U.S. senator Alan Cranston once lost a copyright suit to Adolf Hitler. Cranston, who had begun his career in journalism, spotted an abridged translation of Mein Kampf in a New York bookstore in 1939. He had read the full text in German and was concerned that the English adaptation omitted Hitler’s anti-Semitism and ambitions to dominate Europe.

To publicize the truth, Cranston worked with a friend to publish an anti-Nazi version of the book. “I wrote this, dictated it [from Hitler’s German text] in about eight days, to a battery of secretaries in a loft in Manhattan,” Cranston told the Los Angeles Times in 1988. They produced a tabloid edition of 32 pages, reducing Hitler’s 270,000 words to 70,000 to yield a “Reader’s Digest-like version [showing] the worst of Hitler.”

At 10 cents apiece, Cranston’s version sold half a million copies in 10 days. But by that time the original was a best-seller in Germany, and the publishers sued Cranston for undercutting the market. In June the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ordered the presses stopped. The truth had gotten out, Cranston said, but “we had to throw away half a million copies.”