Samuel Frederick

It took 14 years for two scholars to decipher 526 pages (mostly used scraps, backs of calendars, some as small as business cards) of Swiss author Robert Walser's writings, composed with a dull pencil in a one to two-millimeter-high cursive. The body of works hidden in these apparent scribbles includes entire plays, a novel, and many short prose pieces and poems. They are among the most radical and at the same time delightful works of German-language modernism. These two volumes, published in 2000, were the final publications in the six-volume series, closing out the project. Already an avid reader of Walser, I bought these just before beginning graduate school. They ended up becoming central to my research — and still are. The library already has the first four volumes. This occasion seemed to me a fitting way to complete the set.