*SOLD*
Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister[Human All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits]
 
AND
 
Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Anhang: Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche[Human, All Too Human A Supplement: Mixed Opinions and Maxims]
 
Friedrich Nietzsche
Chemnitz, 1878 and 1879
 
Both works bound in one - early 20th century vellum binding with stylized spine lettering, pages slightly trimmed. 
 
A Book for Free Spirits - No ads and rear wrappers, but the gray front wrapper is present(any parts of the original wrappers are often missing in rebound copies of Nietzsche’s works).
 
First edition, first issue with “eere” correction, cut and pasted over “menon”(a non-word) to create “meere”(sea) on p. 290.(Schaberg)
 
Ex libris Dr. Heinrich Duthaler, with his ownership signature and his woodcut bookplate on the front pastedown.  Duthaler was an eminent Basel, Switzerland resident and late contemporary of Nietzsche.  The front wrapper is modestly stained at the top right corner, with a tiny portion of the bottom right corner clipped. The seventh section, Wife and Child, contains numerous margin notes and underlining – by Duthaler and possibly Georg Vischer(see below for his significance). Otherwise the pages are unstained and crisp.  Very Good. 
 
This copy is one of a small number of advance copies sent to Nietzsche’s closest friends.
 
Ownership inscription on front wrapper, "Mr. Georg Fürstenberger-Vischer / from the author!"
 
Georg Fürstenberger-Vischer was the son-in-law of the classical philologist Wilhelm Vischer-Bilfinger, who had supported Nietzsche's appointment at the University of Basel in 1869.  Fürstenberger-Vischer maintained a close relationship with Nietzsche even after Wilhelm’s death in 1874. 
 
In mid-April 1878, Nietzsche gave instructions to his publisher in Chemnitz for the dispatch of 30 advance copies of Human All Too Human to his closest friends(including the soon-to-be former friend Richard Wagner) and the Basel Library. 
 
Shortly after April 20, the copies were shipped.  Fürstenberger-Vischer was the first respondent on April 26 with a short thank you note to the perpetually ailing Nietzsche, who just a few months earlier had received a bottle of Madera from Fürstenberger-Vischer in an effort to revitalize his health.
 
The book would not be published until May 7.
 
Overall, there were only 489 copies of the first edition, first issue, as the remaining 511 of the original 1000 first edition copies were sold to E.W. Fritzsch in 1886 for use in a new edition.(Schaberg)
 
This copy is a subset of an already small subset. 
 
Mixed Opinions and Maxims - First edition, first issue.  No wrappers bound, but a complete copy with all the ads.  A few finger smudges on the title page, otherwise the pages are clean and crisp.  Very Good.
 
“Only 325 copies of this book were sold in this first edition, first issue state before the remainders were sold to E.W. Fritsch of Leipzig and then reissued with a new title page.  With the publisher’s penciled hand correction to page 35 – correcting “Opfersinns” to “Opfe rthier’s” – as requested by Nietzsche in his March 5, 1879
letter to Schmeitzner.”(Schaberg)
 
“Nietzsche’s health, always fragile, forced him to take leave from Basel University in 1876–77.  He used the time to explore a broadly naturalistic critique of traditional morality and culture…Nietzsche’s research resulted in Human, All-Too-Human, which introduced his readers to the corrosive attacks on conventional pieties for which he became famous, as well as to a style of writing in short, numbered paragraphs and pithy aphorisms to which he often returned in later work.”(Stanford)
 
“The wanderer. He who has come only in part to a freedom of reason cannot feel on earth otherwise than as a wanderer - though not as a traveler towards a final goal, for this does not exist.  But he does want to observe, and keep his eyes open for everything that actually occurs in the world; therefore he must not attach his heart too firmly to any individual thing; there must be something wandering within him, which takes its joy in change and transitoriness.  To be sure, such a man will have bad nights, when he is tired and finds closed the gates to the city that should offer him rest; perhaps in addition, as in the Orient, the desert reaches up to the gate; predatory animals howl now near, now far; a strong wind stirs; robbers lead off his pack-animals.  Then for him the frightful night sinks over the desert like a second desert, and his heart becomes tired of wandering.  If the morning sun then rises, glowing like a divinity of wrath, and the city opens up, he sees in the faces of its inhabitants perhaps more of desert, dirt, deception, uncertainty, than outside the gates - and the day is almost worse than the night.  So it may happen sometimes to the wanderer; but then, as recompense, come the ecstatic mornings of other regions and days.  Then nearby in the dawning light he already sees the bands of muses dancing past him in the mist of the mountains.  Afterwards, he strolls quietly in the equilibrium of his forenoon soul, under trees from whose tops and leafy corners only good and bright things are thrown down to him, the gifts of all those free spirits who are at home in mountain, wood, and solitude, and who are, like him, in their sometimes merry, sometimes contemplative way, wanderers and philosophers.  Born out of the mysteries of the dawn, they ponder how the day can have such a pure, transparent, transfigured and cheerful face between the hours of ten and twelve-they seek the philosophy of the forenoon.”(Aphorism 638, Human All Too Human)
 
A rather special association copy of a rare and important book, Human All Too Human, bound with its second installment – works that marked a turning point in Nietzsche’s life and work.