Description

8vo. 13 pp. (including title-page) on 4 leaves. Ink on paper. Contemporary wrappers. Anthology of calendar mottoes (natural and weather phenomena, tasks, etc.) for every day of the year, all written in the style of "Jurende's vaterländischer Pilger": in its calendar section, this popular journal, published until 1852, included a separate column for a "nature calendar" which provided a brief such note for every day. The present manuscript appears to be a rough draft for the year 1836, but if that is so, the published calendar would have undergone extensive editorial revisions. Not signed, but attributed on the inside lower cover by a later collector. That the young Rollett composed calendar mottoes is a previously unknown detail of the writer's biography. He had met Beethoven several times as a six-year-old and later wrote about these encounters; in 1835/36 the son of a physician from Baden was still a pupil at Vienna's Piarist gymnasium. - In the age of Metternich, the poet Rollett was persecuted for his revolutionary sentiments; he flew to Germany in 1845, and then to Switzerland. He briefly returned to Austria in 1854, then took a doctorate of philosophy from the German university of Gießen and subsequently studied pharmacy in Vienna. Together with Moritz Hartmann and Hermann Jellinek, Rollett, who identified as a German Catholic, is considered one of the more prominent members of the "Young Austria" movement. - Wrappers a little dusty and with edge flaws.