Hesse (Hermann) Magister Ludi

London, Aldus Publications, 1949.

First English edition, first impression. 8vo. Original black cloth. Dust-jacket.

The first English edition of Hermann Hesse’s last novel, Das Glasperlenspiel (Zurich, 1943), translated by Mervyn Savill. It was later retranslated by Richard & Clara Winston as The Glass Bead Game (1969). Set in the future, in Castalia, a secluded province devoted to scholarship, the novel follows the life of Joseph Knecht, who rises to become Magister Ludi, master of the Glass Bead Game, a ritual synthesis of all human learning. In the end Knecht turns his back on the order, convinced that intellectuals must not cut themselves off from the world. The novel closes with Knecht’s poems and three imagined “incarnations” from other times and cultures. Hesse began the book in 1931 and finished it in Switzerland in 1943, after German publishers had refused it because of his opposition to the Nazis.

Hesse received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946; Das Glasperlenspiel, his last novel, had been published three years earlier. His books found an enormous new readership after his death, particularly with the counter-culture of the 1960s, and have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. This edition, with a foreword and translations of the poems by Eric Peters, was published by Aldus in London in 1949, the same year as Henry Holt’s American edition of the Savill translation. The jacket is lettered “Nobel Prize Novel”, with a portrait and biography of Hesse on the rear panel.