Education: Bookman to the World

The Russians stirred a lot of worry a few years ago by saturating the Middle and Far East with low-priced books. But the Russians keep running up against a formidable obstacle: a great curiosity for American books. In Egypt 50% of publishers’ lists are books of U.S. origin. In Iran a Persian edition of Dr. Spock’s baby book was hard to get published because the printers kept snitching page proofs to take home to their wives. In other countries the primer style of U.S. textbooks (often none too popular at home) is highly esteemed for self-teaching. This vast foreign market is now being tapped by a remarkable enterprise called Franklin Publications.

Franklin goes unsung in the U.S., but is famous in the exotic cities listed on its Manhattan front door: Cairo, Beirut, Baghdad, Tehran. Lahore, Dacca, Kuala Lumpur, Djakarta. In those places, far from Manhattan’s Publishers’ Row, Franklin in ten years has guided the printing of 26,477,800 books in such exotic languages as Arabic, Persian, Pashto, Urdu, Bengali, Malay and Indonesian.

Einstein in Arabic. Franklin, fittingly named for Ben, set out in 1952 to be “the ambassador of American publishing”−nonprofit broker for countries hungry for U.S. books. It is headed by Datus C. Smith Jr., former director of the Princeton University Press, and governed by a board of directors that includes top U.S. publishers, librarians, industrialists and university presidents.

Franklin does not operate in a cold war way to push particular books. Instead, its foreign branches, staffed entirely by nationals, report their countries’ desires. Franklin then buys rights from the U.S. publisher (who usually charges only a nominal fee) and delivers translations to foreign publishers. Last year the entire operation cost Franklin a mere $1,500,000, which came from U.S. and private grants and the 10% royalty that foreign publishers pay after a book is put on sale. The net effect is a boost for infant publishing industries in countries that are afflicted with “undercapitalization and unsophistication.”

Franklin’s first effort was a 23¢ Arabic version of Edward R. Murrow’s This I Believe, published in Cairo in 1953. The first edition of 35,000 copies sold out the first day. Franklin has gone on to feed the Middle and Far Eastern appetite for books ranging from Ethan Frome to Gone With the Wind, from The Spirit of St. Louis to The Universe and Dr. Einstein. Ferdinand in Twi. Franklin’s biggest single venture is in Iran, where in 1957 it launched a handsome Golden Book geography. Royalties were so abundant that Franklin turned them into a loan for building a first-rate printing plant in Tehran, staffed by the newly trained graduating class of an orphan asylum. Out of this grew a healthy new Iranian textbook industry.

Last week the Ford Foundation gave Franklin $1,000,000 to spur a wealth of new projects, notably the creation of a one-volume encyclopedia, slated for translation into five languages. The work is slow, since each version has to add local lore about flora, history and religion. But the promise is big, since few of the countries have any kind of reference books. With its new Ford money, Franklin is also thinking about untapped markets from Spanish-speaking Latin America to French-speaking West Africa. Soon due for Africa: a first edition of Ferdinand the Bull in Ewe, Fanti and Twi.