What is a Pirated ML Edition?

Modern Library editions were extremely inexpensive right up through the 60's. But this didn't stop people from copying a number of ML books and selling them on the open market. Particularly egregious were the pirate operations in Taiwan. One operation, Book World Company, boldly printed a list of titles that they offered! These were not licensed reprints with royalties going back to Random House—these were blatant rip-offs.

A pirated copy will have several (but not necessarily all) of the following characteristics:

• unusual binding style and size not matching known configuration
• lack of a colophon on the binding
• sometimes a printed or stamped Chinese language text block (examples left) on the front or rear paste-downs, end papers, title page, or last page
• blank pastedowns
• blank DJ inverse
• Cover usually plain with silver or gold scripting.

The text block pages were usually copied wholesale, often with the ML copyrights intact.