Apropos of nothing, I offer a picture of my collected copies of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, a book that that has had, as the author might have said, an almost uncanny effect on me. The paperback on top was purchased at Second Story Books, in Washington DC, circa 1985. It remains the most intense reading experience of my life. Below that is a 1948 copy that I found on the Internet. It is inscribed by Hans and Hilde Jacobi to their friend Poldi. I wonder if this could be the Hans Jacobi who wrote prolifically for the German, French, and American cinema from the twenties until the sixties. Then there's a paperback German copy, the excellent John Woods translation, and the critical edition with commentary. Readers who felt that Doctor Faustus was mentioned a few too many times in The Rest Is Noise — the book begins with the Austrian première of Salome not least because that performance coincided with Adrian Leverkühn's fatal encounter with the Devil — will be relieved to know that in Listen to This it shows up only once, on the next-to-last page, in the midst of a discussion of the fearsome finale of Brahms's Fourth Symphony.
