Autograph letter signed (‘Stefan Zweig’) to [Simon] Kra, Salzburg, 8 February 1926

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942)
Autograph letter signed (‘Stefan Zweig’) to [Simon] Kra, Salzburg, 8 February 1926
In French. 1½ pages, 284 x 221mm, bearing Zweig’s monogram. Provenance: Sotheby's, 21 May 1998, lot 119.

Zweig adds two items to his legendary autograph collection, but a Baudelaire piece escapes him. Zweig is happy with the success of a lecture tour in Switzerland and Germany, though less so with the state of the book market in Germany. He thanks Kra for obtaining for him items (presumably autograph manuscripts) by Henri Murger and Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne (‘très content!’), and comments on the prices, especially for a Baudelaire poem on which he was outbid: 'je suis consolé que ce monsieur qui a acheté le Baudelaire l’a du payer 9000 fr[an]cs. Assez pour un poème !’. He also asks Kra to obtain for him two printed books:Maurice Castelain's biography of Ben Jonson [Ben Jonson: L'Homme et l'oeuvre, 1572 – 1637, Paris, 1907] and Marcel Poète’s Une vie de cité: Paris [published by Auguste Picard (Paris, 1924)]. He concludes with an apology for the hurried message: ‘Excusez la hâte! Je suis très pressé: 38 lettres a répondre’.

Simon Kra was a manuscript dealer and publisher (most famously of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 through his publishing house, the Éditions du Sagittaire). In 1927, he published a French version of Zweig’s Drei Meister (‘Three Masters’, 1920) as Deux grands romanciers du XIXe siècle: Balzac-Dickens in 1927. The majority of Zweig's letters to Kra are in the British Library.