from German New Guinea (Berlinhafen and Astrolabe Bay)

This book is an English version of the two works titled „Descriptive Catalog of Lud- wig Biró‘s Ethnographic Collection from German New Guinea“ (Beschreibender Catalog der ethnographischen Sammlung Ludwig Biró ́s aus Deutsch-Neu-Guinea), originally pu- blished in 1899 and 1901 as two individual books during the Austro-Hungarian K. and K. Double Monarchy („Kaiser und König“, „King and Emperor“, until 1918).

Due to the time and place of this first publication (Budapest, Hungaria), the original books were bilingual, written in Hungarian and German. The original descriptions of Lud- wig Biró, as well as the entire Hungarian text, were translated by Dr. Semayer into German. These translations of the two texts, combined here in one book, differ in many respects, especially in terms of punctuation and phonetic apostrophes. Since these differences were not specifically explained in the original, I mostly omitted them entirely, to avoid confusion. The pronunciation of the terms of the indigenous people, which Biró has collected in his very precise observations, is therefore only roughly reproduced.

The contents of both books could certainly have been merged with one another, sin- ce most of the groups of items have been processed twice here, albeit with different objects, places of origin and descriptions. Despite this, I decided not to merge them, so that the spirit of the original works would be maintained. In some places I have given the contem- porary terms with an explanation in brackets.

The observations made by Ludwig Biró, who had lived in German New Guinea for almost six years from 1892 on, are very valuable for collectors of items of this relatively small geographic area. Together with the graphics and original photographs, these observations represent some of the best resources there are of this historical period.

As for the pronunciation of the names given to the objects and parts in the native languages, I would like to point out that this corresponds to the German pronunciation of the alphabet and not to that of the English. So „a“ is spelled like „calm“, „i“ like „evening“, „j“ like „onion“, „t“ like „time“, „u“ like „book“.

At this point, I owe my special thanks Mr. Ulrich Kortmann, who greatly heloed the production of this book by providing me with his two original copies.

ISBN 978-3-948396-07-7 79.- € 246 Pages in A 4 hardcover with 135 g paper.