Armed Services Edition

The biggest book giveaway program in history is Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.  To date, it has given children under the age of five an incredible 270 million books—but she is giving books away so fast that by now I’m sure that number is incorrect.  Dolly has been offered and declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom three times—twice by Trump and once by Biden.  Until we think of an even higher award to give her, perhaps you might think of donating to her program. 

Now that we have given Dolly a much-deserved plug, I can tell you about the largest giveaway program of adult books in history—the Armed Services Edition program that ran from 1943 to 1947.  Over 123 million books in 1,324 different titles were provided to the American troops fighting World War II.  This program was so successful in so many ways that I doubt that I can fit them into just one little blog post.

World War II began in 1939, and though America tried to stay out of the conflict, we knew we were eventually going to be dragged in—it was about as inevitable as a New Mexico heat wave.  The draft came back in 1940, and suddenly millions of young American men were shipped to remote training camps, where the entertainment included drilling, KP duty, and trying to figure out how to play poker with no money.  The Army asked Americans to donate books, but quickly discovered that people were sending in everything from tax law treatises to 800-page family Bibles with genealogies going back to Noah.  Worse, the books were heavy hardbacks.  Soldiers didn’t have room in their packs for a 900-page biography of Rutherford B. Hayes.

So the military created the Council on Books in Wartime, a nonprofit collaboration of the Army, Navy, seventy major publishers, and a dozen printing houses. Their job?  To create lightweight, disposable books that American soldiers could carry and read anywhere—from a hammock in the South Pacific, to a foxhole in Belgium, to the latrine outside Camp Who-Knows-Where.

The books were visually different from the average paperback:  they were wider than they were tall, roughly 6.5” wide by 4.5” tall—a shape designed to be both easier to read while lying in a foxhole or hammock and easier to fit into a cargo pocket.  The books were designed to last only long enough for one or two readings, and they were printed on high acid, thin paper, usually in two colors.  To facilitate printing, two different books were printed, one on top of the other, then the two volumes were cut apart.

The range of books was impressive.  Fiction included books by Twain, Hemingway, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and Steinbeck.  Nonfiction tackled history, psychology, economics, biography, and travel.  Some books that were banned in American libraries were shipped freely to soldiers overseas—apparently, the War Department decided the fight for democracy included the right to read something occasionally spicy.  The program’s official motto was, “Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas.”  If that’s true, then a few of the ASE titles were probably classified as “weapons of mass distraction”.

Troops loved these books….Really loved them!  These books were read on troop transports, on submarines, in field hospitals, in foxholes, and even—with the grudging permission of camp guards—in POW camps. Some veterans claimed an ASE book was the only thing keeping them sane.  A few soldiers reportedly risked their lives to save an unfinished book during enemy attacks.  (I have students who won’t risk walking across the room to save a textbook.)

The book programs had a tremendous, unexpected post-war benefit.  Book publishers said that many of the soldiers who had never read a book before the war became new customers after the war, with the number of books purchased expanding after the war.  This, in turn, had a positive effect on the GI-Bill education explosion, with many veterans had never read literature before the war; ASEs convinced them they could succeed in college.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the program was a cultural revolution that transformed American reading habits.  At the same time, some major authors became nationally famous, especially Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), John Steinbeck, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

How popular were the books?  Soldiers requested the books more often than cigarettes.  There were several documented cases where soldiers risked their lives to save an unfinished book.  General Eisenhower wrote that the ASE program was “as important as any arms shipment.”

Today, the books are hard to find, mainly the fault of the way they were printed:   the high acid paper literally falls apart over time.  And the books were bound in a style that is called “perfect binding” (primarily because it is far from perfect).  The “perfect” refers to the “uniformly” straight edges of the paper—not that the binding was any better.  The pages were glued in, and the books usually fell apart after a couple of readings.  Printers refer to it as “imperfect binding” or “temporary binding.”

As the books’ glue dried, the spines cracked and soldiers often tore their books in half, so that two men could read the same book at once.  Most surviving copies look like they’ve spent years in a foxhole—which many of them did.  If you find one in a used bookstore, it will usually be held together with a rubber band and priced around ten bucks, which is a bargain for an artifact that has survived artillery fire, monsoons, malaria, and the U.S. Postal Service.

If these fragile, little old books could talk, they’d probably tell stories that are even better than the ones printed inside, but either way, they’d be worth listening to.

Just like Dolly…Only with fewer sequins.