JOEST, Wilhelm. - Tatowiren. Narbenzeichnen und Korperbemalen. Ein beittrag zur vergleichenden ethnologie.

Berlin, Asher 1887. Folio publisher's cloth backed printed boards (recased and rebacked preserving the original spine, edges somewhat rubbed and scraped); [2],viii,128pp, one plain and 11 coloured lithograph plates, illustrations through the text. Some browning and spotting but a very presentable copy. ¶ There are no common tattoo books of any age or consequence and this ranks high among the most desirable and hard to find. Born a rich kid, Joest was a fieldworker - a traveller, collector and ethnologist of enormous range - and quite properly he died of some fever in the New Hebrides at the age of 45. His collections form the core of the Rautenstrauch Joest Museum in Cologne. His thesis, that despite whatever religious rituals surround tattooing the wellspring is vanity and sexual preening, was discounted by later researchers (who reached absurd levels of Freudian gobbledygook by the nineteen sixties), but his research - historical, from other travellers and ethnologists, and first hand - remains impecable. New Zealand, Melanesia and New Guinea, south-east Asia and Japan are particularly well covered.

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