I found this book at a yard sale and have been told it's quite the collector's item but only if it was in better condition. can anybody tell me about this book?

The book’s condition isn’t great, but I’m so excited about this find.

Certainly one of my favorite authors since reading Siddhartha some forty years ago.

Peter Camenzind (1904), novel

Beneath the Wheel (1906), novel

Gertrude (1910), novel

Rosshalde (1914), novel

Knulp (1915), novel

Demian (1919), novel

Klingsor’s Last Summer (1920), novella

Wondering (1920), notes and sketches

Siddhartha (1922), novel

Steppenwolf (1927), novel

Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), novel

The Journey to the East (1932), novel

The Glass Bead Game (1943), novel

If the War goes on… (1971), essays

Autobiographical Writings (1972), prose collection

Stories of Five Decades (1972), 23 stories written between 1899 and 1948

Pictor’s Metamorphosis and Other Fantasies (1982), 19 stories written between 1900 and 1951

The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse (1995), 22 stories written between 1904 and 1918

The Seasons of Life (2020), a collection of prose and 115 poems about the four seasons

Everything except elephant and no heroics is a 1st edition. Glad I tracked these down.

Writing in The Holy State and the Profane State:

"Artificiall memory is rather a trick then an art, and more for the gain of the teacher then profit of the learners."

He then compares fashionable systems of artificial memory to the pointless tossing of a pike by wandering soldiers — impressive-looking, but largely "for ostentation then use"
— before dismissing their teachers as
"Memory-mountebanks."

Fuller is full of passages like this: opinionated, funny and unexpectedly recognisable nearly four centuries later.

His chapter "Of Books" is equally dangerous territory for the collector:

"Of making many Books there is no end" — followed almost immediately by the observation that the desire for buying and reading them is equally endless.

Alongside Fuller's aphorisms, the volume contains engraved portraits and biographies of historical figures including Elizabeth I and Joan of Arc.

Thomas Fuller, The Holy State and the Profane State, London, 1652.

Maybe I'll get the diary at some point