WWII Military Library Stamps 2

Stamp on the cover of Is Sex Necessary? by James Thurber, 1944.

The acronym NYPE appearing in the ship-shaped rubber stamp above stands for New York Port of Embarkation. New York City was one of the coastal cities where troops embarked to be shipped overseas. 

Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge, 1944.

From 1943 to 1945 the 52nd General Hospital treated wounded in the English Midlands. The medical staff was composed of graduates of Syracuse University College of Medicine. I found a photo of the hospital ward there on the US National Library of Medicine website. It looks like there is a stack of books on the table! New York Heritage also has a collection of photos of the hospital.

The Travels of Marco Polo, edited by Manual Komroff, 1944.

Ilag VII was a German internment camp built in Bavaria to imprison Allied civilians (mostly Americans and British) captured as German forces invaded Europe. The stamp above has the word geprüft which means "inspected and approved"—the Germans would not allow reading material that criticized their people or government in any way. This Marco Polo book was probably donated to the prison by the Red Cross.

Selected Short Stories, by O. Henry, 1944.

The publishers who provided books as Armed Services Editions were very anxious to keep these paperbacks outside of the US (for fear of flooding the market). Military hospitals were eventually allowed distribute ASEs, but they were supposed to be destroyed after the war. This copy of Selected Short Stories somehow survived its stay at the Fairfield-Suisun Air Field hospital (now Travis Air Force Base, California).

The Pearl Lagoon, by Charles Nordhoff, 1945.

Part of the duties of the Special Services Division of the US Army was to improve morale with books.

Great Smith, by Edison Marshall, 1943.

The War Prisoners Aid of the YMCA sent spiritual, educational, and recreational materials to prisoners of war in Europe. This book was stamped by the sender in Switzerland (the stamp was not put there by the receiving library).

My previous post WWII Military Library Book Stamps includes nine other stamped books.

World Book Night and the Armed Services Editions

About this time last year I noticed a lot of bookish people on Twitter talking about World Book Night. Founded in 2011 in the United Kingdom and 2012 in the United States, World Book Night is an annual April 23rd giveaway of thousands of free paperback books. As I read more about the program I recognized many parallels with the Armed Services Editions book giveaway program during WWII. Despite the similarities, the founders of WBN were not actively following the ASEs as a model.

These days the memory of the Armed Services Editions resides mostly in the minds of vintage book collectors. So, this year I thought it would be interesting to compare the two book giveaway programs. Today’s World Book Night is an international event (US, UK, and Ireland). The Armed Services Editions program of the 1940s was limited to Americans, so I’m focusing my comparison to World Book Night US.

Organization

World Book Night US is run by an independent nonprofit organization. World Book Night UK also began as an independent charity, but now it is one of several programs run by The Reading Agency. In 1943 the Armed Services Editions was one of many programs managed by a US nonprofit organization, the Council on Books in Wartime. In January of 1944 it was spun off into its own independent nonprofit corporation under the name Editions for the Armed Services, Inc. Although it was then legally separate from the CBW, the same people staffed the two organizations.

The organizations managing the book giveaways in the 1940s and today were headed by book publishing professionals. Members of the Board of Directors of World Book Night US include executives from major publishers, book distributors, and book sellers (see staff listing on their website). The Board of Directors for the Council on Books in Wartime was filled with the similar publishing leaders, often representing the very same publishers then as today (see the full list in my earlier post).

Selected Titles

World Book Night and the Armed Services Editions have both taken existing popular books and repackaged them as specially-branded paperbacks to donate to people unused to reading recreationally. The book selection process for the two programs appears to be very similar. The 30 to 35 WBN US books each year are chosen by a panel of librarians and booksellers. Books chosen for the ASEs (30 to 40 each month) were decided by a special committee of publishing staff, librarians, and booksellers. Because the ASEs were destined for the troops, the selection committee also included a representative from the Army, the Navy, and the government’s Office of War Information.

