From Death-Camp to Existentialism: A Psychiatrist's Path to a New Therapy (Man's Search for Meaning)
Boston: Beacon Press, 1959.
First American and first English language edition, first printing. Signed by Viktor Frankl on the front free endpaper and dated Detroit, Oct. 17 1960, spaced to accommodate Charles Bruce Lee's name below. xii, [ii], 111 pp. Bound in publisher's dark crimson cloth-affect paper-covered boards stamped in blind on front board and lettered in white on spine. Near Fine with light rubbing, light foxing to edges, and faint offsetting and foxing to endpapers. Slight ripple to terminals. In an About Very Good unclipped dust jacket with sunned spine panel, light foxing, and dampstaining (mainly visible on back panel and verso).
A rare signed first US edition of the Holocaust memoir better known as Man's Search for Meaning. In October 1960 Viktor Frankl was in Detroit on one of his many lecture tours, delivering five lectures on five successive evenings at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, beginning with "The Meaning of Life" on October 16, the date Charles Bruce Lee wrote his name in this book. The following night, when Frankl lectured on "The Meaning of Suffering," Lee obtained the renowned psychiatrist's signature.
Frankl's writing would have had a particular poignancy for Lee, a Black biologist with painful memories of his wartime service as an intelligence clerk in the segregated Army. "My first night on a Jim Crow train car was like Schindler's List," he later said in an interview with Alan Govenar. "We rode in wooden cars behind the engine with the upper windows open. The coal dust blew in. I was in a car that was built to hold eighty people, but there must have been over one hundred fifty men jammed into it."
Lee grew up in Buffalo, New York, earned a bachelor's degree from the Tuskegee Institute, and finished up with a Ph.D in malacology, the study of invertebrate zoology, from the University of Michigan. He worked for the government for 34 years, spending ten years as the chief of microbiology of the Detroit Arsenal and directing research on the fungal deterioration of ordnance materials. Like Viktor Frankl, he lived past the age of 90. An interesting association between two men who successfully overcame considerable adversity.
Price: $30,000