Joseph II. And His Court
Mobile, AL: S.H. Goetzel, 1864. Very Good+. Item #14823
Mobile, AL: S.H. Goetzel, 1864. First American Edition. Four volumes bound in one; octavo; 240; 240; 139,[1]; 152pp.; contemporary half black morocco over marbled boards, gilt spine in six compartments, original wrappers printed on four different samples of wall paper bound in with publisher's advertisements present on all four rear covers.
Minor shelf wear to extremities, textblock a bit foxed and toned, slightly later Philadelphia bookseller ticket and contemporary ownership bookplate of a Sarah J. Potter to front pastedown, else a Very Good or better copy, original wallpaper wrappers in superlative condition.
Records indicate that the Austria-born publisher Sigmund Heinrich Goetzel first opened his bookshop Cotton County in Mobile, Alabama, in 1854. Around the same time several attempts had been made to open a paper mill in the city, though all quickly failed and by the middle of the Civil War the area's main distributor Rock Island Mill had very short supplies for non-CSA government business. As early as 1862 Goetzel had begun producing his own paper, though he appears to be one of just a handful of publishers who succumbed to using gaudy unsold sheets of wallpaper on which to print their wrappers. A survey of the Goetzel Confederate-era imprints indicate that only the six novels published by the firm (five of them by female authors) were given the wallpaper treatment, indicating that the publisher had made the conscious decision to relegate to his primarily female home front readership with works printed on colorful and cheaply-procured materials.
Which brings us to the author Luisa Mülhbach, the pseudonym of Clara Mundt (1814-1873). Of the novelists published by Goetzel during the Civil War (Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Sally Rochester), Mühlbach and Dickens were arguably the most popular of their time. In her career Mühlbach published two-hundred and ninety (!!) novels, many dealing with historical figures of royalty. The present work first appeared in her native German under the title "Kaiser Joseph und Maria Theresa" between 1856 and 1857, though it is worth pointing out that in the American translation, also by a woman, Maria Theresa has been excised from the title altogether. However, reading the text reveals that Maria Theresa is given equal billing to her husband Emperor Joseph, the first page of Volume One opening the scene in her, not his, chambers: "In the council-chamber of the Empress Maria Theresa, the six lords who composed her cabinet-council, awaited the entrance of their imperial mistress to open the sitting." As scholar Elizabeth Kimmer argues, Mulhbach "clearly savour[s] fantasies of female power." Perhaps this explains why Maria Theresa had to be removed from the title altogether and the author's first name be shortened to the gender-ambiguous initial "L." Only the translator Adelaide De V. Chaudron gets full billing on the covers and title pages, arguably because her Confederate-era early reader, "Chaudron's Spelling Book," was a Goetzel bestseller, going through three printings in two years.
"Joseph II. And His Court" remains the most common of the Goetzel wallpaper novels on the market, though this example is an especially fine one, enhanced by its female provenance.
References:
Cathleen A. Baker. "The Enterprising S.H. Goetzel: Antebellum and Civil War Publisher in Mobile, Alabama."
Elizabeth Kimmer. "Royal Housewives and Female Tyrants: Gender and Sovereignty in Works by Benedikte Naubert and Luise Mulhbach," published in "Strategic Imaginations: Women and the Gender of Sovereignty in European Culture" (2020).
T. Michael Parrish & Robert M. Willingham, Jr. "Confederate Imprints," 6437.
Price: $2,000.00