Since I been living in Copenhagen over the last year and a half I have been actively on the lookout in the local antikvariater for works of philological scholarship, especially those produced and published locally in what has been historically – and continues to be – a vibrant scholarly community. Many of these have been one-off chance finds in local bookshops and book auctions, but there has been one bookshop in Copenhagen I have had previously not yet visited. The bookshop Herman H. J. Lynge & Søn on Silkegade (branching off from the Købmagergade main street) is a high-end rare book store which I first became aware of when finding their their AbeBooks listing when I was (as I occasionally find myself doing) looking to see myself a good copy of Lilian Jeffery's Local Scripts of Archaic Greece. Oxford University Press does new reprints of a 1990 edition with a supplement, but the print-on-demand reprints only have grainy reproductions of the plates that aren't on high-quality photographic paper like the original printings... I eventually decided that their list price of 2,200 DKK (ca. $311.93 USD) for a version of the book that was not the revised 1990 edition with a supplement (a crucially important extra if I am going to use the book as a reference for actual scholarly work) despite that I could be sure that the plates would be of good quality. Oh well. So I put Lynge & Søn out of my mind for the time being, at least until a friend recently pointed out their storefront in person and mentioned how he was intimidated to go in and ask to look around.
Well, I decided to take one for the team and went through Lynge & Søn's online catalogue. I identified a few more volumes of interest to me that I might be willing to pay a premium for and emailed ahead of time so that they could be expecting us to enter and we wouldn't have to resort to an awkward 'Can we look around?' as though we were tourists who happened to wander in and not in fact holders of Oxbridge-granted doctoral degrees (as our unkempt appearances might disguise).
As it turned out, on the day we made the appointment to visit the shop my companion had fallen ill so I had to forge on alone. Upon entering I was greeted by a pleasant young chap who presented the volumes which I had asked about over email, one of which was the second edition of the well-known Danish philologist Holger Pedersen's work Hittitisch und die anderen indoeuropäischen Sprachen (Hittite and the other Indo-European Languages). This work of Pedersen was critical of the Indo-Hittite (or Indo-Anatolian) hypothesis that the Anatolian subgroup of the Indo-European language family was an outlier to the family as a whole, while all the others had their own separate period of linguistic unity with new innovations before splitting off into the remaining nine-ish major subgroups of the Indo-European language family that scholars agree on. While consensus in the intervening decades has fallen on the side of Indo-Anatolian hypothesis, Pedersen's work still has lasting value for individual points of analysis which he advanced here.
So I did purchase this book for 500 DKK (ca. $70.89 USD), but I should give a casual warning to those reading this post that apparently the list prices on Lynge & Søn's website do not include VAT, so an unexpected additional 125 DKK was heaped onto this. Additionally, my friend and I were right to suspect that the storefront is not well-suited for casual browsing. I am sure that there is a system in place for the people working there to find their holdings and dispatch them to their online buyers I had the impression from the way things were organised that the staff would not be too happy with people coming in to casually handle their sometimes extremely rare and expensive books. This impression was reinforced by the fact that they were not set up to take card payments in the shop itself, but I had to first make the purchase through their online shop before they handed over the goods in person. That said, the shop staff was very pleasant and for a brief while I had a short time to ogle the rare books on hand while they were setting up the card payment on the store computer.
While shopping at this rare book store was an odd experience with some unexpected difficulties, the staff was helpful and pleasant, and I am now in possession of yet another piece of Copenhagen philological ephemera which I might actually use for real scholarly work. I would probably still much prefer to do the in-store experience for Lynge & Søn if I were an actual rich person looking into to buying one of their more expensive manuscripts for thousands of kroner as an investment, but since I do not have that kind of money to spend next time it might just be easier to order online next time if it is just something costing the low hundreds as something I am actually going to read and use in my work (and yeah ok, I admit it, collect for my aesthetic sensibilities).
