HET ACHTERHUIS [The Diary of Anne Frank]

Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Contact, 1947. Very good.. First edition of the world-famous "Diary of a Young Girl," a moving monument of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany's cataclysmic destruction of individual lives, communities, and cultures. Begun on her 13th birthday, Anne Frank's notebooks record the following two years of her family's life in hiding, her final entry made just days before the family's arrest and internment; the afterword records her death in Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Conventionally known as a "diary, " Frank's text was written and rewritten in the form of letters to an imaginary "Kitty" and composed with an eye not only to posterity but to eventual publication: in May of 1944, she began to edit and rewrite her previous entries in a second notebook: assigning pseudonyms to the people she wrote about, removing unsatisfactory entries and expanding others, and standardizing her chosen literary form. The title HET ACHTERHUIS (literally "The House Behind" or "The Secret Annex") was her own.

Following the notebooks' recovery by Miep Gies, Otto Frank selected the text of this first edition from among his daughter's drafts, choosing to leave out certain descriptions of familial conflict and to censor sexual material on the advice of the publisher. In this first edition, the editorial hand is Otto Frank's, but the voice is entirely Anne's ("I know I can write"), her own "best and harshest critic."

Produced with extremely poor-quality post-war materials, this is a solid copy of a typically fragile book. 7'' x 4''. Original red and cream paper boards. Illustrated with a frontispiece photograph of the author, two facsimile reproductions of the handwritten diary, and three illustrations of the interior. X, 254 pages. Toning to spine and a bit unevenly to portions of boards. Short cracking to rear joint; interior cracking to gutter of title page (holding firm). Clean. Housed in custom quarter blue goatskin clamshell box and blue cloth chemise.