first edition Hardcover
1930 · Berlin
by Bloch, Ernst
Berlin: Paul Cassirer Verlag, 1930. First edition. Hardcover. g. Quarto. 278pp. Original tan cloth with red lettering and borders on front cover and spine. Lacking free front endpaper. Written between 1910 and 1929, Spuren (Traces) is considered Ernst Bloch’s most important work next to The Principle of Hope and The Spirit of Utopia. This book, which collects aphorisms, essays, stories, and anecdotes, enacts Bloch’s interest in showing how attention to “traces”—to the marks people make or to natural marks—can serve as a mode of philosophizing. In an elegant example of how the literary can become a privileged medium for philosophy, Bloch’s chief philosophical (truncated)