Broadly speaking, book diplomacy covers the use of books to achieve certain objectives related to the foreign policy interests of a given country, usually involving state-private partnerships of varying degrees. In this volume, scholars from different disciplines examine in detail how books functioned as tools of “soft power” and cultural diplomacy during the cultural Cold War. This study also introduces a 10-point typology to examine the many forms and practices of Cold War book diplomacy and the diversity of objectives and outcomes that they involved. Looking beyond the Cold War, this volume stresses the continuing importance of books as a distinct form of material culture used to convey information around the world.
Contributors are: Tahoor Ali, Hanna Blum, Deborah Cohn, Cécile Cottenet, Alexander Erokhin, Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam, Musa Igrek, Julia Lin Thompson, Rósa Magnúsdóttir, Christos Mais, Hafiz Abid Masood, Mila Milani, Birgitte Beck Pristed, Giles Scott-Smith, Ilaria Sicari, and Steven W. Witt.