Looking Forward / Looking Back

Daniel Simon’s anthology for the magazine’s centennial, A Compass on the Navigable Sea: 100 Years of World Literature, is forthcoming from Restless Books in February 2026. The following note by longtime editor Ivar Ivask (1927–1991) appeared in the Winter 1976 issue of Books Abroad. The next year, he would rename the magazine World Literature Today.

What is Books Abroad, the international literary quarterly published for half a century by the University of Oklahoma?

It is not just another literary journal. It actually is a secret inland harbor which receives and registers cargoes of books from all over the world. It is not a proud, aesthetically exclusive island nor an ideologically self-assured promontory, but a wide-open port offering a place for the exchange of different literary ideas and the latest news. Books Abroad was invented by a scholar of vision from landlocked Nebraska, Roy Temple House. He devised as the journal’s logo a full-rigged ship with the motto Lux a peregre—“Light from Abroad.” He obviously thought of books as ships, filled with light from abroad, reaching the inland harbor of his journal. It is a rather poetic but nonetheless apt image. However, the image of the generous harbor must be coupled with that of a lighthouse which radiates the light received back abroad, since this has also been an essential function of the quarterly. . . .

Perhaps a more descriptive title for our journal may well be “World Literature Today” rather than Books Abroad. . . . The present editor, born and raised in a seaport, has no trouble identifying Books Abroad with the maritime imagery launched by its founder. Indeed, Books Abroad approaches its second half-century with every intention of continuing its proven mission of both harbor and beacon in Oklahoma.

—Ivar Ivask