Twenty Years

Celebrating both its 20th anniversary and the return to his desk after three years with OWI of lean, energetic, discerning Founder-President Harold Guinzburg, Manhattan's distinguished Viking Press memorably advertised:

"Books do not make wars, nor do books win them; yet there has never been a war in history in which books figured so importantly. It was a book (Mein Kampf), written just a little more than twenty years ago, which set forth the gospel of pan-Germanism and the German faith in aggression. Books were martyred by those who thought that ideas could be destroyed by burning the paper upon which they had been set down. There were books which tried to warn us of the enemy. There were books written in hot desert sun and under naval gunfire which reported this war as no war had ever been reported before.

Finally, added to the flow of books which reach them from other sources, there are the millions of handy expendable books--the Armed Services Editions--which are conveying to our men fighting throughout the world some of the flavor of the life which they want to remember, much of the heritage of culture and ideas for which they are fighting.

"As publishers we take pride in the part, however small, which we have been permitted to play. We are proud that some of our books were good enough and powerful enough to have been burned in Germany.* We are happy that some of our authors contributed to the warnings which preceded this war, to the reporting which accompanies it, and to the planning which must follow it."

*Viking authors whose books went on Nazi bonfires: Lion Feuchtwanger, Stefan Zweig, Arnold Zweig, Franz Werfel. Other Viking authors: John Steinbeck, Ludwig Bemelmans, Dorothy Parker.

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