Covered by Elvis Costello on Deadicated . The book became so popular that within the first year it went through three editions.
Brant sees follies as sins.
Each chapter chastizes a type of fool who is depicted graphically in the accompanying woodcut. Some of them found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse, or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors . . . I read it in Basel in the summer of 1932 when I had still vividly in mind the impressions of my first voyage to Europe. When I began thinking about my novel, I took for my own this simple almost universal image of the ship of thie world on its voyage to eternity.