In the Kingdom of Books

Cover of the NZZ am Sonntag-Magazine, 14 Dezember, 2025. Photo by Joël Hunn

Cover story in the NZZ am Sonntag-Magazine. Photo by Joël Hunn

Mr Tenschert, Christmas is coming soon. Which book are you definitely going to give as a present?

HERIBERT TENSCHERT: The first edition of the awkward, yet utterly perfect letters from Hölderlin's great love Diotima, one of 320 copies on handmade paper in vellum binding. Then Tacitus' Germania, in Latin and German by Rudolf Borchardt, edition of Bremer Presse in 250 copies. And also on handmade paper: "Propos sur le bonheur" by Alain, the first edition from 1925.

And more recent works?

"I drink, therefore I am" by Roger Scruton, 2009 – rarely has philosophy been such a celebration of sensuality. I read all kinds of books. Classics have the advantage that they prove their worth simply by having become classics.

Who do you prefer: Thomas Mann or Heimito von Doderer?

Heimito, because Mozart and Schubert are closer to my heart than all the Wagners in the world; and because no one has captured the dreamlike, traumatic undercurrent of spoken Austrian German in literature as adoringly as Doderer.

Dorothea Elmiger or Kim de l'Horizon?

Lolita. Every letter of that name outweighs hecatombs of the latest literature.

You own almost 300,000 antiquarian books, up to a thousand years old, more than any other private bookseller in the world. When does it become too much?

Collectors set themselves no limits, but recently we had to give away 10,000 art auction catalogues because we needed space for other things.

You also sell books. To whom?

To collectors, other antiquarians and public institutions, always the same few dozen people from Europe, America or even the Louvre Abu Dhabi; four or five are really good customers who come back again and again. In terms of price, we are in the top segment. My once largest individual customer, the Dutch collector Joost Ritman, purchased hundreds of manuscripts and early editions from me over several years for more than 150 million marks, until the banks cut off his funding. He had become intoxicated with a sense of omnipotence.

That won't happen to you?

We stand on our own feet. As a young antiquarian, I had a bank guarantee for 500,000 marks from my grandfather so that I could purchase 3,500 old books from a collector in Cologne. I've been in business ever since.

And you've never overextended yourself?

My most expensive purchase was probably the almost 5 million Swiss francs I paid in 2013 for a Book of Hours with 30 drawings by Paul de Limbourg, the main artist of the "Tres Rich es Heures du Due de Berry".

Have you ever read a book online?

Good heavens, no.

Even many intellectuals today hardly own any physical books.

Tant pis pour eux. But there is also a counter-movement. We weren't made to spend all day wiping mirrorsmooth surfaces; we want to feel something. The material of our books is alive: the paper, the parchment, the leather, the inlays of the covers.

How do you explain that to today's teenagers who have no reading experience?

If books played an important role in your home, a visit to our antiquarian bookshop in Bibermühle near Ramsen will help. There you will find the first editions of Faust and the Roman de la Rose in all versions, black and white, colour, printed on paper and on vellum: tangible evidence of their time, immaculate or with signs of reverent use. No computer can replace these material dimensions of the spirit. I am the antithesis of TikTok and Instagram, the most analogue person in the world, even without a mobile phone.

Isn't that rather isolated – and in an elite position?

But hopefully! The superlative is my element. At a time when everything is geared towards conformity, equality and equal rights, I consciously take the opposite path: towards the most beautiful, the supposedly unattainable.

How have prices developed?

They have actually fallen somewhat. But only for the broad range of offerings, such as first editions of Kafka, Thomas Mann, Schiller — things where it's all about anciennity. When I started my own antiquarian bookshop in Rotthalmünster in Lower Bavaria there wasn't much else in Germany. I was one of the first to fight for the older, beautiful things in England and America, immaculately preserved illuminated manuscripts, Book of Hours, incunabula, as books from the first decades of edition up to the year 1500 are called. In this top segment, prices remain stable or sometimes rise exponentially.

The book dealer Heribert Tenschert. Photo by Joël Hunn

Do you read all your books?

I leaf through them, study them and catalogue them. However, it does not make sense to read every book from cover to cover. Montaigne said: I always have my friends around me; they wait patiently on their shelves until I invite them to join me, and then they are at my beck and call.

Montaigne himself is such a friend today.

We have the first complete edition of "Essais" from 1588 and the most beautiful copy of the authoritative definitive edition from 1595, which you can find in our catalogue! And, of course, all later editions.

Are there linguistic boundaries?

I don't deal in books that I can't read. I studied classical philology, Romance languages and Germanic languages, Greek, Old French, Old Provençal, Old High German and Middle High German, and Latin is my second mother tongue. I also receive enquiries about Korans and Hebrew Bibles, but I am not an expert in those areas. I once owned a 12th-century Hebrew manuscript, almost the entire Pentateuch, but I was unable to sell it for a long time.

