Forty-eight American book publishers today announced that they will not participate in the 1938 International Congress of Book Publishers at Leipzig in June, where the publishing trade will be used as “a puppet” for Nazi bureaucracy.
“In Germany,” they said, “the book trade is gagged, as is the newspaper press. No German publisher will dare at Leipzig to express opinions other than those dictated by the National Socialist officials who rule the publishers.
“It will be a display of ventriloquism; the publishing trade will be a puppet, but the voice will be the voice of German bureaucracy.”
The statement pointed out that the Nazi authorities have suppressed the works of nine-tenths of the German writers whose works are published in English translation; that possession of a banned book is a criminal offense; that no book may be published unless the manuscript has been approved by an official, and that censorship extends to science, art and culture in general as well as to political utterances.
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