Friday, July 27, 2012

Fuhrer Meets Geyser

Thirty years ago, I worked with a delightful woman, then a copy editor, who had started her working life as a proofreader at a vanity press. The excellence of her author queries--one jotted these in the margins of galleys--got her promoted to copy editor fairly quickly. The one publication she mentioned from this press was called something like My Three Weeks with Hitler in Yellowstone National Park. The plan of the book was simple: during the 1920s, Hitler visits the US, and while sightseeing in Yellowstone discusses with an interlocutor his plans for world domination. Hitler's dialogue, my coworker said, was rendered as if spoken in broken English by a German: 'Und zen ve must einother var fight mit die Englitsch und French." She was droll, but not I think given to just making stories up, so somewhere out there--perhaps in a storage shed owned by the writer's descendants, there must be copies of this book.

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