Prefaces: The Collected Phantom Volumes of Nicolaus Notabene

By Nicolaus Notabene

In 1844 S ren Kierkegaard published Forord: eight prefaces to books that did not exist, over the name of one Nicolaus Notabene - a man whose wife had forbidden him to write books and permitted, by way of compromise, only prefaces. A preface promises a book. These promised eight.

Here, at last, are the books. Prefaces summons into existence the eight phantom volumes that Notabene's prefaces once stood before - a Logical System begun from nothing, an astrological New-Year annual, twenty-four sermons, a temperance-society address, lyric productions for a single reader - and furnishes each with the full apparatus of a critical edition: an editor's introduction, a textual apparatus, a reception history. A ninth volume, Liv og Tid, recovers Notabene's life: the prohibition, its lifting when his wife departs to join a reading-society of her own, and the one book he lived to sign with his own name.

An elaborate literary fiction erected upon Kierkegaard's own. Edited by Wilson Pruitt for Wroot Press.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H9QTCT95
• ISBN13: 9798188277482
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 402 Pages
• Weight: 1.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"