Passionate Journey is Masereel’s wordless novel with a name change. Right after the war, a German title such as Mein Stundenbuch or the esoteric “My Book of Hours” would not have been a good marketing move for an American audience.

  • Title: Passionate Journey
  • Author and Illustrator: Frans Masereel
  • Forward by Romain Rolland
  • Introduction: Thomas Mann (translated from the German by Joseph M. Bernstein)
  • Date of publication: 1948
  • Publisher: Lear Publishing, New York and Ambassador Books, Toronto
  • Copyright: Artist?
  • Dimensions:
  • Dust jacket: Yes
  • slipcase: unlikely
  • Binding: hard cover
  • Language: English titles, etc
  • Unpaginated
  • Printed: verso and recto
  • Edition: Trade only
  • References: Avermaete 4.IIc
  • Description: frontispiece; 8vo. 22pp of text with 165 full page reproduced woodcut illustrations on unnumbered leaves. Publisher’s tan cloth in dust jacket.
  • Print run not specified
  • This edition was “sanitized” for the American public by omitting two image that were in the original. They depict the hero urinating from the top of a building on pedestrians below as well as a scene of fornication (the deleted images can be seen at the bottom of this page).
Photo credit: Bjarne Tokerud
Half title
Title page
Copyright page
Start of the Thomas Mann introduction
(translated from German by Joseph Bernstein)
Frontis and epigraphs
Printed recto and verso

Omitted Images

Omitted image of the protagonist
urinating on pedestrians below.

Below is a sequence of three images. The 1948 American publication omitted the 2nd image depicting the protagonist fornicating.

OMITTED image.

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