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New York:: Simon & Schuster,, 1939.. Hardcover -. Very good in beige boards with red text and white envelope embossed on front cover. Black spine with white lettering (previous owner's name on front endpaper, some offsetting from newsprint, affecting the front endpapers and 2 interior pages, but otherwise clean and tight) . 5th printing of original edition. Foreword by Whit Burnett,the editor of Story Magazine, who describes this as the most popular story ever published in the then 8 year old history of that magazine. It is a story written as a series of letters, from November 1932 to March 1934, between a Jewish art dealer, living in San Francisco, and his business partner, who had returned with his family to Germany in 1932. This, the first separate edition, reportedly sold 50,000 copies, it was translated into many languages, although the edition in German was published in Moscow and banned in Germany, and the basis for a 1944 film of the same name. A 1995 re-issue was translated into 20 languages and sold millions of copies. A 2019 review in The Guardian comments that this story, "distils the essence of the ideology that cast a deathly shadow over the 20th century. Across a few economic pages it touches the heart of the Nazi darkness. . . it illuminates not just the specific texture of the early Nazi period, but something more timeless. It serves as a guide to the way any politics of identity especially one that invokes the people, rooting that idea in blood and soil eventually, and often very rapidly, divides and polarises. Max and Martin [had found] 'warmth and understanding, where small selfishnesses are impossible and where wine and books and talk give a different meaning to existence'. But even the very best of friends can be rent apart. . . We tell ourselves, as these characters do, that friendship is eternal, that some bonds will never be broken. This short story warns us that ideology, once it has turned to fever, is stronger than friendship.. That this short, fleeting story has lasted so long is not only because of its artistic achievement, and not only because, written in 1938, it astonishingly anticipated the horror that was yet to come. It is because its prescience is not confined to its time. It saw into our own future too." An appealing small volume, uncommon in all printings of the original edition. Unpaginated (61 pp)