Introduction to Natural Magic - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 335

and fifty dollars, so altogether he paid about eighty dollars, ninety dollars
for about six or seven topics, and wrapped them up in a brown bag, bought
the topics and left Mrs. Wlk's bookstore very slowly. The moment he left,
he raced over to the taxi stand, jumped into the taxi, and said “Drive me to
Hollereck,” to my uncle Erich Köchert's place. Then he pulled out the
topics, turned the knight topic around, and indeed it was Tacitus' Germa-
nia , almost complete. That meant he bought for perhaps thirty or forty
dollars something which he later sold, I think, for perhaps about twenty or
thirty thousand dollars, to the German State Library, I think in Berlin, who
had to buy one of the early Latin versions of the Tacitus Germania , which
existed I think in only one or two copies.
This is only a little bit of background on Mrs. Wlk. Now, let me go back
to Heinz and Martin, who spent their summer vacation on Hollereck, at my
uncle Erich's place. Of course we had bicycles, and from time to time we
had to go to Gmunden, either to do this or that or to buy some oil for the
bicycle. Now, always when we came to Gmunden, we stopped at Mrs. Wlk's
place, looked around, and things like that. One day we came by, I think we
must have been thirteen or fourteen or something like that, so it was the
year 1925 or 1924, and in the window were standing twenty volumes of a
topic, where one, the first volume was opened, and it said, Wiegleb's Te x t -
book on Natural Magic . I said, “My God, here is Wiegleb!” So Martin said,
“What?”, and “Of course, this is Wiegleb, the Introduction to Natural Magic ,
the early topics on physics.” Ok, we both went into the store.
I said, “Well, Mrs. Wlk, I see you have Wiegleb's textbook on magic, tell
me how much are these twenty volumes?” So she said, “Well, each volume
is about two shillings, so the whole thing, twenty times two is forty shillings,
will be forty shillings.” Translated today into dollars, it will be perhaps about
eight dollars, something like that. But when you were fourteen years of age,
in Austria, you didn't carry forty shillings with you; this was impossible. No,
what you had was about five shillings, or two shillings. We didn't have the
shillings to buy the Wiegleb.
So we said,“Mrs. Wlk, don't sell the Wiegleb, keep it out of the window, we
will be back as soon as we have raised the funds to buy that topic.” So she
said, “Ok, I will see to that, I will try. I can't hold it too long for you boys, you
know I can't hold it too long.” “No no no, we will be back in a moment.”
We both jumped on our bicycles. Martin raced in one direction, I raced
in another. I thought I could borrow the money from this or that relative
or perhaps from one of my friends. Friends were not at home, others were
not there, I couldn't get it, absolutely impossible, so I hurried down to
Altmünster, which is about four or five miles from Gmunden.
Finally, I reached Altmünster. I went quickly to this person, to chose
persons, and finally I got the forty shillings together, jumped on the bike,
raced back to Gmunden, and went to the store of Mrs. Wlk.
I arrived there of course bathed in sweat, put my bike around the corner,
looked into the window, and there were no topics. No Wiegleb. So I walked
into the bookstore, and there was Mrs. WIk. I said, “Mrs. WIk, I have here