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The first catalog issued by the Henry Regnery Company, in the spring of 1948, proclaimed that "it is our purpose to publish good books, wherever we find them." The catalog went on to say that the company would "attempt to contribute to the reestablishment of the interchange of ideas and opinions that had been characteristic of the Western tradition and that was indispensable if civilization was to recover from the shattering experience of World War II."
Although times have changed in the last fifty years, our purpose remains much the same. Just as the Regnery company continues, it continues to publish books which, as my father announced he would in 1948, run in "direct opposition to the dominant current of the time."
The history of the Regnery Publishing Company is really the list of books which is printed in your program. As with everything in Washington designed to circumvent full disclosure, you have only a partial list. I wish I could talk about many of the books on that list, indeed, all of them. But that would take days, or weeks, and so I am going to talk about just a few, a few that I think are representative of our mission, and a few which will tell you just a little bit about the influence our little company has had.
Being publishers of serious nonfiction, as our product is called by book people, we at Regnery Publishing have the luxury of being in one of the very few industries in the world which makes a product which endures without wear through time. One of the few industries in the world which deals with ideas, and one of the few industries in the world which can make a difference about the shape of the world and the way people live.
Our little company, which year to year has probably had revenues substantially less than the bar in this hotel, set out to have an impact on modern history, on the way people think about history, on the preservation of liberty in our world, and on the political process. I will let you decide whether we have succeeded, even to a small degree, in that quest.
The first book my father published-Blueprint for World Conquest-was a...