By Max Ziegert



Ludolph Moritz St. Goar, „tall and handsome“, never left his antiquarian bookshop without his top-hat. Julius Friedländer from Berlin used to wear a Turkish fez. Jacques Rosenthal, fiery in his youth and with his curly black hairs a real heart-throb, was the perfect complement to his older brother Ludwig Rosenthal, head and heart of the Rosenthal company in Munich. Karl W. Hiersemann, publisher and rare book dealer in Leipzig, resembled a Catholic priest so much that children sometimes kissed his hand, believing he was the parish priest. Even in winter J. A. Stargardt personally climbed up all the stairs to the attic of his house where the valuable books were kept. The house had once belonged to Karl August Varnhagen van Ense. One day Stargardt was found there grappling with a cat who was nursing her kittens on a pile of incunabula.

Born in 1852 Max Ziegert had become an apprentice at J. A. Stargardt’s Autographenhandlung and then worked for Ludwig Rosenthal in Munich, before he finally opened his own bookshop in Frankfurt, Hochstraße 3, not far away from Joseph Baer & Co. He knew his colleagues, and he portrayed them all. Ziegert’s “silhouettes” show the most fascinating characters of the German speaking 19th century rare book trade: from the Rosenthal and Baer families to Emil Hirsch, Hans Boerner, Gustav Nebehay, Martin Breslauer, Paul Graupe and Dominik Artaria.

An excerpt from his "silhouettes":