Otherwise, do you tend to sit on leftovers?

I'm sitting on thousands of leftovers! But that doesn't bother me, because I know that what doesn't sell in 2005 will sell in 2015, or else in 2025. Keep in mind that we are talking almost always about the most beautiful copy that exists outside of institutions worldwide.

At some point, beauty will be rewarded?

Exactly, and then you can sell the book for three or four times what you wanted for it twenty years ago. But the years during and after the Covid pandemic were catastrophic. Suddenly, no one came to Bibermühle anymore, and we were only making 20 to 30 per cent of our usual turnover.

How did you survive?

A billionaire from Down Under bought my entire collection of almost 200 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.

That must have hurt you too.

Separations like that are like letting go of an adult child into a promising marriage. They hurt, but they are part of the cycle. When the Marbach Literary Archive talked me out of the newly acquired manuscript of Kafka's "Process", it felt like a defeat, but worse are missed opportunities such as a 13thcentury Bible from Bologna in 1989, exuberantly decorated, actually a dream piece. I gave up at £850,000 because the bookbinder was so careless to cut into the lavishly painted margins.

An insult to your expertise?

Just thinking about it still hurts me today. Two decades later, the copy reappeared, this time with a price tag of £3.5 million and went to a voracious museum in Los Angeles. A festering wound.

Now there is a collection of printed Books of Hours from the years 1486 to 1586 for sale, the result of decades of collecting labour. How much does it cost? And what do you get?

These Book of Hours are collections of texts and prayers for private devotions by lay people, illustrated with woodcuts or metal cuts by the greatest French artists of the time. I have the largest collection in the world, 433 copies — that's more than the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the British Library in London have combined. Almost 200 are illuminated, meaning the illustrations have been coloured by artists of the time. I'm asking a middle eight-figure sum for these treasures.

433 or none?

The collection is a central massif of book history; you can't break off individual peaks. I need an investor who recognises its value and doesn't just sell off single copies at high prices. The Book of Hours of King Louis XII alone is worth well over half a million euros. The king had it illuminated in 1499 for the birth of his first child, Claude de France, by the Masters of Martainville and Philippa of Guelders, using gouache paints and gold to create such opaque colours that one can speak of paintings in their own right.

Le Hay.Recueil de cent estampes… 1714. Photo byJoël Hunn

Do you have to be of Christian faith to take pleasure in the content of these manuscripts?

Not at all. The borders are brimming with hunting scenes, epic dances of death, historical and mythical events, Julius Caesar and so on, right through to erotic depictions. A kind of recovery from the main religious business. In Italy, the censors wrote "non si legge" in the Book of Hours, meaning not suitable for reading.

Is it true that you scratched the cloak off King David's depiction of Bathsheba?

The ruby-red cloak had already irritated me in the auction catalogue as inappropriate. I bought the book and saw immediately: The cloak was painted over later and was probably added to the figure in the 18th/19th century out of shame. My restorer assured me that the cloak could be safely removed — revealing one of the most explicit depictions of the 15th century.

How much did a freshly printed Book of Hours cost?

Some of these manuscripts fetched prices equivalent to a patrician house on the market square in Bruges, the Manhattan of its time. And every page was a work of art in itself. Many of these books were later cut up so that the individual leaves could be sold. Incidentally, 250 of the editions in my collection are rarissima, meaning that there are no more than five copies in existence worldwide. 115 are even unica, meaning that there is only one copy, the one in our possession.

Have you ever tried to completely remove a rare book from the market? To establish clear conditions?

Only an outsider would ask such a question. Books are called Rarissima just because they only come onto the market once every decade. If we don't already have them, we buy them.

Is there such a thing as collegial generosity in your business?

We appreciate each other and depend on each other, but there are a few tricks. At important auctions, I usually only bid by telephone. My presence in the room draws unnecessary attention to the items that interest me. My interest then attracts copycats who brazenly bid along and drive up the price. Conversely, I then take the liberty of bidding on items that do not interest me—and leaving my fellow bidders stuck with the high prices.

A planned but unavoidable question: Have people been murdered for books?

There are a few verifiable cases. The Spaniard Don Vicente, a priest in a monastery near Tarragona, who was known to be a bibliomaniac, is said to have committed several murders in the early 19th century out of a passion for collecting; and a Magister Tinius was convicted of robbery and murder in Germany in 1814, accused of the same motive. However, neither of them were dealers; they just wanted to own the books. These are isolated cases; more often than not, the abominable creatures who steal leaves or entire sections from books in libraries are nasty villains, whom I wish lifelong neurodermitis upon.

Can collectors also be humble?

