The collection “German Romance in America” originated in necessity as Lynne Tatlock conducted research in support of German Writing, American Reading: Women and the Import of Fiction, 1866-1917 and related scholarly projects. Inspired by the Lucile Project and aided by the expanded accessibility to secondhand book vendors afforded by the digital age, she began ca. 2004 purchasing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century issues of German women’s writing in translation, usually either unavailable or non-circulating in American libraries. The collection—focused largely on popular nineteenth-century German-speaking authors of domestic romance in American translation—grew over the course of a decade to comprise over 200 books. Digital images of these books—their covers, title pages, illustrations, inscriptions, advertising, and select pages are here made available in support of the study of American publishing of popular foreign authors in translation, in particular its material history, and the consumption of these books by Americans. Especially the holding of multiple issues such novels as The Old Mam’selle’s Secret, here collected in more than 60 exemplars, provide evidence for the sharing in the Gilded Age of plates and the recycling of texts as new publishing houses sprang up while others folded. Thanks go in particular to Douglas Knox, Assistant Director of the Humanities Digital Workshop at Washington University, who has seen to it that this digitized version has become presentable. The collection remains a work in progress.