World Book Night titles are recently published fiction and nonfiction books, along with some classics. Likewise, the titles selected for the Armed Services Editions were new general trade books with classics that were not already available as paperbacks. Both organizations have sought to pick quality books that would likely be entertaining to people who are not in the habit of reading.

Audience

The World Book Night website says that their books are given to people, “who don’t regularly read and/or people who don’t normally have access to printed books, for reasons of means or geography.” The same could be said of the Armed Services Editions program. While WBN US donates books to the public across the United States*, the ASEs were distributed by the military to Americans serving abroad. Red Cross and USO clubs, permanent military bases, and large navy ships sometimes had a small library, but the selection was limited. These military library books reached only a small percentage of American troops, and as one officer in the Army Library Service wrote,  “The collections varied from mediocre to bad.” GIs in the field or at sea had virtually no ordinary access to books. Having grown up during the Great Depression, many of the GIs were reading recreationally for the first time thanks to the ASEs.

*WBN US also donates books to the military through individual volunteers and by partnering with Operation Gratitude.

Financing

Authors and publishers involved in WBN agree to forgo royalties. The publishers of books included in the list are responsible for their respective printing costs. Further funding is provided by donations from various members of the publishing industry (see list of 2104 WBN Partners) and individuals. Volunteers distribute the books locally.

During WWII the US government paid for the production, storage, shipping, and distribution of the ASEs. There was a 1 cent royalty for each copy. Half a cent was paid to the author and half a cent to the publisher. ASEs were shipped overseas along with other military supplies.

Armed Services Editions from my collection alongside a couple titles from the 2013 World Book Night US.

Format

Both the World Book Night books and the Armed Services Editions were printed specifically for the giveaways. Books from both programs were printed as paperbacks (hardcover books would be more expensive to produce and ship). WBN and ASE books were printed with specially-branded covers. While WBN paperbacks are the same size as general trade paperbacks (6 x 9 inches, 5½ x 8½ in, etc.), ASE paperbacks were printed much smaller (5½ x 3⅞ inches or 6½ x 4½) in order to fit in a GI’s pocket. In a previous post I wrote a detailed description of the production of ASE paperbacks.

Print Runs

In its first year the World Book Night in the UK was called, “the biggest book giveaway ever” (see “World Book Night giveaway goes international” on The Guardian). In 2011 WBN UK distributed one million copies in Britain. The next year WBN UK printed one million books again, and WBN US debuted with 500,000 for American readers. That’s a combined 2,500,000 books in two years’ time. In 1943, the first year of the Armed Services Editions program, a whopping six million free books were printed for distribution to GIs.

In 2013 WBN UK reduced its print run to 500,000 copies, and this year they halved it again to 250,000. In 2013 WBN US distributed 500,000 copies, and it moved up to 550,000 for 2014. So, after four years the combined number of US and UK books given away will be 4,300,000. From 1943 to the fall of 1946 123,535,305 ASE books were put in the hands of GIs. ASEs continued to be printed for the US troops who served in post-war Europe and Asia. By the summer of 1947 the final total of books printed was 108,512,000. With the backing of the US government at war, the Armed Services Editions is likely to remain the biggest book giveaway ever.

A recovering GI getting a haircut and reading the Armed Services Edition of Hell on Ice, by Edward Ellberg.

Readers’ Reactions

World Book Night has had a passionate response from book-lovers. Tens of thousands of people volunteer every year to be the book givers who distribute the free books. Givers follow up with the recipients, and you can read some of their reader feedback on the WBN US website.

In World War II, homesick American GIs were delighted to have books to distract them from military life. Colonoel Trautman, the Army representative on the ASE selection board, reported that “The only complaint the boys have about the books is that there just aren't enough of them.” While, the New York Times Book Review called ASEs, “more popular than pin-up girls.”

