Windham County Observer

By Edwin Seaver and Robin McKown

John Gunther, who is the only man we know of to have successfully invaded three continents single-handed, has just completed a new War Edition of his book, "Inside Asia." The new edition of this excellent book brings the record up as far as the Japanese grab of the Dutch East Indies.

Mr. Gunther, who has a passion for statistics, reports that he made five thousand textual changes in the new edition, added 30,000 words.

While we're on the subject of statistics, here are a few about John Gunther and his books. More than 1,250,000 copies have been sold of his three "inside" books—"Inside Europe," "Inside Asia," and "Inside Latin America." All three were distributed by the Book-of-the-Month Club, the first two as book-dividends given away to members, the last as a recent book-of-the-month. In fact, the Book-of-the-Month Club has distributed close on to three-quarters of a million copies of Mr. Gunther's books.

"Inside Europe" and "Inside Asia" were translated into sixteen different languages, and in England they enjoyed a wider distribution than any American book, since Mark Twain.

To gather material for "Inside Latin America," which is still riding high on all the best-seller lists, Mr. Gunther flew some 18,000 miles, talked with seventeen of the twenty heads of states, eighteen of the twenty foreign ministers. In five and a half months he only had dinner alone five times and didn't have a single day off duty.

At the age of eleven he made a complete written digest of Ridpath's Universal History. Since then he's been writing Gunther's Universal History.