Kleine Schriften. Ein Beytrag zur Völker- und Länderskunde, Naturgeschichte und Philosophie des Lebens

A charming set in completely original condition of the first collected edition of the works of Georg Forster. The first volume was revised and edited by Forster himself, who died before the remaining volumes were published, and was the only volume to be published in Leipzig (it was reprinted later in Berlin); the subsequent volumes were published in Berlin between 1794 and 1797. Some sets are therefore found with the second (Berlin) rather than the first (Leipzig) edition of the initial volume. As the title implies, this set prints an important selection of Forster's shorter pieces. A great number of the essays printed here relate to Pacific voyaging, reflecting Forster's enduring interest in the region. Fittingly, the first essay is his important and long-overlooked memoir of Captain Cook, 'Cook, der Entdecker', first published as the introduction to the German edition of Cook's third voyage, and only recently translated into English for the first time.

Any number of the essays are of tremendous interest, not least Forster's 1787 article on the British Colony in New Holland, an essay on Tahiti and another on the breadfruit (with folding plate), the Latin preface to his Dissertatio de Plantis Esculentis insularum oceani australis of 1786, and his article on the red Bee-eater of Hawaii, first printed in the Göttingisches Magazin in 1781, and recognised as the first major natural history article relating to the Sandwich Islands (see Forbes 13). There are also two major essays on the Northwest coast of America, both accompanied by excellent large folding maps the first with notes on the fur-trade and the map by Carl Gäck the Berlin cartographer (1791), and the second, accompanied by another large folding map by Gäck, but on this occasion based on an Arrowsmith chart of 1789. The two large folding charts were published for Forster's own German translation of Cook's third voyage, but were included in some copies of his Kleine Schriften, as here.

Otherwise, the essays show Forster's wide-ranging interests, including pieces on English literature, the Comte de Volney, and his memoirs of the tumultuous year 1790, with many plates including a portrait bust of Benjamin Franklin.