Ayn Rand: Playboy Interview Archive

March 2024 marks the 60th anniversary of Playboy's Interview with Ayn Rand. To commemorate this significant event, one of the earliest mass-market publications to offer Ayn Rand a public forum, Pen Ultimate Rare Books is offering a bibliophile-worthy copy of the original Playboy issue (March, 1964), with its cover touting a pictorial essay, "Girls of Russia and the Iron Curtain Countries." No, Rand was not the centerfold. In this intellectualy electric interview with Alvin Toffler, future author of Future Shock, Rand elucidates her views on everything from meta-ethics to aesthetics, from then-current events to sex and politics. Additionally, this archive includes a copy of "The Lost Parts of the Playboy Interview," written by Don Hauptman, who successfully acquired the original archive of the Ayn Rand interview from Playboy s auction in 2003. Information and illustrations here are nowhere else available. Mr. Hauptman s article details the correspondence between Rand and Playboy, revealing (and illustrating) that "Rand rewrote the interview s questions as well as her answers." Book #vP1244. $400. From the largest selection of rare, signed, manuscript, and photographed Ayn Rand in private hands. Some of Rand s more provocative answers from the Playboy interview: "I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important.... When I came here from Soviet Russia, I was interested in politics for only one reason to reach the day when I would not have to be interested in politics.... I have read only one book of [Nabokov s] and a half the half was Lolita, which I couldn t finish. He is a brilliant stylist, he writes beautifully, but his subjects, his sense of life, his view of man, are so evil that no amount of artistic skill can justify them.... Look at modern art and literature with their image of man as a helpless, mindless creature doomed to failure, frustration and destruction. This may be the collectivists' psychological confession, but it is not an image of man.... I am an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, of individual rights there are no others of individual freedom. It is on this ground that I oppose any doctrine which proposes the sacrifice of the individual to the collective, such as communism, socialism, the welfare state, fascism, Nazism and modern liberalism. I oppose the conservatives on the same ground."