Kafka / Schamoni / Portman - limited edition

Among the rarest collector's editions of small prose by Franz Kafka are three bibliophile prints by the Litomyšl printer and publisher Josef Portman with illustrations by the Westphalian painter Albert Schamoni. Between 1928 and 1931, Portman published a series of Franz Kafka stories, An Old Manuscript (1928), A Report to an Academy (1929) and The Country Doctor (1931), all translated into Czech by Ludvík Vrána, a Catholic priest, writer and translator who worked for publisher Josef Florian until the late 1920s. Copies of the three bibliophilias from which the reprints for this book were taken are in the art collections of the Museum of Czech Literature and have the print number 1. They were part of Portman's private collection, containing his own unique prints, bibliophilia, artworks, books and archival materials, which he decided at the end of his life to donate to the Karásek Gallery in Prague, which was already under the administration of the Museum of Czech Literature.

Publisher Josef Florian contributed to the introduction of publisher Portman and illustrator Schamoni. In the 1920s he was in contact with young Westphalian expressionist artists (the Junges Westfalen art group) who visited Stará říše in person. In addition to Josef Horn, Wilhelm Wessel and Otto Coester, Albert Schamoni also spent several creative visits there. For Florian's publication Joseph and Asenech, published in his Good Works series in 1925, the twenty-one-year-old Schamoni created charming colour illustrations. The book could not escape the attention of the passionate bibliophile Portman, who discovered a new illustrator for his own publishing plans. At Schamoni's suggestion, Portman published a series of the aforementioned Franz Kafka short stories, which were selected from a larger collection of Kafka's prose collectively entitled The Country Doctor (Franz Kafka: Ein Landarzt,1919, Munich - Leipzig: Kurt Wolff). Although Portman published them separately, they have a unified style that relies on authentic handwork, a small book format, unpretentious design, and printing on high-quality graphic paper. They were printed in small editions ranging from 16 to 26 copies.

The main advantage of these bibliophilia lies in the illustrations, which Schamoni created in the technique of fine etching, which allows for a detailed expression of the imaginative and grotesque character of the text. Together with Otto Coester's illustrations for Kafka's The Metamorphosis, published in two versions by Florian in 1929, Schamoni's prints for Kafka's texts published by Portman represent pioneering achievements. These originally illustrated bibliophile editions are also of international significance, as they were one of the first modern visualisations of Kafka's literary texts in Bohemia through German painters.