The obscure barber-surgeon Johann Gottfried Schnabel wrote what was probably the most popular German novel of the first half of the eighteenth century, a work that was also the most important eighteenth-century German response to Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Indeed, Schnabel's four-volume account of the settlers of an idyllic island somewhere near the Cape of Good Hope, Wunderliche Fata einiger See-Fahrer (Strange Fates of Some Sea-Voyagers, 1731-1743), more commonly known to German readers as Insel Felsenburg (Isle of Felsenburg), continues to attract readers and scholars to this day. Schnabel also wrote a widely circulating account of the erotic adventures of a German nobleman, Der im Irr-Garten der Liebe herum taumelnde Cavalier (The Cavalier, Reeling Deliriously in the Labyrinth of Love, 1738), that as recently as 1972 appeared in a paperback edition in a popular series of erotica--"Für Herrn von Elbenstein...