The first of Ezra Pound’s six publications with Casa Editrice, a publishing house operating under the Republic of Salò’s Ministry of Popular Culture. All published in 1944 and 1945 at the height of the war effort in Italy, these pieces served as propaganda, Poundian propaganda though with pro-war, pro-Axis, and anti-Usurocratic intersections with the RSI, in Italian to be read by the Italian people. L’America… is a history of usurious and anti-usurious acts in America and the occasional relation therein to Britain, and asserts that “The first serious attempt against [the usurers], after Lincoln’s, began with the Fascist Revolution, to be reaffirmed by the formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis.”

First edition, in the original Italian, later translated into English by John Drummond and published by Peter Russell as the sixth Money Pamphlet (London, 1951, Gallup A51b). Published in March 1944 (unrecorded by Gallup) under the auspices of Fernando Mezzamosa, Minister of Popular Culture. A scarce title, given the context in which it was published and the cheap, wartime stock used. Pound had in fact written to Mezzamosa earlier in the year requesting resources to start a journal, Volontà Repubblicana (cf. “Money is, in the first place, an instrument of the will.”) in Rapallo, but was rejected “due to the absolute necessity of reducing the use of paper to the minimum.” That Pound had suggested to Mezzamosa that the paper would not be an “organ of the state” may have had some bearing.

This booklet is the first in Editrice’s “Biblioteca di Cultura Politica” series, which Pound had some hand in editing, providing at least Arthur Kitson’s La Storia di un reato. In April 1944, James (Giacomo) Strachey Barnes, an English Italophile ex-pat and fascist, and a good friend of Pound’s at the time, received a request from Mezzamosa to contribute, and provided Giustizia Sociale: attraverso la riforma moneteria, a similar booklet filled with Poundian ideas, e.g. Gessellism, which Barnes and Pound had discussed over the previous year; though Barnes later revealed, in drafting a plea to Churchill for Pound’s pardon, that he did not understand Pound’s views.

A particularly good copy, no less for the poor quality of the production; covers clean, straight, uncreased and unbroken with bright ink. Internally fine, without a chip. Has seen some damp (Venetian?) in its time, with a little foxing and leaking from the staple, but this almost exclusively to the front cover, the remainder unaffected. Small label pasted inside the backcover, possibly of later bookseller’s inventory. Gallup records various corrections made in pencil or with slips typed by Pound and pasted over lines; this copy has neither and is as, or very nearly, off the press. Gallup A51a.