Emil Offenbacher (Kew Gardens, NY)

Twenty-four volumes (23 cm), in publisher’s wrappers. - Emil Offenbacher (1909-1990) was apprenticed with Graupe in Berlin and Halle in Munich, and issued his first catalogue in Paris in 1934. In 1941 he emigrated to New York, establishing premises on Madison Avenue together with Erwin Rosenthal. From 1945 until his death in 1990 Offenbacher was based in Kew Gardens, New York, and dealt mostly in early science, technology and medical books. Among his clients were the New York Public Library, the Newberry Library, the John Crerar Library, and the National Library of Medicine; Cornelius J. Hauck of Cincinnati, and Roy Neville of San Carlos, California. See memoirs by Bernard Rosenthal, in Jonathan Hill’s “Catalogue 61: The Reference Library of Emil Offenbacher, Part I” (New York 1991); Lucien Goldschmidt, in The Book Collector, volume 40 (1991), p.260. Cf. Donald C. Dickinson, Dictionary of American Antiquarian Bookdealers (Westport, CT 1998), pp.158-159; Ernst Fischer, Verleger, Buchhändler und Antiquare aus Deutschland und Österreich in der Emigration nach 1933. Ein biographisches Handbuch (Stuttgart 2011), pp.229-230. ¶ Faint waterstain in upper corners of Catalogues 26-27; otherwise in perfect state of preservation.