Frá v.: Karítas Kvaran, Rósa Guðbjartsdóttir, Þórdís Edwald, Kjartan Gunnarsson, Jónas Sigurgeirsson, Hannes H. Gissurarson, Baldur Guðlaugsson og Ármann Þorvaldsson.
The Public Book Club, Almenna bokafelagid, AB, held its annual general meeting on 4 May 2024. AB was founded on 17 June 1955 in order to counter the disproportionate influence of the communist-dominated book club Language and Culture, Mal og menning, supported by Soviet money, the notorious ‘Russian Gold’. AB is now a publishing company rather than a book club, however. AB’s Director, Jonas Sigurgeirsson, gave a report about last year for the other shareholders, Kjartan Gunnarsson, Baldur Gudlaugsson, and Armann Thorvaldsson. Also present was the Academic Adviser to AB, Professor Hannes H. Gissurarson.
In 2023, the emphasis was on children’s books and material for tourists. But in past years, AB has published several books about the 2008 bank collapse and its aftermath by Icelandic journalists and historians: The Icesave Deals: The Blunder of the Century? by Sigurdur Mar Jonsson; The Andersen Documents by Eggert Skulason; The Pots-and-Pans Revolution: Spontaneous or Planned? by Stefan Gunnar Sveinsson; The Currency Supervision Authority: Power without Supervision? by Bjorn Jon Bragason; The Abolition of the Economic Controls: The Deals of the Century? by Sigurdur Mar Jonsson. AB has also published Ayn Rand’s three main novels in Icelandic translations, We the Living, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged. Moreover, AB distributes the books in English by Professor Emeritus Hannes H. Gissurarson, published by the Brussels think tank New Direction, including Twenty-Four Conservative-Liberal Thinkers in two volumes.
