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This bilingual compilation is published in collaboration with the Freud Museum, London.
As Gerhard Fichtner reminds us in his printed essay accompanying the CD catalogue, from early on Freud was a ‘book-worm’, whose ‘favourite food [was] books’ (pp. 10-1). Already during his school years, he found ‘infinite pleasure’ in ‘enlarging [his] beloved small library’ (p. 22), as he wrote to his friend Eduard Silberstein. To his fiancée he wrote in 1883 that ‘above all reading makes one independent and all one needs is perseverance, adventurousness and books’ (p. 22)—books, alas, that did not come for free, so that he also reported he had ‘bought some new trousers for 10 florins but books for 20 florins’ (p. 23).
Towards the end of his life, Freud's library was, as far as we know, ‘considerable but not huge’ (p. 15). It comprised about 3,600 titles (in some 4,500 volumes). Habent sua fata libelli [books have their fate]: When Freud emigrated to London in June 1938, he was able to take with him about two-thirds of his library, and gave the rest to a Viennese book-dealer, Paul Sonnenfeld, who in turn sold most of it to another dealer, Heinrich Hinterberger, while keeping 70 copies for himself. The collection in London remained more or less intact, and Anna Freud specified in her will that after her death the house and contents should become a Freud Museum, where the books are still housed today. Hinterberger's collection was sold as a whole to the Library of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, from which it later became a part of the Health Sciences Library of Columbia University. Sonnenfeld's copies, which he