Klaus und Erika
This book, in English, is RARE. It's out of print and costs over a hundred quid to buy.
It's about groovy German artists and intellectuals living in exile in the 1930s. It's written by groovy German artists and intellectuals too: Erika and Klaus Mann, offspring of Thomas Mann. They literally had to run for their lives, but they did it in great style.
Whenever I moaned about not being able to get this book, people were keen to mention its availability at archive.org but I can't be doing with that. Real books for real eyeballs.
It's a shame it's out of print in English (you can still get it cheaply in German) because, though it was written in German, it was originally published in English in 1939 when it would have verboten in Nazi Germany. When it came to publishing a German edition later on, they had to resort to translating some of the English publication because the Manns had lost their original German manuscripts.
In the end, the Interlibrary Loans system came good. I ordered it from the LSE via the Mitchell (one of their iconic carpets pictured) for £25. It's mine til April.
A strange detail: the PDF version has this cool picture of Einstein in New York but it's missing from this print edition. It shouldn't be missing and it's even listed in the illustrations index as being on the flyleaf. From what I can see, no page has been torn out and nor is there a sticky spot where a plate has been removed. It's just not there. This is too bad because I wanted to get a cheeky scan of it. Ah, well. One for the ages.
Anyway, I can finally read this stupid book now and die happy.
