4 ASEs from my own collection
“Books are weapons in the war of ideas.” -Slogan of the Council on Books in Wartime
During World War II, the non-profit Editions for the Armed Services, Inc., (a body of the Council on Books in Wartime) began producing paperback books to be distributed free to American troops. These Armed Services Editions were small, compact, and cheaply produced (they cost 6 cents a copy to print, including 1 cent in royalties paid to the author and the original publisher). They were printed on magazine presses and bound along the short side of the text block (instead of the long side as is customary). The titles included fiction and non-fiction in many genres, appearing usually unabridged. Over the life of the program, from 1943 to 1946, over 120 million copies of approximately 1300 titles were distributed to soldiers. The Armed Services Editions project was one of the largest-scale distributions of free books in history.
"Books are Weapons in the War of Ideas" poster
I became interested in Armed Services Editions when I encountered them as part of a Book History class in my Library & Information Studies degree in 2007. I am fascinated by the position these books held at the intersection of personal and world history. They laid the foundation for American mass-market paperback publishing after the war (for more information, see Michael Hackenberg: The Armed Services Editions in Publishing History which appeared as a chapter in the book Books in Action). Like many other wartime products, ASEs were made with ingenuity, using the resources at hand. They represented a fascinating moment in American ideology, a moment at which books and ideas were presented as being as crucial to upholding freedom as other aspects of the war effort. At the same time, they played a very personal role in the lives of many soldiers, touching individuals’ lives as only great books, at the right moment, can.
In the June 23, 1945 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, in an article entitled What the G.I. Reads, David Wittels wrote, “In this most murderous and precedent-shattering struggle in world history, millions of men have been going into battle equipped with books as well as guns.” Wittels goes on to describe the books’ popularity among the armed services, the cheap paperbacks being “read to tatters,” and torn in half along the spine to accommodate two readers at once. In some cases, these books were the first that soldiers had picked up since high school. Wittels also quotes a private, John L. Stewart, who wrote, in a request for more books, “It would be a bad bargain to win territories, but lose that magic kingdom which you defend.”
The message that appears in the front of ASEs
The “Books Are Weapons” poster above is from the digital collections of the Boston Public Library http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/2351907969/
And generously licensed under a Creative Commons License. Thanks, BPL!
All other images were taken by me and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution/NonCommercial 2.5 Canada License.
This page was last updated December 22, 2011
