BALÀZS, Bèla. Der Mantel der Träume. Chinesische novellen.

4to (270 × 205 mm), pp. [8], 110, [2], including 20 mounted colour-printed plates (each c. 105 × 120 mm). Original yellow cloth (‘duvetine’), title to upper cover and dragon motif to spine, in red. An excellent, bright copy in the original drab card slipcase with printed label. Contemporary bookseller’s label (Hans Dommes, Köln). First edition of Mariette Lydis’s first published book, number 70 of 100 copies on thick handmade paper and bound in bright yellow ‘duvetine’ (the limitation notice mentions copies are either in ‘duvetine’ or in Chinese silk), complete with rare original box. Though described on the title as Chinese stories by Balàzs illustrated by Lydis, the illustrations in fact came first, with the 16 fables added in response— so the book is in effect a series of pictures ‘illustrated’ with text. Its genesis lay with Lydis (then Marietta Pachoffer-Karñy) and her friend, the Viennese progressive educationalist Eugenie Schwarzwald, who approached the Hungarian emigré poet and aesthetician Balàzs (who had composed the libretto for Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle in 1911) to write a text so that a book could be published. In order to have it ready for Christmas he had to write the sixteen tales in just three weeks, producing a series of strange and sometimes chilling tales perfectly complementing the striking orientalism of the images. It was a great success — Thomas Mann extolled it as ‘a beautiful book’ in a press review, while a modern critic writes: ‘Not surprisingly [Balàzs] stuck to his favourite theme — human alienation… In these fables, Balàzs suggested that men could only unite with women in the utopian world of dreams and longing’. (Congdon, Exiles and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany, 2014, p. 104). Der Mantel der Träume has more recently been published in English as The Cloak of Dreams (Princeton, 2010). The 20 illustrations are from watercolour miniatures and reproduce dates (Lugano 1921-2) and the artist’s initials ‘M.P.K’ [for Marietta Pachoffer-Karñy, from her first marriage in 1910 to Austrian businessman Julius Koloman Pachoffer-Karñy, d. April 1922].