Den Haag: N. V. Servire, 1930–31. Octavo (23 × 16,7 cm). Original printed wrappers in different colors; [4], 96; 97–192, [4]; 193–288, [8]; [4], 289– 392, [4] pp. Wrappers lightly dust-soiled; leaves sporadically foxed; else good.

Complete run of the left-wing, quadrilingual (Dutch, English, French and German) literary magazine with contributions by numerous well-known authors, founded and edited by the 18-year-old Sonja Prins (1912– 2009). She was the daughter of a lawyer and her father was considered Amsterdam’s last bohemian. She spent part of her childhood in the USA, Canada, England and Switzerland. The founding of the magazine also marked the departure from her parents’ home and the beginning of her studies. At the same time, she became a member of the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN). After graduating, she worked as a secretary in a Utrecht steel factory. During the German occupation, she illegally distributed the resistance newspaper “De Vonk” for the CPN, in which she also published texts. She was arrested by the Gestapo because it was discovered that she was hiding persecuted people in her apartment. Three years followed in the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück. She secretly wrote poems and translated Shakespeare’s “A Midsommer nights dreame” from memory and performed the play in the concentration camp. She addressed her time in the concentration camp in a novel and a volume of poetry. She resigned from the party in 1957. (Constanze Jaiser, Poetic Testimonies: Gedichte aus dem Frauen-Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück 1939-1945, Stuttgart u. Weimar 2000, p. 368.)

The contributors include: Xavier Abril, Joe Bousquet, Paul Bowles, Kay Boyle, André Cayatte, John Dos Passos, Georges Dupeyron, Carl Einstein, Charles Henri Ford, Georges Herbiet, Masaka Ikeda, Eugene Jolas, Kenji Kawano, Herman Kesten, Robert Mac Almon, Philippe Lamour, Vladimir Lugovskoy, Norman Macleod, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Walter Mehring, Paul Nizan, Joseph Outkine, Ezra Pound, Erich Reinhardt, Edouard Roditi, Harold J. Salemson, Victor Serge, Sergei Tretyakov, Roger Vitrac, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukovsky, etc. With attractive unattributed wrappers.

Book ID: 52718

Price: $2,750.00