HORNIMAN (Roy)
Israel Rank: Die Autobiographie Eines Verbrechers.
With a wonderful bookplate on the front pastedown: Elisabeth Jaedicke’s, which prominently features a dog (presumably Elisabeth’s), named ‘Nim, the Prince’, encircled by a decorative wreath and grandly placed between the sun and the moon.
Israel Rank, first published in 1907 was the inspiration for the legendary Ealing Comedy “Kind Hearts and Coronets”, in which the anti-hero changes identity from the Jewish Israel Rank to the Italian Louis d’Ascoyne Mazzini. The German edition is the only translation from the early twentieth century: it is easy to place it in the context of Oded Heilbrunner’s “gradual assimilation of antisemitic discourse”.
The first edition OCLC reports copies only in the National Library of Israel, Duke University, National Library of Germany, and Humboldt University.
