Inscribed by Ginsberg on the title page, "Allen Ginsberg, for Carl Laszlo Basel 1980, December 4, with representation of his experiences in Concentration Camp, the world of art & aesthetics", also with an original drawing of a skull-and-crossbones within a hexagram, accompanied by a flower and the mantra "Om Ah Hum". Carl Laszlo (1923-2013) was a Jewish Hungarian art collector who survived several concentration camps including Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. After the war he set himself up as a psychoanalyst and art collector in Basel, also becoming politically involved with the displaced Dalai Lama in the 1950s, and involving himself in the American counterculture scene in the 1960s. His concentration camp memoirs are published under the darkly ironic title Holiday on Waldsee, and his childhood memoirs under the title The Way to Auschwitz. A compelling association. This copy is of the sixteenth printing, first printed in 1961.
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