Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

Early printing, published the same year as the first printing, of the first American edition of the diary of Anne Frank.

• Anne Frank (German-Dutch).
• Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1952.
• 283, [3] pages.
• Red topstain.
• Original unclipped ($3.00) first-edition pink dust jacket with photographic portrait of Frank on front cover, designed by Ursula Suess.
• Bound in original full black cloth, silver-lettered spine. 

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. Following the notebooks’ recovery by Miep Gies, Otto Frank selected the text for a first edition from among his daughter’s drafts. The editorial hand is Otto Frank’s, but the voice is entirely Anne’s: “I know I can write."