What to make of the collector who collects bad books? I don’t mean merely poorly written books. Those are legion and easily ignored, though there are always a few who enjoy collecting the works of Amanda McKittrick Ros, William McGonagall and other dreadful, perhaps wilfully so, writers.

I mean books that are thoroughly bad – baleful, vicious, mendacious, hate-filled screeds that have unarguably had ill effects on their readers and on society. There are more recent contenders, but almost a hundred years after its first publication, the leader in this base parade remains Mein Kampf, the manifesto written by Adolf Hitler, with secretarial help from his sycophant Rudolf Hess, while serving a wrist slap of a prison sentence in Landsberg for attempting to overthrow the German state. In it, Hitler lays out his nationalist, expansionist political programme for all to see, prophesying the horrors to come. I haven’t read it, but I’m willing to take the word of others that, among its demerits, Mein Kampf is badly written. 

Mein Kampf was published in two volumes in 1925 and 1927, and a complete first edition is consequently difficult to find. A powerful taboo long existed against dealing in it. The taboo has faded with time, though I’m told that Christie’s still refuses to accept copies for auction. The book itself may be vile, but it is undeniably of enormous historical consequence. After the war, it was made illegal in Germany to print copies of it. When the prohibition was lifted in 2016, a fat scholarly edition sold out online before publication. Was that a neo-Nazi frenzy or simply the result of pent-up demand? In defence of reading the book, some argue that if more people had done so at the time, they would have recognised Hitler’s intentions and taken effective steps to combat them.

Any rare-book dealer offering for sale a copy of the first edition of Mein Kampf braces themselves for criticism, at least on grounds of taste, and perhaps suspicions of closet Nazi sympathies. The dealers best placed to fend off accusations of this kind are Jewish, though naturally few choose to handle such material. And yet there are Jewish dealers who handle anti-Semitic material and Jewish book collectors who collect it.

Recently, two editions of the same work arrived at our bookshop, one the original English-language version, the other a German translation of it. The English title was Germany Must Perish!. It was written by an author named Theodore N Kaufman and issued by an obscure publisher, the Argyle Press, in Newark, New Jersey, in March 1941. The stark black-on-white lettering of the dust jacket had a Germanic flavour to it.

Writing as chairman of the American Federation of Peace, Kaufman argues that the innate warmongering of the German race has made world peace unattainable. As a solution, he proposes sterilising all German males under sixty-five years of age and most German females under forty-five. He also proposes the redistribution of German territory among the country’s neighbours. A large map in the book depicts Europe after such a partition, with Holland at least four times the size of the present Netherlands, Berlin in Poland and Munich in France. Austria, lately swallowed by Hitler’s Germany, would be spat out into a new state called Czechia.

Aha, I thought, satire. A contemporary reviewer in Time magazine thought so too, likening it to Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Sadly, no. Reading the press interviews the author gave at the time makes it clear that Kaufman was sincere in presenting what he saw as a practical programme for the extermination of Germans.

Kaufman’s cranky diatribe was the very definition of a bad book. In countering the eugenic ideology of Nazism, he had simply borrowed the tactics of the enemy. He was fighting over the same swampy ground using the same racialist, genocidal weapons that Hitler was deploying against Jews. Kaufman at least had the excuse that his weapons were only rhetorical.

That is, until the Nazis heard about the work. For all his failings as an author, Kaufman was an effective self-publicist, and his book was fairly widely reviewed. Joseph Goebbels knew an open goal when he saw one. He quickly had Kaufman’s book translated into German, glossed with a suitably pointed commentary. If the Jews planned to exterminate Germans, why should Germans not exterminate Jews first? In September 1941, Julius Streicher fulminated against the book in the pages of Der Stürmer. When the Jews of Hanover were deported to Poland the same month, the local authorities listed Germany Must Perish! among the justifications. During his trial at Nuremberg after the war, Streicher cited the book in his defence. A bad book had, through the workings of the Nazi propaganda machine, become something much worse: an exploitable justification for the Holocaust.

Any notion that the Nazis truly believed Kaufman was the leader of a Jewish plot against Germany is absurd. The American Federation of Peace had only one member, who also happened to be its chairman. The Argyle Press of Newark, New Jersey, was a one-book pop-up shop, proprietor Theodore N Kaufman. In a photograph on the cover of the German translation, the bespectacled Kaufman hunches over his typewriter like a batty uncle writing letters to the local newspaper in a deleted scene from Woody Allen’s Radio Days. Perhaps to a 1940s German raised in a seething stew of anti-Semitic hatred, any Jewish male appeared menacing.

I was a little disappointed that our collector took only one of the two books on offer. He thought that the English-language first edition would do well enough for him. But I realised that the key problem for the collector of anti-Semitic material is one of discrimination. To humanity’s eternal shame, there is so much of it to choose from.