"Kurtz" on Amazon.com

Following is an exchange of e-mails that I had with my brothers about a year ago about Kurtz books on Amazon.com, which I am now belatedly realizing might be of interest to the rest of the family:

In an idle moment (when I was avoiding paying bills), I searched Amazon books on "Kurtz", wondering, in an ego kind of way, how far down my own books would appear on that list. I was disappointed that I had to go to p. 7 of some 20,000 listings to find a listing for me. (For the record, my two books rate 218,176 and 573,659 on amazon.com's bestseller list!) But on p. 4 of the search, I was astonished to find "Church History" by "Professor Kurtz" published in 1899. Remember those volumes that sat on Dad's bookshelves? The amazon.com listing doesn't say anything about the books, but I guessed that this listing had to be out of our family history (our great grandfather?). So then I googled "kurtz church history" and found a digitized version of the book. Is that Dad's handwriting in the emendation, dated 1929, of the "Professor Kurtz" name to read Johann Heinrich Kurtz? Except for the "J", it looks like it could be his scrawl, but how and why I have no idea!

I remember glancing at Kurtz Church History occasionally but finding the books impenetrable. Do any of you know anything about those books? Does one of you have them?

If you enter "john w kurtz" in amazon.com, it's interesting that in addition to all of his other books (except for his translation of Refuge), his dissertation appears, listed as out of print.

Here was Rob's response to that message:

Interesting stuff. I don't think that's Dad's handwriting though. Neither the J nor the capital H seems right - the rest, maybe. The capital letters look more like those of our Grandfather Kurtz. I have a copy of an autobiographical piece on which he wrote some notes -- I can't put my hands on it right now to compare closely, but if my memory is reliable, these look like his.

I think Mother told me that she gave most of Dad's library to the college library and that they had put a lot of it up for sale in one of their annual purges. But David or Eric might have some things as well. Then only books I have from it are copies of the JFO book, one each in English and German, and one copy of Refuge that Mother gave me at her 95 birthday party.

I had a similar experience about twenty years ago when I was browsing the card catalog at Claremont's Honnold Library and found Dad's Drei Novellen - I searched the dusty stacks and found an autographed copy, a gift, apparently, to someone whose name I didn't recognize at the time and can't remember now. Somehow it had found its way into the Honnold collection -- maybe it's still there.

My faithful customer who was Dad's student when you were born (she complained still that class was not canceled!) died recently. She never came into my store without mentioning Dad -- even when I was not in the store she would remind my employees of that connection!