About this Edition

In June 1844 the Copenhagen bookseller C. A. Reitzel published, under the pseudonym Nicolaus Notabene, a small octavo volume entitled Forord, indeholdende Prøver til et nyt Tidsskrift — Prefaces, containing Specimens for a New Journal. It contained eight prefaces and no books. The prefaces prefaced nothing.

Beginning with Urania, Aarbog for 1845 in December 1844, and continuing volume by volume until February 1847, Notabene composed and published the eight books that the 1844 prefaces had announced. This edition presents those eight phantom volumes, the Danish source set in its period orthography on the verso and the English translation on the recto, together with a biographical companion (Volume IX) and the editorial apparatus.

Reading orders

The corpus admits of two reading-sequences. The biographical order — the order in which Notabene composed and published the volumes — is recommended for a first reading and is the edition’s primary navigation: IV — I — VIII — V — VI — III — II — VII. The editorial order — the order of the eight prefaces in the 1844 Forord — is preserved on the spines (I–VIII) for the citation conventions a century of scholarship has established. Both orders are offered on the home page; neither is regarded as exclusively correct.

The bilingual presentation

The volumes of 1844–1847, and the documents of 1923 and 1962, appear in their original Danish with an English translation on facing pages. The 2026 editorial apparatus — the General Introduction, the editor’s introductions, the textual apparatus — is in English only, the Norden Foundation grant having underwritten the English critical publication specifically. The Danish is set in the period orthography of its source (aa for the modern å, capital common nouns, the period’s compounding and punctuation); it is not modernized. Vibskov’s 1962 essay, by contrast, retains its mid-twentieth-century orthography, marking its later time-stratum.

The Forord of 1844 itself is not re-edited here; it has been authoritatively edited in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (vol. 4, Gads Forlag, 1997).

Editorial matter

General Introduction (Henriksen, 2024) · Hertel’s 1923 Prospectus · Translator’s Note · Lexicon of Systematic Terms.