The Project Gutenberg eBook, Old Tavern Signs, by Fritz August Gottfried Endell

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Title: Old Tavern Signs

An Excursion in the History of Hospitality

Author: Fritz August Gottfried Endell

Release Date: January 18, 2013 [eBook #41869]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD TAVERN SIGNS***

E-text prepared by Chris Curnow, Matthew Wheaton,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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Old Tavern Signs

Old Dutch Signs
From a Painting by Gerrit and Job Berkheyden

Old Tavern Signs
An Excursion in the History
of Hospitality by
Fritz Endell

With Illustrations by the Author

Published by Houghton Mifflin Company
Printed at The Riverside Press Cambridge
Mdccccxvi

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published November 1916

THIS EDITION, PRINTED AT THE RIVERSIDE PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, CONSISTS OF FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY NUMBERED COPIES, OF WHICH FIVE HUNDRED ARE FOR SALE. THIS IS NUMBER 5

Preface

For a sign! as indeed man, with his singular imaginative faculties, can do little or nothing without signs.

Carlyle

The author’s love of the subject is his only apology for his bold undertaking. First it was the filigree quality and the beauty of the delicate tracery of the wrought-iron signs in the picturesque villages of southern Germany that attracted his attention; then their deep symbolic significance exerted its influence more and more over his mind, and tempted him at last to follow their history back until he could discover its multifarious relations to the thought and feeling of earlier generations.

For the shaping of the English text the author is greatly indebted to his American friends Mr. D. S. Muzzey, Mr. Emil Heinrich Richter, and Mr. Carleton Noyes.

Contents

Illustrations