Peter Schlemihl

A young man sells his shadow to a stranger in gray for a purse that never empties, and finds that nobody will tolerate a man without one. Chamisso wrote it in 1813, a Frenchman who had become a German and knew what it was to belong nowhere; he later sailed round the world as a naturalist. This edition adds fifty-six plates of painting, among them works by Carl Spitzweg, Edvard Munch and Jacob Philipp Hackert, and one restored and coloured illustration.