Yes. You need patience, and sometimes even that doesn't help. I would buy a Gutenberg Bible in a heartbeat, but of the 48 copies in existence, none have been on the market since 1978. Looking through my books can also be frustrating in this regard: some of the world's greatest bibliophiles have left here feeling very small and frustrated, some even depressed.

How much calculation is behind it?

We can't do without Machiavellianism. You also compare yourself with collectors who have long since passed away. For example, I have the largest collection of books printed on vellum since 1815, about 550, but at that time Count MacCarthy, alas, unfortunately had a larger one! To my relief, I can mention that MacCarthy began collecting as early as 1760. At that time, everything was still privately owned and almost nothing was in public hands.

Museums Brackets?

Worse still, they lock many things away in safes and storage rooms forever. We do have a vault, too. It is accessible, fireproof and waterproof, five by five metres with reinforced concrete walls several centimetres thick. But most of our books are kept openly in the house and in storage rooms. I am more concerned about the woodpecker that pecks holes in the façade than I am about thieves. To make my holdings even more visible and durable, I would like to establish a foundation with other collectors, a private "world museum of images in books," into which I would contribute my collections of illustrated books.

The manuscript reference library of the Bibermühle. Photo by Joël Hunn

Do you want to survive in your books?

I hope that the collections won't scatter to the four winds too soon. But the books will outlive me anyway. Humanity will perish before they do.

At some point, everything will decay into dust.

I can reassure you that the books we deal in here are so durable that we can talk about thousands of years. This is not paper made from wood pulp that turns brown and decays, but rather handmade paper that will still look the same in 2000 years. The same applies to parchment, even more so. You can throw it into water or into an open fire, but otherwise it is indestructible.

No fire or water damage hitherto?

Once, I took a large volume of the Plantin Polyglot Bible on vellum into the bathroom with me. It was lying next to the jacuzzi, on top of the towels, when it suddenly started to slide – I managed to grab it at the last moment. We do have a shock freezer, which can be used to stop the effects of water, but the moisture stains will of course still remain in the book.

The Rhine flows right past your antiquarian bookshop. Is that a threat?

If I lost my collection today, I would start collecting again tomorrow. Many parchments have become wrinkled due to centuries of dryness. The Rhine is an advantage for our holdings because the permanently higher humidity smooths the parchment again.

Are there any books you would never part with?

Some things captivate me with a deepseated affection. The battlefield of the manuscript of the famous speech that my late friend Martin Walser gave at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. The unopened copy of Goethe's dissertation from 1771. Or my unopened copy of Hölderlin's first edition of "Hyperion".

Unopened? You can't open your Hyperion at all?

I read it in many other wonderful editions.

How great is the temptation to reach for the scissors?

That would be bizarre and unnecessary, because the pristine preservation documents the original condition. Of course, Goethe's dissertation would still be an incredibly rare book if it were cut open, one of no more than five copies worldwide. So, cutting it open would be a mortal sin. How many hundreds of books do you think I have cut open, especially French reference works? Or even a stunningly beautiful "Roman de La Rose" on vellum.

Do you use a cutter for that?

No, the knife mustn't be too sharp. Otherwise, there's a risk of cutting into the leaves.

Do you work with gloves?

That only happens in bad films and with ill-advised "experts". You would lose your sensitivity, the paper could crease or tear. Washing your hands is enough.

Do you sometimes use paperback editions for relaxed reading?

Certainly not. If I want to read Faust, I use the edition by Albrecht Schöne, which has a wonderful commentary, or I read the book published by the Bremer Presse or, noblesse oblige, the vellum copy of the Doves Press.

Do you make notes in books?

Only rarely, for completely new things or discoveries that should not be kept from others. I pride myself on having a reasonably decent handwriting.

What's on your bedside table?

Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow" – also available in German, co-translated by Elfriede Jelinek, in my opinion her main entitlement for the Nobel Prize. Karl Kraus, "Die Fackel" (The Torch), Nos. 890–905. Oskar Loerke, "Der längste Tag" (The Longest Day), 1920.

Will you break the world record for the most expensive book ever sold?

That would be 1'art pour 1'art, and so far my business dealings have kept me well away from the 32 million marks that the Federal Republic of Germany paid for Henry the Lion's Gospel Book in 1983. That is still the record, if we define "book" as bound, either manuscript or printed. No autographs or declarations of independence of any kind are meant.

Was the price for the Gospel book justified?

It could have been twice as high without seeming excessive. We don't even need to look at the sums paid for the humbug of a Basquiat, Jeff Koons and their like.

What else are you missing?

As mentioned: the Gutenberg Bible on parchment, of which there were apparently 30 copies in 1455! And the "Térence des ducs" manuscript from around 1410 in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. For I live and strive according to the motto of my favourite Roman poet, Horace: "Dulce est desipere in loco": "It is sweet to be foolish once in a while, when the occasion is right." •