AQ - Book Trade and Publishing

The history of Marx's and Engels' private libraries is one of loss, recovery, and the many unfinished attempts that have been made to reconstruct the two collections. The Annotated Index (AI) under review here lists books, brochures, and periodicals once owned by the two men that later were found in more than 20 locations within and outside Germany.

In 1844, already as a student, Marx began recording his acquisitions in notebooks. Thirty-one of these early possessions are listed in the AI. In 1849 he gave 800 volumes for safekeeping to his Cologne friend Roland Daniels, whose 1851 inventory (the so-called Daniels list) identifies nearly 400 individual titles. Separated from his private library for 12 years, Marx relied on the Library of the British Museum. The record of his many years of reading is stored in some 250 notebooks, the listing of which in the AI has not progressed very far.

In the margins of his personal copies (although not in the British Museum materials!) Marx carried on a heated dialogue with the written texts, using praise, blame, ridicule, wit, and dismissal of opposing arguments in his homegrown marking system of six different colors of pencil. Engels on the other hand was a more disciplined reader, writing marginal notes in a steady hand. (The editors of the AI have for good reason favored Marx's "wild" marginalia for inclusion in their illustrations to the volume.) And because Marx and Engels often exchanged books, one often encounters the one responding to the other's marginal comments.

The breadth and content of Engels' early book collection is not well documented. The AI lists only a handful of the numerous literary works that Engels drew upon in his early writings. (During his great Ireland project, for example, Engels compiled a bibliographic index with over 150 titles and 15 notebooks of excerpts.) More titles are sure to be included in the still outstanding edition of his unpublished works.

Compared to the libraries of other 19th-century scholars, Marx's and Engels' are rather modest. For research Marx relied on the collections of the British Museum, Engels on libraries in Manchester and London. Engels acquired about half of Marx's library after the latter's death in 1883. The other half went to Marx's daughters Eleanor (Marx) Tussy in London and Laura (Marx) Lafargue in Paris and to other close friends and relations. Engels integrated his portion of Marx's library into his own and sought to ensure that the entire collection would stay together after his death. Neuhaus and Harstick, in their introducation to the AI, estimate that this library contained "at least 2,100 titles in 3,200 volumes" (p. 23), but it is not clear if they are referring to Engels' combined post-1883 library or the pre-1883 collections.

When this library was later transferred to Berlin (with no inventory list), the materials were integrated into the 4,000-volume library of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) [Social Democratic Party of Germany], against the donor's wishes. A 1901 library catalog lists around 8,000 items (not including Russian-language books). A typewritten catalog tracked down in 1987 has proven indispensible in identifying titles that had once been in Marx's and Engels' possession.

In the latter 1920s Boris I. Nikolaevskii (MEGA co-planner with David B. Riazanov) went through the library's 16,000 volumes and in 1929 published a catalog that identified no fewer than 1,130 relevant titles. After the Stalin era his work was recognized as crucial for locating Marx-Engels books worldwide. Banned in 1933, the SPD library in 1934 was moved to the warehouse of the Secret Prussian State Archives in Dahlem. In 1936, over the archivists' objections, the Prussian State Library in Berlin took 6,700 titles. Four years later the Institute for State Research of the Berlin University received 3,618 titles and the State Scientific-Statistical Seminar 1,300 titles. In November 1945 the American authorities returned some 4,000 items from Dahlem to the SPD archive.

After the founding of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) this collection was combined with the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) [Socialist Unity Party of Germany] Central Committee's library to form the basis of the library of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Berlin. In 1946 the staff of the Moscow Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute removed some 1,000 books of Marx-Engels provenance from the SPD Library. As well, rare books and books not available in Moscow were taken from the Prussian State Library and sent to Moscow as war booty.

Bruno Kaiser, the director of the Library of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, and his co-worker Inge Werchan received the remainder of the Dahlem collection in the early 1950s and took up the search for other books owned by Marx and Engels. In 1967 Wachan published a well-illustrated catalog of the results of their search: Ex libris Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels: Schicksal und Verzeichnis einer Bibliothek (Berlin, 1967). Here for the first time the Daniels list was reprinted as an appendix. Except for a very few titles in Amsterdam and at the Karl Marx House in Trier, Werchan does not give locations of the books. For good reason, she and Kaiser had to keep silent about the fact that 438 of the 504 books rediscovered between 1953 and 1961 had been given up to the Moscow Institute for Marxism-Leninism by decision of the SED Central Committee.

In the 1970s and 1980s Werchan uncovered a further 300 titles. After the MEGA Commission decided to include marginalia along with excerpts and notes in the fourth section of the work, the party institutes in Berlin and Moscow, the IISG in Amsterdam, and the Karl-Marx-Haus in Trier, in a coordinated effort, expanded the search to locations outside Berlin and the GDR. By 1995, the number of identified copies had increased to about 1,400. By the time the Annotated Index went to print, 50 more had been found, so that the reconstructed inventory contains 1,450 titles in some 2,100 volumes (a rough figure, at best, because it includes small publications, such as two-to-eight-page pamphlets and numerous offprints from journals and newspapers).

It is likely that more books from Marx's or Engels' ownership were left behind in England, but apparently no further reseach has been undertaken in this regard. For example, one of Marx's notebooks from the early 1860s, auctioned in May 2000 at Sotheby's, contains his handwritten notes on Malthus' Principles of Population and William Godwin's Political Justice, as well as excerpts from Marx's copy of T. J. Dunning's Trades' Unions and Strikes, all found in Daniels but not in the AI.

This edition of the AI lists at least 392 titles not positively identified as having been owned by Marx or Engels, implying that the AI might be more appropriately considered a "preliminary annotated index" and not a "prepublication." It is not a typical catalog of a private library, but rather a location tool and preliminary device for the editors.

The author index is not very helpful, as it does not include the title numbers with the entry. The organization of the indexed titles by subject and discipline is on the contrary very useful. The editors have maintained the pre-1990 habit of treating Marx and Engels as Siamese twins. Only after looking at the catalog entry does the reader find out whether a work belonged to Marx or to Engels. Smaller errors can be easily overlooked, although it is a puzzle why the editors spell Machiavelli as "Macchiavelli," when the rest of the literary and bibliographic world prefers the former. [hm/ga]

AQ -- Book Trade and Publishing

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