[Typescript and Original Art]: Three Angels Book

Typescript and original art. Quartos. Seven-page typescript Signed in bradbound folder, along with 25 original watercolor and ink illustrations, plus additional material. Folder modestly worn and illustrations with a bit of light soil (mostly on blank versos), very near fine. The typescript is signed by Ziegler at the close and again at each illustration with a stylized "HL." A charming children's book by husband and wife Hella (Helene) Ziegler and Hans Leinkauf, Austrian Jews who fled Vienna in 1940 to escape Nazi persecution. In Vienna, Leinkauf had owned a trucking business started by his father as well as a valuable art collection, much of which consisted of works by well-known 16th and 17th Century artists, including Dürer and Rembrandt. (According to a website documenting Nazi art thefts in Austria, Leinkauf's collection was cleared for export to the United States but seized at Trieste in 1944 and sent back to the German Reich; it apparently has not yet been located.) In the United States, Leinkauf married fellow Viennese emigrant Helene (Hella), and together they created this book. The book tells the story of three angels who take a day trip to explore earth, doing good deeds along the way: one goes skiing, one visits a department store, and another flies a plane! The story is light-hearted, and the illustrations are well-executed. Nineteen larger illustrations came to us numbered and stored separately with address labels on the verso, presumably the final cut. In another folder is a cover mockup illustrated in color and lettered in pencil, five smaller color illustrations of angels, 18 pencil sketches or tracings on onion skin (including several which do not appear to have made the cut; very good with some toning and edgewear), and two drawings (presumably by Leinkauf) unrelated to the project.While we find no record of this story being published, the typescript’s folder does show the label of New York literary agent K. Dennis Osborne, so presumably they shopped it around. Leinkauf’s typed address labels on the verso of the 19 illustrations give a Chicago address canceled in pencil, but the folder they are housed in gives a Los Angeles address, where Leinkauf died in 1946. A charming and visually engaging children's book, presumably written in Los Angeles, by a husband and wife who fled Europe to escape Nazi persecution. Reference: Lexicon of Austrian Provenance Research.…