CGR Forerunners

Dear Reader,

Columbia Global Reports is celebrating its tenth anniversary. I come from Louisiana, where we use the term lagniappe to mean something extra that you hadn’t expected. In that spirit, during our anniversary year, in addition to our usual six books, we are publishing four additional books, under the collective rubric Forerunners.

Our mission is to produce concise nonfiction books that have something fresh and important to say. Sometimes we dispatch reporters all over the world to produce firsthand accounts about issues that are not getting the attention they deserve, and sometimes we commission original thinkers to write books that advance the conversation about ideas. The books in the Forerunners series are republications of significant but currently not-well-enough-known books that originally came out more than a hundred years ago. We chose them by looking for long-ago works written in the spirit of the editorial mission we are pursuing today. Like our new books, the Forerunners books are meant to bring to the public’s attention something that doesn’t have it already.

Two of the books in the Forerunners series are works of original reportage: Richard Harding Davis’s Cuba in War Time and Elizabeth Banks’s Campaigns of Curiosity. The other two are works of argument on pressing questions: Kelly Miller’s Race Adjustment and Walter Lippmann’s Drift and Mastery. For each book, we have commissioned a new introduction by someone who has a particular concern with the author and the topic (in one case, that’s me). We hope the four books, individually and as a group, will give readers a sense of discovery and also underscore what our venture is trying to do.

Sincerely,

Nicholas Lemann
Director, Columbia Global Reports