The definitive text of Mao’s Little Red Book, the army edition of August 1965 in its printed wrappers, with Lin Biao’s inscription leaf intact

MAO ZEDONG. Mao zhuxi yulu 毛主席語录 [Quotations from Chairman Mao]. [Beijing]: Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun zong zhengzhibu, August 1965. The August 1965 edition, the first to give the full thirty-three chapters and 427 quotations, issued for internal circulation within the army. Pocket format (Chinese 64-kai). Title printed in red and green, portrait of Mao printed in sepia, Lin Biao’s calligraphic inscription leaf; pp. 270. Original cream paper wrappers, the title 毛主席語录 in black on a red panel, the imprint 中国人民解放軍总政治部編印 (compiled and printed by the General Political Department of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army) in black at the foot, the spine lettered in red with a red star. With a printed errata slip and a printed inspection slip.

Oliver Lei Han counts this as the third edition, after the first edition of May 1964 and a regional printing at Harbin in March 1965, and calls it the first complete edition. Chinese sources and Daniel Leese number it the second official edition of the General Political Department. It is the text on which, in Han’s words, “all subsequent versions and translations are based” (p. 8).

Notes

The Quotations were compiled within the General Political Department of the People’s Liberation Army as a primer for soldiers. They grew from the daily Mao quotation that Lin Biao 林彪, as Minister of Defence, had the PLA Daily (Jiefangjun bao 解放军报) print from 1961. The first edition of May 1964 had thirty chapters. The August 1965 edition added three more and raised the count to 427 quotations, the form Alexander Cook calls “the canonical revised edition that first appeared in 1965” (Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History, 2014, p. xiii). Twenty-eight million copies of it had been printed by March 1966. It remained an army publication until April 1966, when the Party Centre gave its printing to the People’s Publishing House and its sale to the Xinhua 新华 bookshops, and just over a billion copies followed between 1966 and 1971 (Leese).

This copy is in the printed paper wrappers. With the August 1965 edition, in Daniel Leese’s words, red vinyl “by and large replaced the white paper cover,” so the wrapper issue is the less common form of the definitive text. It keeps the leaf bearing Lin Biao’s brush inscription, lines from the diary of the soldier Lei Feng 雷锋. Lin’s original carried a superfluous stroke in the character ting 听 (to listen, to obey). Corrected plates were first used, so far as Han could establish, for this edition, and most copies of it that keep the leaf show the corrected form (Han, pp. 5, 8). After Lin’s death in September 1971 the leaf “was to be torn out or otherwise defaced” in every copy (Han, p. 6), and many surviving copies lack it. The errata slip and the printer’s inspection slip, both easily lost, remain with the book.

In February 1979 the Central Propaganda Department withdrew the Quotations from circulation, and more than a hundred million copies were destroyed (Leese). An army copy of 1965 that kept its Lin Biao leaf has come through both purges.

Original printed paper wrappers. A large tide-line stain spreads across most of the upper wrapper, the spine is spotted, the lower wrapper is lightly creased with small signs of wear at the edge, and the corners are softly rubbed. The title panel and imprint are clean and legible. The Lin Biao inscription leaf, the errata slip and the inspection slip are present.

References

Oliver Lei Han, “Sources and Early Printing History of Chairman Mao’s ‘Quotations’,” BibSite, Bibliographical Society of America, pp. 5–8; Justin G. Schiller, Quotations of Chairman Mao, 1964–2014: A Short Bibliographical Study (New York: Grolier Club, 2014); Daniel Leese, Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, 2011), ch. 5; Daniel Leese, “A single spark: origins and spread of the Little Red Book in China,” in Alexander C. Cook (ed.), Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 23–42; Tang Yanming 唐炎明 and Tang Yaming 唐亚明, “Mao zhuxi yulu” de dansheng ji qita 《毛主席语录》的诞生及其他 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2017).

The definitive army text of Mao’s Quotations, in its printed wrappers, with the Lin Biao leaf that so many copies lost after 1971.

Offered by Atelier Zweig LLC. Shipped insured, with signature on delivery.