Pandora's Secrets

摘要

You can't tell a book by its cover. One of the most modest of all the bindings in CHF's rare-book collection is actually a great treasure: the first edition of Pandora, Das ist, Die Edleste Gab Gottes.This unassuming book-bound in thin cardboard covered with rough blue paper trimmed flush to the text block-was among a collection of over two dozen alchemical books given to CHF by Alfred Bader in 2002. Many were early 18th-century German editions, a handful still clad in the characteristic vellum-and-gold binding of the court library of Christian Ernst, Graf zu Stolberg (1691-1771). In contrast, Pandora's cardboard-and-blue-paper rebinding resembles nothing so much as a paperback published in cold war-era Eastern Europe. But opening the cover reveals a book of rarity and beauty.