GROTTU ORLOFF'S PAD!

awritersruminations:

WWII poster, printed in 1942 (image via)

The poster uses this quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt:

Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No
man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever.
No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody
man’s eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know, books
are weapons.

The above was President Roosevelt’s message to the American people printed on an Office of War Information poster. It was a few months into the war and nine years after the Nazis had set fire to thousands of books and banned the works of hundreds of authors from German libraries. This compelling poster suggests that, in times of war, revolution, and social change, books transcend their state of physical objects to become powerful symbols in a war of ideas and ideologies. A closer inspection of the poster reveals that the book towering over the bonfires looks much more like a fortress built of solid stone blocks than an object made of paper and ink. The image depicts the double nature of the book in times of change and crisis: it is both a fragile object threatened by destruction and a powerful symbol preserving cultural memory for future generations. (via)

(via gh2u)