Famous Feral Child

Stuttgart: Erhardische Buchhandlung, January 6, 1768 — December 7, 1768. 49 consecutive issues of a weekly magazine in a disbound state; 784 pp. (numbered consecutively). The publication was sold weekly from the bookstore in Stuttgart that printed it. Some copies include a yearly table of contents and index — however, many — including ours — do not. In German.

Fair to Good; the magazines were previously bound. All pages 1–784 of 49 issues, present and generally the text is crisp.

German Farmer’s Almanac 

49 consecutive issues from January to December 1768 of a very scarce German weekly magazine that was published by a Stuttgart bookstore from 1767 to 1768. Publication ceased at the end of 1768. Each issue is generally 16 pages with 2 articles.

The publication is similar to the American Farmer’s Almanac. Topics include: population growth around the earth; how to unfreeze your limbs (the answer is to drink alcohol); unknown sources of wealth (an especially popular subject addressed in many issues); how to keep fish alive in the extreme cold; how to keep silkworms; how to prune trees; how to keep sheep, etcetera. Many of the articles are translations from French, Swedish or English articles.

Early German Account of Frances’s Famous Feral Child

One of the most famous stories of wild children is that of Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc. She was found living wild in the woods of France in 1731 and became the source of a flurry of publications in the 18th century. Her story was mostly forgotten until 2004 when a French researcher released findings that this was no tall tale, but rather truth.

Marie-Angélique’s story is told over 12 pages in the issues from July 27, 1768, and August 3, 1768. According to the article, she was an indigenous person from the arctic (from between Canada and Hudson Strait), sold into slavery, taken to an ​“American” island with sugar plantations, and from there sold again as a slave, and brought to France. Thence she escaped and lived alone in the woods.

The article in the Stuttgarter allgemeines Magazin is almost identical to a 1768 English version: ​“An Account of a Savage Girl, Caught Wild in the Woods of Champagne” (1768) Marie-Catherine Hommasel-Hecquet and/or Charles Marie de La Condamine, translated from the French by William Robertson. The account is written from a perspective of Western ​“superiority” and the worldwide fascination in the 18th century of this young girl as ​“savage” and ​“wild” is, of course, a racist caricature of a tragic life.

A scarce publication. At the time of cataloguing, no other copies for sale. No auction records in Rare Book Hub. OCLC locates no copies outside of continental Europe.