“Sign of the Goldene Sonne in Leonberg, Wurttemberg,” the cover image from Old Tavern Signs: An Excursion in the History of Hospitality by Fritz Endell, published in November 1916 by Houghton Mifflin Company and printed at The Riverside Press, Cambridge. This first edition was limited to 550 copies of which 500 were offered for sale; John Glessner’s copy is number 354.
Fritz Endell (1873-1955) was a German artist. He studied in Paris with various artists and specialized in woodcuts, returning to Stuttgart around 1902. From 1914 to 1920, the period in which he wrote and illustrated Old Tavern Signs, he was living and teaching in the United States. He returned to Germany after World War I and remained active until the 1940s.
The Preface to the book states:
”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.”
John Glessner finished reading the book on April 24, 1917, as indicated by a penciled notation inside the back cover.