Effect on the Publishing Business

When World Book Night debuted there was concern from some booksellers that the free books would hurt their sales. Some authors thought that the giveaway would devalue the public perception of books. Yet, it is ordinary for the book publishing industry to give away thousands of free books every year as advance reader copies. Free books create word-of-mouth, which sells more books. The hundreds of thousands of books given away on World Book Night are actually good for business. Publishers’ Weekly reported that the titles included in the 2013 WBN US saw a 32% sales increase after the giveaway.

Considering the millions free books involved in the Armed Services Editions giveaway, publishers in the 1940s were very wary of flooding the market. Their agreement with the US government stipulated that the ASEs were not to enter civilian hands. Initially the ASEs could only be distributed outside the United States. This rule was relaxed somewhat when the Council on Books in Wartime allowed ASEs into military hospitals on US soil (but the books had to be destroyed after reading). The flimsy paperback books themselves were designed to be disposable. When the war ended excess stock in government warehouses had to be pulped. The ASE program was very good for business. It cost publishers almost nothing, and the free books encouraged the habit of reading to millions of men in the military. This is thought to have been one of the reasons for the boom in book buying in the later 1940s and 1950s (see my post on The Great Gatsby).

Additional References

ArmedServicesEditions.com A great resource devoted to ASEs.

The Guardian has numerous articles about World Book Night.

A History of the Council on Books in Wartime, 1942–1946. New York, 1946. The CBW published this history before the nonprofit corporation was dissolved in 1946.

Jamieson, John. Books for the Army: The Army Library Service in the Second World War. Columbia University Press, New York, 1950.

Jamieson, John. Editions for the Armed Services, Inc.: A History, Together With the Complete List of the 1,324 Books Published for American Armed Forces Overseas. New York, 1948.

Armed Services Edition logo

Last week I bought a copy of the 1945 Armed Services Edition of James Thurber’s My World—And Welcome To It.* I noticed that the last page (which is usually the last page of text or is just blank) has a little ASE logo on it (3/4 inch wide).

*This book is a collection, which includes Thurber’s short story, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

I don't know who designed the logo, or why it didn’t appear in all of the ASEs. The inside front cover of each ASE included a simplified seal of the United States along with a description of the book program. This would have been an ideal place to put that ASE eagle logo.

The Princeton University Library has a collection of Council on Books in Wartime documents. I bet buried in there somewhere is a record of who designed the seldom-used ASE logo.

WWII-Era Book Giveaway Boosted Popularity of The Great Gatsby

The 1945 Armed Services Edition of The Great Gatsby.

One might say that this flimsy 5½ x 3⅞ inch paperback edition of The Great Gatsby was ultimately responsible for the book’s film adaptation nearly seventy years later. The Armed Services Edition program was a colossal government-sponsored book giveaway during World War II. Over 120 million paperbacks were distributed to American troops overseas. One of the titles included in the project was F. Scott Fitgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It was released at a time when literary critics were less than enthusiastic about Fitzgerald’s work and book sales of Gatsby were sluggish.

Back cover.

In Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions (1984) writer Matthew Bruccoli theorized on the Gatsby sales boost that returning GIs may have produced:

“There is no way to determine how many converts to literature—or, less elegantly, to reading—were made by the ASE. The fix was free. Moreover, it seems highly probable that some postwar reputations were stimulated by the introduction of authors in the ASE to readers who had never read them before. One hundred fifty-five thousand ASE copies of The Great Gatsby were distributed—as against the twenty-five thousand copies of the novel printed by Scribners between 1925 and 1942. Was there a connection between the ASE publication of Gatsby and Diamond as Big as the Ritz and the Fitzgerald revival that commenced in the late 1940s?”

