Guggenheim Catalogue

Dr. Felix Guggenheim

We are pleased to offer the rare book collection of Dr. Felix Guggenheim (1904–1976). Guggenheim emigrated to the United States in 1940. An influential publisher in Germany, Guggenheim was able to utilize his European contacts to establish a successful business as a publisher and literary agent for clients in the USA and in Germany.

Guggenheim’s Los Angeles based publishing company, Pazifische Presse, published German exile luminaries such as Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Döblin, Friedrich Torberg, Alfred Neumann, Leonhard Frank, Franz Werfel, and Bruno Frank. Many of those authors’ publications with Guggenheim are the true first editions of their works. Guggenheim’s clients as literary agent included the authors that he published along with Heinrich Mann, Vicki Baum, Erich Maria Remarque, and many more.

Guggenheim associated with virtually all famous German literary authors of the time, and his influence on German literature during World War II and the post-war period was extraordinary. It is precisely for these efforts that Guggenheim was honored by the German Federal Government in 1966 with Germany’s highest civilian honor, the Order of Merit First Class (Bundesverdienstkreuz).

Guggenheim was also very active helping other refugees escape to the United States during World War II. He held leadership positions in the Jewish Club of 1933, where he assisted fellow members with advice regarding immigration.

Throughout his life, Guggenheim collected rare Judaica with an emphasis on the history of the persecution of Jews. Altogether, only 140 to 150 books in Hebrew were printed before 1500. Of these Hebrew incunables, many survive only in fragmentary form because of pogroms, book burnings, and expulsions of Jews over centuries. While monastic libraries preserved the forty to fifty thousand non-Hebrew incunables, no such systematic preservation existed for early Hebrew texts. In this catalogue, we are pleased to present ten incunables and two earlier manuscript books important to the history of Judaism. Many of these items Guggenheim acquired prior to 1938 and managed to safely transport out of Germany over Switzerland to the United States.

This catalogue is divided into two parts: first, twenty-five highlights of Guggenheim’s Judaica and antisemitism collection; and second, twenty-five highlights of German­istic. These two seemingly inapposite parts coexist in tension with each other. The books and manuscripts in this catalogue collectively represent the complex web of great Judaic intellectual thought and Germany’s Land der Dichter und Denker (land of poets and thinkers).

Printed copies may be ordered for $50/each, inclusive of domestic shipping.