University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Publishing American Values: The Franklin Book Programs as Cold War Cultural Diplomacy

Robbins, Louise S.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/3718

Description

Title
Publishing American Values: The Franklin Book Programs as Cold War Cultural Diplomacy
Author(s)
Robbins, Louise S.
Issue Date
2007
Keyword(s)
  • Libraries and society
  • Cold War
  • Franklin Book Program
  • American Library Association. International Relations Committee.
  • American Book Publishers Council Foreign Trade Committee
Abstract
In 1951 librarians from the American Library Association’s International Relations Committee and publishers from the American Book Publishers Council Foreign Trade Committee met at the Library of Congress to discuss how to meet the “need for books in developing countries.” The nonprofit Franklin Book Programs they established existed from 1952 until 1978 and helped to make possible the publication of some 3,000 titles in languages such as Arabic, Urdu, Bengali, Indonesian, and Portuguese; involved the intelligentsia of each country in the process of book selection and translation; and established both a publishing infrastructure and a market for U.S. books in areas where there had been none. Why were these countries and languages chosen? Was the decision to establish a nonprofit organization that could accept funding from the federal government a result of concerns about Cold War censorship? Was the decision another manifestation of librarians’ and publishers’ assertions of the importance of free access to ideas as a counter to communist ideology? Was it a way to build an international market for American values or American publishers? This research uses archival sources and oral history to explore the motives and actions of behind the Franklin Book Programs.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/3718
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2007 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

Owning Collections

Library Trends 55 (3) Winter 2007: Libraries in Times of War, Revolution, and Social Change PRIMARY
Library Trends 55 (3) Winter 2007: Libraries in Times of War, Revolution, and Social Change. Edited by W. Boyd Rayward and Christine Jenkins.