Mao Zedong's first Little Red Book was blue ... and without the spin

The thoughts of Mao Zedong, published in 1964 under the title Quotations, are considered the blueprint for Chinese communism and a guidebook to the Cultural Revolution.

- David Barnett

The collected soundbites from his speeches and writings have become known the world over as the Little Red Book.

But the red-covered Quotations of the former Chinese Communist Party chairman, who died in 1976, aged 82, went through many ideological iterations before the official version was settled on. The original cover was also a different colour - in fact, had some of those earlier thought experiments been declared the final draft, we could now be talking about Chairman Mao's Little Blue Book.

For the first time, a huge collection of the various editions of Quotations has been assembled and is to be unveiled and presented for sale at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair next month, with a communism-busting price tag of £1m.

The collection is the work of more than two decades by Justin G Schiller, an American collector who began to visit China in the 1990s. Dr Matt Wills of London rare book dealer Peter Harrington, which is representing the sale, said: "At that time, the market for collecting the Little Red Book was only just beginning, and you could find all kinds of rare and one-off editions being discarded by institutions and private individuals if you knew where to look. Justin was in place at the perfect time to build a collection without parallel. It would be impossible to do the same today, as the majority of the rarer editions have long perished."