News

A Young Army Librarian's Idea Ignites Reading for us All
Date Posted: 11/18/2008

By Rob McIlvaine
FMWRC Public Affairs

Ever wait until a good book came out in paperback so you could save money and be able to carry good reading wherever you went?

If not for a couple of young Army Soldiers assigned to the Library Section in 1942, this might not have been possible.

A Soldier reads while perched on a Humvee

Downtime is experienced by everyone deploying or ‘hurrying up to wait.’ But with a best-seller, classic, mystery, history, western or poetry to stimulate the creative part of your brain, the waiting proved doable.

The Council on Books in Wartime, a non-profit organization founded by booksellers, publishers, librarians, authors, and others, in the spring of 1942 listened, intently.

The council’s primary aim was the promotion of books to influence the thinking of the American people regarding the war, to build and maintain the will to win, to expose the true nature of the enemy, to disseminate technical information, to provide relaxation and inspiration, and to clarify war aims and problems of peace.

However, until the early part of the war, books were either hardcover or large paperback. Neither could be produced at a low cost and shipped overseas.

The Armed Services needed not only a new system of distributing reading material, but also a new type of book: one that was cheap enough for the services to buy, small enough for a GI to carry, and interesting enough to appeal to a broad audience.

Ray L. Trautman, chief of The Library Section, a division of the Morale Branch in the U.S. War Department, and H. Stahley Thompson, a U.S. Army graphic arts specialist discovered that the rotary presses used to print monthly pulp and digest magazines were available between issues for extended periods of time.

Thompson concluded that such presses could print paperback books for less than 10 cents a copy on runs of 50,000 or more and for as little as five cents a copy on runs of 100,000.

In January 1943, Trautman and Thompson took their proposal to Malcolm Johnson of D. Van Nostrand Company, a member of the executive committee of the Council on Books in Wartime.

The notion appealed to the council’s sense of purpose.

The council guided the Army’s good idea into an efficient cooperative enterprise involving the Army, Navy, the War Production Board, over 70 publishing firms, and more than a dozen printing houses, composition firms, and paper suppliers.

Between 1943 and 1947, nearly 123 million copies of 1,324 titles of small paperbacks designed to fit in fatigue pants pockets were distributed to U.S. Armed Forces around the world.

Johnson not only supported the idea of distributing inexpensive paperbacks to the American troops overseas on a massive scale, he offered to actually operate the entire project.

Cover of "Books in Action: The Armed Services Edition," edited by John Y. Cole, 1984

With W. Warder Norton, chairman of the council’s executive committee, providing his firm support of the plan; Isabel DuBois, the Navy’s chief librarian adding her suggestions; Philip Van Doren Stern, an authority on printing production named as project manager; Armed Services Editions, Inc., (ASE) a nonprofit organization, was established and under way in May 1943.

The books were sold to the Army and the Navy by the council at a cost of six cents each, plus 10 percent for overhead.

Distributed overseas only, the oblong, pocket sized editions were kept out of the civilian market and competition with book sales at home.

Authors and publishers each received a royalty of one-half cent per copy, although some authors such as Irving Stone, whose books “Lust for Life” and “Immortal Wife” were published in the series, tried to stop his payments “on the grounds that [they] were a small enough contribution to make to the war effort.”

Before production could begin, the use of rotary presses – an inexpensive printing method – needed a better idea for this unusual application. Designed for magazines and not for pocket-sized books, the solution was to print the books “two up,” or in pairs, one book above the other, and then to separate them by a horizontal cut; or as John Jamieson states in his “Books for the Army,” “…they were to be printed as magazines and then cut in half to make pocket-sized books.”

As part of its “weapons in the war of ideas,” the Council on Books in Wartime also created another subsidiary organization – Overseas Editions, Inc. (OIE).

The choice of books for OEI was made by the Office of War Information and approved by the same advisory committee serving the ASE.

Intended for civilians in overseas countries liberated by Allied troops, the books informed the people of Europe about America, democracy, and current events. Between February and November 1945, OEI published 72 titles (22 in English, 22 in French, 23 in German, and five in Italian) and shipped 3,636,074 volumes overseas.

With the end of the war, the Council on Books in Wartime ceased active operations on January 31, 1946, but the “paperback” lives on as a cheap, portable replacement to bound, hard-cover editions.

Those who grew up on not knowing there was a time when books weren’t available in cheap, pocket-sized editions, owe thanks to a group of Soldiers and civilians who took the idea of two Army librarians and made our reading life a reality.