When Books Went to War, by Molly Guptill Manning

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October 10, 2021 by ethelfritha

I had to get this particular stack of books checked out by a real live librarian instead of using the checkout machine, because I had to pay for a book. The trouble with living in a bigger house with what occasionally feels like a million kids, none of whom have any idea where anything is at any time, is that library books (along with pens, socks, homework assignments, glasses, and my sewing scissors) disappear with alarming regularity. I cringe to pay for a book we’ve lost. For one thing, it costs about 3x market price, especially for a book that you absolutely know has been dog-eared, chewed on, scribbled in, and thrown spine-first down the stairs, and for another thing I KNOW THE DAMN THING IS AROUND HERE SOMEPLACE, but when you’ve run out of renewals there’s not a lot you can do. At least none of my kids pooped on it this time.

Anyway, I laid down 25 smackers for “Sally the Rainbow Unicorn Princess” or whatever and then I had this whole stack of new books I wanted to get, which the librarian offered to check out for me while I was there. Now, this is embarrassing. Here I’ve just publicly–not to say expensively–declared that I cannot be trusted with books that don’t belong to me, and then I present a huge stack of books that also don’t belong to me and say “I’d like to take these back to my disaster house, please and thank you.” But the librarian, being a librarian, was neither embarrassed nor disapproving. This was not even the worst thing she’d seen that morning. One by one she enthused over my book choices. When she got to this book, she laid her hand reverently upon it and said, “You know, this may be one of the best books I’ve ever read.” Now, when a librarian says something like that to you, you take it seriously.

Unfortunately this left my expectations a bit high. I can’t say I thought it was one of the best books I ever read–it’s very dry–but I was impressed to learn about a little-known sliver of what has to be the most-media’d war of all time. It seems that prior to WWII, mass-market paperbacks just weren’t really a thing. One or two publishing houses had been experimenting with the format, but most booksellers refused to have them in their stores, preferring stately, high-quality, high-value hardbacks.

Then the US entered the war, and thousands upon thousands of civilian recruits found themselves drilling with blocks of wood instead of rifles at muddy, half-built training camps. The government scrambled to outfit the new troops, but discovered that there was a more pressing need even than real weapons, appropriate uniforms, and some kind of floor for the barracks: morale. The men, fresh from the fields, shops, and docks, were lonely, dispirited, and desperately bored. Something needed to be done–and soon.

It didn’t take long before the American Library Association took up the challenge and organized a massive book drive. But while the books collected were a godsend to the spectacularly grateful trainees, the bulky hardcovers proved to be a liability in the field. As the soldiers marched for miles with pounds and pounds of gear, they began to abandon everything that was even the least bit extraneous–and books, precious as they were, were the first to go.

Yet the book drive had been so popular, and so enormously beneficial to morale, that the war department began to look into ways to make books more accessible to the soldiers. Rising to the challenge was a civilian committee which managed to secure contracts with a number of publishers to print special “armed forces editions” of hundreds of books, both classics and contemporary fiction. These paperbacks were specially formatted to be cheaper to print and easier for soldiers to deal with and they were so wildly popular that the committee could barely keep up with demand. Soldiers read everywhere–in the barracks, in the hospitals, in foxholes, wounded at the bottom of a ravine. Men with no high school educations, who had never read anything more challenging than the front page of a newspaper, became avid readers because there was nothing else to do, because they needed to escape, because they never realized that books could be like this. And what were the most popular books? Meaty, manly thrillers and Westerns? No. Far and away the most popular book among American soldiers was…drumroll please…A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Betty Smith was deluged with fanmail from men sharing all sorts of personal details with her, explaining why her book affected them so. She tried her best to answer every single one. The committee was so desperate for more content that they began to publish obscure, bottom-barrel novels like The Great Gatsby, which became enormously popular. Yes, that’s right–the reason every American teenager in the country has to read Fitzgerald was because a book committee in WWII was throwing literally everything the publishing world had to offer at the book-starved troops.

While armed forces editions don’t exist anymore, and you’d be hard-pressed to find an example of one (since they were literally read to pieces), hundreds of thousands of servicemen came home demanding cheap, accessible literature, kickstarting the paperback book trade. And when the US government passed the GI Bill, allowing servicemen to get a college education, regular college students moaned that they hated having veterans in their classes because “all they do is read” and it made them look bad!