Colour woodblock scenes from one of the world’s first novels, the early 11th-c Tale of Genji (Kyoto, late 19th c.)

2025–6 is a double anniversary for Rilke: 150 years since his birth, and the centenary of his death. The collection, and the performance, seem timely.

And next month will see the premiere of Vita Mariae, the sequence of words and music I have written based on Rilke's cycle, performed by the outstanding Cambridge University Schola Cantorum (cambridgeschola.com/event/656235...). I'm excited to hear it.

The collection I have built is now offered for sale (simonbeattie.co.uk/wp-content/u...).

... as far as I can tell, every English translation of the work, including one apparently unrecorded printing), translator (producing my own version, the first in the UK for almost 75 years), and composer (setting a number of my translations to music).

Some years ago, I became very interested in Rilke, specifically his cycle Das Marienleben, which he wrote just before he started work on the Duino Elegies. It set me on a stimulating path, as a bookseller (tracking down not only an inscribed copy of the first edition but...

Simon Beattie Bookseller, translator, composer. Old books, new music.

Someone in Austin, Texas listened to some of my music yesterday. Always interesting to see how far it reaches. soundcloud.com/simon-42-1

A provincial performance of Charles A. Somerset’s 'Shakspeare’s Early Days' (1829), the first English Shakespeare biopic.

A complete set of a satirical illustrated ‘chronicle’ of the First World War (printed 1915–16) in the style of a lubok, a form of Russian popular print going back to the seventeenth century.

...and Cambridge.

Oxford...

Reading in a palanquin. From a 23-foot-long panorama, c.1843.

First Nations people in Calgary. Taken on a round-the-world choir tour in 1911, ‘one of the most remarkable events in British choral history’.

'Ladies’ Ceremonial Poetry Contest' by the young printmaker Kawanabe Kyōsui, daughter of the woodblock designer Kawanabe Kyōsai. Tokyo, c.1888.

A remarkable survival: the first fascicle of the important dictionary compiled by the Brothers Grimm.

The whitebeams (if that's what they are) I walk past every day looking gloriously fresh and green in the morning sunshine.

Perhaps ask the Natural History Museum, or the RSPB?

Of course, there is a (German) word for this: Buchfundstück. A thing found in a book.

Yes. Have never visited, but drove near there once.

A children’s game issued to commemorate the first America’s Cup in 1851.

Out now: simonbeattie.co.uk/wp-content/u...

First edition of a dramatic work from 1887 (‘The Sea: a Musical Painting’) by the virtuoso pianist Andrei Oppel (1843–1888), dedicated to the painter Ivan Aivazovsky (famous for his seascapes), this copy inscribed to Prince Vladimir Mikhailovich Golitsyn.

An example of an ‘improved’ eighteenth-century print, the plate originally engraved in 1718, to which someone added Hogarth’s name in the early 1920s.

From a 19th-century French children's book.

Victorian toothache, as depicted by George Cruikshank in 1849.

The early 16th-century Pitchmarket in Cerne Abbas.

Someone once told me foxgloves flower every other year. Don't know if that's right.

A rather elegant brocade paper, in a copy of Johann Christoph Beer's Christlicher Communicanten Geistliches Schatz-Kästlein, 1762.

From a 1968 children’s book about Mars. Artwork by the popular Soviet children’s illustrator, Yury Smolnikov (1926–1989).

A block-printed putto enjoying a book.