"EHER-VERLAG ARCHIV" Stamp

Hello to all! I have just recently discovered LT and was pleased to find a group that seemed to describe one of my occasional maladies. I love to pick up strange and interesting books here and there when I stumble across them and I am hoping someone here can help shed some light on one of my little mysteries.

I have a 1936 German copy of Mein Kampf with a small purple double oval stamped on the first page that says "EHER-VERLAG ARCHIV" and handwritten, in pencil, in the center of the oval is something that looks like "^4^4". I have been unable to determine what the significance of the stamp may be and was wondering if anyone here might know or be able to point me to a resource that can help. Thanks!

From what I found, it looks like Eher-Verlag was a publishing house of the nazi party. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Eher_Nachfolger

Yes, Kegsoccer is right. The Eher Verlag was involved in printing "Mein Kampf". Your stamp just means that this particular book was part of the archive, with the handwritten number indicating the archive number.

Thanks for the quick responses. I have actually read up some on Eher-Verlag since getting the book and find it fascinating. I was wondering if the Eher-Verlag Archiv would be some place they stored proof copies, first runs, large batches of books, or something else all together. Was there an archive in most major cities, at each publishing company, or a single central one and, if so, where? Was the Archive simply a way for Eher-Verlag to keep a history of books published or something like a public library? On and off since I bought the book I have been doing Google searches to get the story behind it but have never found anything with details of the Eher-Verlag Archiv. Has anyone else seen these stamps on German books before? Thanks again, I am looking forward to some interesting book lore.

I catalog old Jewish books, and I recently saw a stamp, and I think it was the same thing -- it was on an anti-semitic/propaganda work from Nazi Germany. Unfortunately, that's all I have to tell. It's the only time I've seen it, despite having gone through several boxes of similar works. So, I'd say that books with the stamp aren't all that common.

A thought: the carats in the handwritten number might be "1" (the number one). Whereas Americans, in my experience, make their ones as a single stroke, French people make theirs with a definite "hat"--like a typewritten "1". Sometimes an individual's "hats" are so pronounced that the 1 ends up looking something like a 7, or--in extreme cases, a carat.

While I don't know if German people do the same, it's the first thing that springs to mind.
Hope this helps!

You may have seen this already, but this site has an image of your stamp, and that carat-like numeral as well. It looks like nnicole has hit on the correct interpretation of that symbol.

Also in Italy we make 1 with "hats" but it doesn't look like a 7 because we put a little dash on the 7 to make it different from a 1