"Excusez la hâte! Je suis très pressé: 38 lettres a répondre"

Zweig, Stefan, Austrian writer (1881-1942). Autograph letter signed ("Stefan Zweig").

$5,027.00

To the Parisian autograph dealer and publisher Simon Kra, who had bid for Zweig at an auction. Zweig adds two items to his legendary autograph collection, but a Baudelaire piece has eluded 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 de sa naissance à nos jours" (Paris, Auguste Picard, 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". The majority of Zweig's letters to Kra are in the British Library.