Description
Second American edition of My Battle (Mein Kampf) by Adolf Hitler, in the publisher’s exceptionally rare and controversial dust jacket.
Second American edition of My Battle (Mein Kampf) by Adolf Hitler, in the publisher’s exceptionally rare and controversial dust jacket. Octavo, viii, 297pp. Light brown cloth, title printed in red on spine and front cover. Frontispiece portrait. Free of marks or notes, appears unread. Light foxing along top edge of text block. In the publisher’s dust jacket, $2.50 on front flap, light toning to spine, wear along top edge, with the Dorothy Thompson blurb on the back panel. (Pastore, 204)
The best example of this dust jacket we’ve encountered. An exceptionally rare example of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, with the dust jacket eliciting a diplomatic protest from the German government.
This book is the second American edition of My Battle, after a controversial first print run in 1933 by the Houghton Mifflin Company. The first print run of 7,603 copies, priced at $3.00, generated moderate commercial success but elicited condemnation from Jewish American groups across the United States. By 1937, Houghton Mifflin decided to risk a second edition, with a retail price of $2.50, a new dust jacket containing a provocative quote by columnist Dorothy Thompson, and illustrated with the colors of the Weimar Republic. The dust jacket resulted in a diplomatic protest from the German government, demanding that it be replaced with an approved design from the German publisher Eher Verlag, but Houghton Mifflin refused.
