LONDON-PRINTED BYRONIANA FOR GERMANS, WITH 5 MORE ENGRAVINGS THAN THE ENGLISH ORIGINAL. 4to. [23 x 16 cm]. (16) pp, (88) pp, interleaved with 44 tissue-guarded stipple-engraved plates of women, plus a stipple-engraved frontispiece of the 17-year old Byron. Bound in contemporary quarter purple ribbed cloth over plain boards, with gilt title on spine. Dampstain to upper margin throughout, visible mainly on the plates; scattered foxing. Extremely rare early edition of this German adaptation of Finden’s Byron Beauties (1836), published in London and Leipzig by Black & Armstrong. Relative to any English edition we could trace, the present German translation contains 6 extra plates with corresponding text, as well as an additional 12-page introductory essay on the life of Lord Byron. The bulk of the work is devoted to striking stipple engravings of the principal female characters found in Byron’s works, facing brief one-page leaves of letterpress generally giving a brief explanation of the character and a relevant quotation. “In 1836, the two brothers [Edward and William Finden] realized their ultimate commercial success when they created Finden’s Byron Beauties; or, the Principal Female Characters in Lord Byron’s Poems. This volume emerged in England ‘as one of a series of projected standards for female beauty’, as Andrew Elfenbein explained, because ‘Byron had become so closely associated with respectable culture that his characters could stand for his poetry.’ As a measure of that respectability, even the Brontë sisters copied Finden’s engravings to practice their drawing.” (Rosen, p. 164). The English edition of 1836 published by Charles Tilt contains just 39 engravings; the additional portraits found here comprise the frontispiece of Lord Byron; extra portraits of The Girl of Saragossa and The Girl of Athens; Lady Noel Byron; Ianthe; and Miss Chaworth. Although the frontispiece bears an English imprint of John Murray (dated 1835), the other 44 plates were perhaps re-touched for this edition as they bear the imprint “London, bei Black & Armstrong”. According to Kayser’s Vollständiges Bücher-Lexicon 1750-1910, Vol 7, p. 160, the present work in fact appeared in 15 fascicles contains 3 engravings each, for a total of 45 engravings as here (frontispiece + 44 plates). COPAC shows no copies of Genius der Frauen in UK libraries; OCLC locates just one copy in US libraries (Harvard, with just 39 plates). * cf Brigitte Glaser, Die Rezeption Byrons in der deutschen Kritik (1820-1914): eine Dokumentation, p. 662; and Rosen, “Byron’s ‘Beauties’: national heroines and defenders of liberty”, in Julia Margaret Cameron's 'fancy subjects': Photographic allegories of Victorian identity and empire (2016).