With the highest hopes, the nameless author had attended a meeting of the Folio Club for the first time on a Tuesday evening, a literary association of eleven men who had elected him as their new member.

“Nobody could have had deeper feelings of admiration and respect than I,” says the novice, and the statutes also make sense to him: They meet once a month in private, everyone presents a text they have written, which is then discussed.

When all have been read, a vote is taken.

The author of the best contribution serves the society as president at the next meeting, while the author of the worst must host the next meeting in his house at his own expense.

Tilman Spreckelsen

Editor in the features section.

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Except that the newcomer won't be there next time.

After seeing them for one evening, he calls the club members “a clique of morons” who “look as ugly as they are stupid.

I also believe that it is their firm intention to abolish literature, undermine the free press and overturn the rule of nouns and pronouns ”, in short: a“ devil's covenant ”.

Although texts were presented that evening that one would like to count as world literature today, above all “Metzengerstein” and “The manuscript in the bottle”.

Obsessions for limbo

Edgar Allan Poe's volume “The Tales of the Folio Club”, edited by the studied English philosopher and long-time television editor Rainer Bunz, cannot refer to any existing edition or a continuous manuscript in its current form. It contains an introduction that was unpublished during Poe's lifetime as well as eleven early texts by the author, some of which differ significantly from the revised and canonical ones today. Nevertheless, this presentation makes sense. Because Poe himself had drafted the project for a corresponding novel in several letters. And when the twenty-four-year-old received a literary prize for “The Manuscript in the Bottle” in October 1833, the jury placed it in the context of the planned novel. A little later the book was offered for subscription and then withdrawn again,a better opportunity for publication beckoned and fell apart. Meanwhile, numerous stories appeared individually in periodicals, and when it finally came to the volume "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque" in 1839, the texts were found there along with numerous others without a framework.

In fact, the works that the editor classifies as contributions to the “Folio Club” project already contained much of what is associated with Poe's later work, above all the obsession for a limbo between life and death. There is “The Spirit Seer” with the joint suicide of a spatially separated couple with an allusion to Orpheus, “A broken deal” between a metaphysician and the devil, in which the interesting vision of a physical survival without a soul, “A decisive loss” is about the survival of a seemingly dead person who experiences his own autopsy, or “The Duke of Omelette” who plays cards with the devil in hell and cheats in order to return to life. And of course the magnificent "Metzengerstein" with a horse ghost,which anticipates elements of Theodor Storm's “Schimmelreiter” in an astonishing way. The composition of “Famous”, the final piece, which depicts an evening party that mirrors the framework of the “Folio Club”, is ingenious.

The narrator's sudden change of heart

Despite all the tendency towards the grotesque, the satirical and parodic intent of the young author cannot be overlooked.

An important reference for this is the "Blackwood's Magazine", founded in Edinburgh in 1817, which lasted until 1980 and published articles by authors such as Shelley, Coleridge or George Eliot during this time - Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" was also published in 1899 in the " Blackwood's Magazine ”.

Poe dedicated a satirical essay to this periodical and its aesthetics in 1838.

But even in connection with the “Folio Club” fragment, a participant who tells “A decisive loss” receives the name “Mr.

Blackwood Blackwood ”.

And what about the narrator's change of heart, what about the sudden hatred of the members of the literary society? That too can only be inferred. In a letter dated September 2, 1836 to the author and editor Harrison Hall (1785 to 1866), Poe once again recommends the whole project of the "Folio Club" stories to his heart. The number of participants in the evening party has now grown to seventeen, corresponding to the increased number of his own texts that he now wants to put into this framework. He attaches particular importance to intermediate chapters in which the texts are discussed by those present, i.e. spontaneously criticized, which should take up about a quarter of the volume, which is also estimated to be 300 pages. One can only regret that nothing at all came to us from this part, especiallybecause Poe avowedly wanted to show the mechanisms of literary criticism and at the same time to question them.

At least this explains the narrator's hatred of club members.

Because the vote on the best and the worst text was apparently to the disadvantage of the narrator, who - according to Poe's plan - should then gather the manuscripts of that evening and publish them in that 300-page volume.

His reasoning can sometimes be heard even today: the author, who was so harshly treated by literary criticism, wanted to pass the decision on the value of his poetry to the public - in the hope of a different outcome.

Edgar Allan Poe: "The Tales of the Folio Club".

Edited and translated from the English by Rainer Bunz.

Manesse Verlag, Munich 2021. 320 pp., Hardcover, 25, - €.