copy of one of Nietzsche’s scarcest titles and the last installment in the Human All-Too-Human trilogy.
 
Printed in an edition of 1000 copies, of which “Only 192 copies of this book were sold in this first edition, first issue state before the remainders were sold to E.W. Fritsch of Leipzig in 1886 – and then reissued with a new title page.”(Schaberg)
 
All of Nietzsche’s works in original, unrestored wraps are of utmost rarity. And to add even more gravitas, this copy is inscribed by the publisher on the front cover corner for special presentation to Nietzsche’s closest friends and associates:
 
“Gratis im Auftrage des Verfassers” [Free on behalf of the author]
 
‘Nietzsche remained respected in his professorial position in Basel, but his deteriorating health, which led to migraine headaches, eyesight problems and vomiting, necessitated his resignation from the university in June, 1879, at age 34. At this point, he had been a university professor for ten years, and had just less than another ten years of productive intellectual life remaining.
 
From 1880 until his collapse in January 1889, Nietzsche led a wandering, gypsy-like existence as a stateless person (having given up his German citizenship, and not having acquired Swiss citizenship), circling almost annually between his mother’s house in Naumburg and various French, Swiss, German and Italian cities. His travels took him through the Mediterranean seaside city of Nice (during the winters), the Swiss alpine village of Sils-Maria (during the summers, located near the present-day ski resort of St. Moritz), Leipzig (where he had attended university, and had been hoping to resume his teaching career in 1883), Turin, Genoa, Recoaro, Messina, Rapallo, Florence, Venice, and Rome, never residing in any place longer than several months at a time…
 
Reluctant to construct a philosophical “system,” and sensitive to the importance of style in philosophic writing, Nietzsche composed [the Human All-Too-Human trilogy] as a series of several hundred short passages and aphorisms—concise condensations of his assorted insights—whose typical length ranges from a line or two to a page or two. Here, he often reflects upon cultural and psychological phenomena by connecting them to individuals’ organic and physiological constitutions. The idea of power (for which he would later become known) sporadically appears as an explanatory principle, but Nietzsche tends at this time to invoke hedonistic considerations of pleasure and pain in his explanations of cultural and psychological phenomena. Given his harsh criticisms of hedonism and utilitarianism in later works (e.g., Thus Spoke Zarathustra, re: “the Last Man”), Human All-Too-Human appears to many readers as an uncharacteristic work, more science than art-inspired in its approach to health, where Nietzsche was struggling to break free of Wagner’s spell, and which, presupposing a fundamentally hedonistic moral psychology, does not fully embody the pain-and-power-centered approach that he later developed.’ (Stanford)