Not too long ago I made the lucky mistake of telling a good friend that I’d not yet read (i.e. had never really heard of) this Austrian author he was talking about, Heimito von Doderer.

In fact, I didn’t even own any of his books. So my friend surprised me by going out and buying me a wonderful, two-volume hardback set of Doderer’s “The Demons.”

It’s wonderful to look at. (No, haven’t read a word of it, yet.) It has so many nice touches I’ve never seen before, like dust jackets that have the author bio on the front cover, not inside the flap, and a note from the publisher about the translation – with some hilarious commentary no publisher would ever dare put in print these days (i.e. calling a major review outlet “curiously uneven”). Maybe this was how all nice books looked back in 1961, but I’d never seen anything quite like it.

Below are some images of this great set of “The Demons,” with a few comments.

Also: Another friend gave me Hermann Broch’s “The Sleepwalkers.” (These are great friends.) But now I don’t know which huge Austrian novel I should read first.

Front of the box set.

Detail of front of box, with blurb from Thornton Wilder, and odd Knopf logo in the lower-right corner.

Back of the box. Note the lower-right corner, showing a writer at his desk.

Detail of the dust jacket to volume 1. The poor Times Literary Supplement sure takes a beating here. And the book is called a monster.

Dust jacket two. He spent 30 years writing this? Oh my. And he was a lumberjack in Siberia?

Front of book with webs and people walking around them.

Back of book.

Detail of back of book with soldiers and politicians.