Twisted Sister

Another find from the Housing Works sale: a first edition (tho' slightly banged up) of My Sister and I, the infamous forgery of Nietzsche's late-life diaries, which purported to support theories of the philosopher's incestuous relationship with said sibling. See a bit by philosopher Dennis Dutton on the kerfluffle.


But lo! What is this? Seems the book used to belong to renegade sociologist Ned Polsky, the author of counterculture classic Hustlers, Beats and Others. Did he pencil this annotation?

"$am Roth" refers to booklegger Samuel Roth, who famously pirated Ulysses in the US while it was still contraband. Roth, who was Jewish, also penned Jews Must Live, an anti-Semitic tract that, if googled, will today lead you to any number of white power websites, where it lives on in digitized samizdat, polluting a new generation of wingnutten sheissekopfs.