The Forty Days of Musa Dagh

New York: Pocket Books, Inc. (GC-768). 1961. Cardinal Edition First Printing. Softcover. Very Good+. [a good sound copy with only light wear, a tiny bit of damage at lower rear hinge]. Mass Market PB The first U.S. paperback printing of Werfel's epic of the early days of the Armenian genocide. Controversial to this day (ask a Turk), it was first published in the U.S. by The Viking Press in 1934 (the original German edition had come out the year before), and had no additional American editions until the appearance of this one, more than a quarter-century later -- which suggests that the same forces of denial and suppression (primarily emanating from the Turkish government) were at play in the publishing world as in the motion picture industry, where protests and pressure applied by the Turks prevented M-G-M (which had owned the movie rights to the book since the 1930s) from ever getting a film adaptation off the ground. (One very bad one was produced independently in the early 1980s, after M-G-M had divested itself of the rights and washed its hands of the whole thing.) .