The Blue Octavo Notebooks

Brod named this selection of 109 entries Betrachtungen über Sünde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg [Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way] and included it in the 1931 collection The Great Wall of China.

The octavo notebooks were later included in a volume of fragments and uncollected writings published in 1953, along with the numbered extracts.

The Blue Octavo Notebooks were published in English in a single volume edition by Exact Change (1991, ISBN 1-878972-04-9).

This edition includes the complete notebooks, the numbered extracts, and Max Brod's original notes.

Scholars have noted that from late 1917 until June 1919, Kafka stopped writing entries in his diaries, and instead wrote in these notebooks, the bulk of which were aphorisms.