The Book of the Road - Johannes Joergensen - Superb Binding + Sending 1912 1/15

Beautiful bibliophilic work with a rare dedication by the author to Gabriel Thomas "companion de voyage"

(Joergensen also thanks him in the preface to his biography Sainte Catherine

of Siena and also dedicated to him in 1926 his book the pilgrimage of my life for 15 years of friendship)

Gabriel Thomas (major figure in the Parisian cultural world in the 19th century)

was the well-known patron of the Catholic and then symbolist painter Maurice Denis

who founded with his support the "Ateliers d'Art Sacré" for the "renewal of Christian art"

Johannes Joergensen or Jorgensen: Danish symbolist poet, famous for his works

of saints and spirituality (1866 – 1956) converted to Catholicism in 1894.

He is the only representative in Denmark of the literary movement initiated in France called "Catholic Renewal".

Johannes Joergensen was also a friend of Léon Bloy ("the Catholic pamphleteer and mystical writer")

(who in 1901 wrote a booklet on "Johannes Jœrgensen

and the Catholic movement in Denmark"

of which we sold some handwritten pages at Ader)

Léon Bloy, who is full of praise for him: "a great Catholic writer,

the only one there is in the vast Scandinavian world", retracing the doctrinal formation

of Jœrgensen, presenting his work, and giving his personal testimony on his friend Johannès

in whom he recognizes a vocation of martyrdom: “Martyrdom administered by imbeciles. What a dream ! »

All these men are thus connected by the symbolist wave.

"The Book of the Road" : Road-trip pilgrimage! referring to his conversion

and the thoughts and feelings that led him to Rome, passing through the

Germanic pantheism, and the naturalistic and revolutionary romantic period.

According to Teodor Wyzewa : It was, apparently, a mixture of travel impressions and poetic fantasies, something analogous to Henri Heine's Tableaux de route .

Under the pretext of recording his impressions as a tourist, the former lieutenant of Mr. Brandès had amused himself by celebrating the beauty, the grandeur, almost the sanctity of the Catholic religion!

He first related the principal stages of his excursion through Germany. Instinctively, without yet knowing where his pilgrimage was taking him, and simply as a poet eager for picturesque sensations, he had moved away from the noisy modern capitals to seek, in old small towns, what might have been preserved there of the old German soul.

Finally he had reached Assisi; and there a new existence had begun for him. Insensibly, the reading of the Fioretti and the Golden Legend , the spectacle of the Catholic ceremonies, the daily association with the Franciscan monks, all this had completely revealed to him the legitimacy of the moral ideal already glimpsed earlier at Nuremberg and at Rothenburg.

Such was this Roadbook : a daring apology for Catholic dogma, worship, and spirit. However, under the religious thesis which made it the principal object, the book abounded in long descriptions of nature and art; and constantly the author had joined there to the graceful and learned music of his prose, little poems in verse, whether, in the picturesque solitude of Rothenburg, he amused himself by translating into Danish stanzas the popular German songs collected formerly by Brentano and Arnim, or that, among the olive trees of the hills of Umbria, he tenderly evoked the memory of his native plains: so that one could still believe in a simple fantasy of a dilettante — or, as they said, of " decadent,”—desiring only to offer his skepticism new sources of emotion and dream.

https://www.auction.fr/_fr/lot/leon-bloy-manuscrit-autographe-johannes-jorgensen-6-pages-in-8-13158969

https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Revues_%C3%A9trang%C3%A8res_-_Un_%C3%A9crivain_danois_:_Johannes_J%C5%93rgensen

https://www.persee.fr/doc/rscir_0035-2217_1930_num_10_4_1506_t1_0720_0000_3

State

Very nice work with slight wear from use

• slight friction on the back
• small snag on the back
• small snags on the 2nd course

• Fresh interior
• dirt on a page