The Key to the Great Gate (Croatian SF/Nazis/World War Two)

First edition/printing. Book (PON label on FFE) and jacket both in Good Plus condition primarily because of some moisture staining at bottom of spine."The Key to the Great Gate (manuscript trans Fred Bolman and Ruth Morris from the Serbo-Croat 1947), was first composed in an Italian concentration camp (the manuscript was destroyed and had to be reconstructed later). An imprisoned Scientist, having learned how to expand and contract the Einsteinian spacetime continuum, dazzles and befuddles his Nazi guards, gradually becoming an effective symbol of human dignity and the freedom of the spirit – consistent with the underlying burden of the twentieth-century genre of the Prison Novel, whose two poles are Incarceration and Escape. The book is also funny, in a fashion possibly evocative, for readers not familiar with Serbo-Croat literature, of writers like Karel Čapek." - John Clute, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 3rd Edition/Internet. Cover art and profuse interior art by Fischer. An uncommon book.…