Friday, December 5, 2008

These might be the books that Hitler burned

Nothing warms a publisher's heart faster than the prospect of someone trying to censor one of the books they publish. This advertisement, currently being flogged on eBay, dates from 1965 and sports the wonderful tagline 'These are the Books that Hitler burned'.

Although a few decades had passed, it was still early enough, apparently, to try and move copies of the well-known 'Great Books of the Western World'. One doesn't like to suggest that the publisher's are being deliberately misleading, but it must be said that the long list of authors doesn't appear to include all that many that were blacklisted by the Nazis. Marx and Freud, certainly, and I know that Spinoza was singled out as well. But at a guess, probably not Nietzsche.

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