Stefan Zweig was a bibliophile and document collector, literary pieces from Goethe's hand, also much music from Mozart, Beethoven. He wrote a series of interesting essays for small distribution in bibliophile journals. Zweig always wanted his magnificent manuscript collection cataloged, but somehow it was never finished, neither the collection nor the catalog. In the short story "Die unsichtbare Sammlung" --The invisible collection, the blind collector savors the collection he cannot see and cannot detect that the originals have been replaced with similarly sized and textured papers. But he wants a catalog. Likewise Zweig had a cataloger at work, but increasingly feared that a finished catalog would doom the collection to the status of "national heritage property" and prevent him from selling anything....With the advent of Nazi power he began dispersing things...sending his own extraordinary incoming correspondence from famous writers like Rilke to the Jewish Library in Jerusalem in Palestine, to be closed for 20 years after his death. The he sold off his treasures one by one, mostly purchased by Bodmer in Geneva. He gave away many treasures as mementos, and took much with him into exile into England. Less with him to New York and then Brazil. Of dispersing his collection, he said he wanted a few very fine friends rather than a mob of acquaintances. He ended his life lonely in a small resort in Brazil. Over half a century later, Oliver Matuschek has completed a meticulous catalog of the collection that no longer exists, just short of a thousand items, as though waiting for the last acquisitions to complete it. Matuschek also assembled Zweig's hard to find short essays on collecting, each a small jewel. The book itself is suitably handsomely produced, the title is in Zweig's handwriting on the back cover, not on the front: "I recognize the magic of the written word." One of the essays listed in the table of contents is not bound into the book at all. It is in facsimile form in a pocket in the back cover: "The Autograph Collection as a Work of Art." Matuschek has created a catalog as a work of art. ( )