A book of fairy tales owned and signed by German-born Jewish diarist Anne Frank before she perished in the Holocaust will go on sale in New York valued at $20,000 to $30,000, an auction house said Wednesday.

The well-worn edition of Grimm's fairy tales in German, which includes favorites Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, belonged to Frank and her sister Margot before they went into hiding in 1942 to escape the Nazis.

Frank wrote her name and that of her sister on the fly leaf, said Swann Auction Galleries, which will conduct the sale on May 5. The book will go on public display in its New York showroom on May 2.

The handwriting matches other samples written by Anne Frank, said the auction house. The inside cover of the book is stamped in purple with the initials MF.

It was not known when Frank acquired the book, nor when she signed it. She was born in Frankfurt in 1929 and her sister in 1926. The family moved to Amsterdam in the mid-1930s to escape from the Nazis.

The book was published in 1925 in Vienna.

"What just infuses it with so much incredible emotion and history and potential value is the fact that it is signed by Anne Frank. It was her personal copy," said Nicholas Lowry, president of Swann Auction Galleries.

Anne Frank's diary, which she wrote in hiding, was published two years after she died, aged 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, just two months before the Nazis were defeated.

It has sold more than 30 million copies and been translated from the original Dutch into 67 languages.