Collections of an Only Child: Seventy Years a Bibliophile, the Library of Justin G. Schiller

Watenstedt-Salzgitter Camp of Displaced Persons, (former West Germany), 1947. First and only edition, hectographic typescript. 4to. 46 pp. Translated from the English into Belarusian by Svyataslau Kousch. Illustrated with eight original black and white plates. Stiff staple-bound pictorial wrappers, printed in black, toned, lightly soiled; spine worn, singe holes on lower rear wrapper; singe affecting final six text leaves; in black cloth-covered fall-down-back box.

An extremely rare survival, Daniel Defoe's famous shipwreck tale of Robinson Crusoe, translated into Belarusian, and printed in 1947 at the Watenstedt-Salzgitter Camp of Displaced Persons.

The Displaced Persons Camp in Watenstedt-Salzgitter near Braunschweig, in the former West Germany, was opened at the end of World War II, in 1945, for those survivors who were stranded or left behind after the war without valid identification or passports--mostly from Eastern Europe. Re-settlement schemes were not in place, and only opportunities for repatriation were available. Other texts are known to have been printed at the Watenstedt camp using similar printing methods, but this is the most significant literary production.

This typescript was produced by the process of hectography, which was invented in Russia in 1869 by Mikhail Alisov. It involved the transfer of an original, prepared with special inks, to a pan of gelatine or a gelatine pad pulled tight on a metal frame. It proved an ideal process for small print runs (usually between 20 and 80) in environments where technology was not easily accessible, as well as for clandestine printings.

Extremely rare, we can locate only one other copy, held at the New York Public Library.