232 pages. The marbled boards are very badly rubbed and chipped along the edges; there are three ownership signatures : one on the front paste down, another on the front end paper and a third on the title page. The body of the book is clean, unmarked and solid. "Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (4 July 1715 - 13 December 1769) was a German poet, one of the forerunners of the golden age of German literature that was ushered in by Lessing....Not a little of Gellert's fame is due to the time when he lived and wrote. The German literature of the period was dominated by Gottsched's school. A band of high-spirited youths, of whom Gellert was one, resolved to free themselves from what were seen as the conventional trammels of such pedants, and began a revolution which was finally consummated by Schiller and Goethe. Karl Philipp Moritz, in the context of his travels in England in 1782, remarked: "Among us Germans ... I can think of no poet's name beyond Gellert's which comes readily into the minds of the common people [in London]. The fables, for which Gellert took La Fontaine as his model, are simple and didactic" (Wikipedia)