ALFRED LORENTZ: Leipzig, Germany bookseller billhead from 1909. Lorentz was an antiquarian bookseller whose stock ranged from the academic sciences to fine literature.
This billhead features a column of advertising on the left side with a colorful illustration in Art Nouveau style for the Toussaint-Langenscheidt Method - foreign language study using a phonetic alphabet - and dictionaries with the same pronunciation system. Charles Toussaint and Gustav Langenscheidt developed a revolutionary self-study system in 1856 that provided students a course by mail, one of the earliest forms of mass distance learning.
The customer on this billhead may have had some connection with the dictionaries being offered in this ad. Theodor Reichelt was the customer for the books noted on the billhead, though a Mr. Nebel took care of the payment and may have picked up the books for Mr. Reichelt. A search for this customer turns up a Theodor Reichelt, a German academic of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that seems to fit the bill[head]. A scholar named G. Theodor Reichelt was a known German philologist and orientalist, known for a pioneering collaborating on Tibetan-English dictionaries and linguistic studies published in international orientalist journals. He lived in a Leipzig suburb and would have had easy access to Lorentz's book shop.
But Reichelt was far from being Lorentz's best-known customer. That distinction belongs to Friedrich Nitzsche, the famous philosopher and writer who had a profound effect on modern psychology and European thought, influencing the likes of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus.
Thomas H. Brobjer, in his book, Nietzsche's Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography, references Lorentz as a source of reading material for Nietzsche's library during the 1870s and 1880s. Ephemera played an important role in that discovery, as items such as letters and billheads revealed the connection between the bookseller and famous philosopher.
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