The Armed Services Edition print run of The Great Gatsby was 155,000 copies, nearly eight times the book’s first printing in 1925. Soldiers and sailors tended to swap their books when they were finished reading. So, the real number of new readers introduced to Fitzgerald’s writing could have been much higher than number of copies circulating in the military. Both Gatsby and Diamond (with a print run of 90,000) were distributed after Germany and Japan surrendered. There were still millions of Americans overseas, and they had a lot of spare time for reading. It’s a convincing idea that these hundreds of thousands GIs who came home after the war sparked the new popularity of Fitzgerald, cementing The Great Gatsby’s reputation as a great American novel.

—Andrew Brozyna

1946 Armed Services Edition of Diamond as Big as the Ritz.

Back cover.

Book scans courtesy of ASE collector Brian Anderson.

Update:

You can hear author Maureen Corrigan talk about this online in her September 8th interview on NPR's Fresh Air.

References:

Bruccoli, Matthew J., Editor. New Essays on The Great Gatsby. Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Cole, John Y. Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions. The Center for the Book, Library of Congress, 1984.

Further Reading:

Read about The Council on Books in Wartime, the publisher of the Armed Services Editions.

Read about the history of the Armed Services Editions.

Read about the unique design of the Armed Services Edition paperbacks.

Anatomy of an Armed Services Edition book

Reprinted editions of books popular in the civilian market, The Armed Services Editions were donated to GIs fighting overseas in World War II. The design of these books was driven by a need for minimal size and minimal cost.

The ASEs were sent overseas in supply ships that carried essential military supplies. Small books meant more copies could fit into a shipment, more paper could be used for the military’s massive record keeping, and a soldier could more easily carry one on his person. The US government paid for all publication costs. As a contribution to the war effort printers reduced their fees, while authors and their publishers agreed to forgo royalties. But with millions of books to be published, the government wanted the most economical printing solution.

An example of two ASE books before trimming. From collector Brian Anderson.

Trim Size:

The Army’s graphic arts specialist in the Special Services Division, H. Stahley Thompson, proposed printing books in pairs on magazine/catalog size paper, binding, then trimming them apart horizontally. Many mail order catalogs were discontinued during the war years, so this left the equipment open to use. These roll-fed letterpress rotary presses were ideal for the ASE’s large print runs (50,000 per title).

Presses used to publish magazines like Reader’s Digest (5½ x 7¾ inches) could produce two books, each 5½ x 3⅞ inches. This was the size used for ASE books up to 320 pages. Books up to 512 pages were 6½ x 4½, which was half of a larger magazine or catalog.

5½ x 3⅞ inch ASE book from my collection.

Cover Design:

Illustrator/designer Sol Immerman was hired to create the covers of the Armed Services Editions. Sol ran a book design studio in Manhattan, and he was part-time art director at Pocket Books. His ASE book covers are interesting in that they were treated more like advertisements than actual book cover designs. The paperback cover depicted a photo of the hardcover’s jacket design with its title type treatment repeated to the side. The jacket photos were black and white, while the paperbacks’ background colors varied throughout the series. Sol earned $10 for each cover he designed. Unfortunately, I don’t know what his usual rate was.

Cover of an Overseas Edition.

Although I have not seen documentation explaining the ASE’s approach to cover design, I can use my own experience as a book cover designer offer some educated guesses. Following a simple template, these covers would be much faster to produce than a new cover. The purpose of a unique cover design is to attract the book buyer, but in this case there were no buyers. The Council on Books in Wartime, which published these free paperbacks, could easily have gone with a minimal two-color text-only cover as they did with their Overseas Editions. This approach would have saved even more time and money, but it would not be attractive to the intended readers: young GIs, many of whom were teens fresh out of high school. I’m guessing that it was Immerman who suggested that the printing budget be large enough to accommodate colorful covers.

American book publishers donated their titles to The Armed Service Editions (the publisher received only half a cent for each book printed). While, this contribution was in support of the war effort, I am sure that publishers saw these free books as promotion to future book buyers. If a GI enjoyed reading an ASE book, The Call of the Wild for instance, then it was hoped that he would buy the hardcover when he returned home. The fact that ASE book covers looked so similar to advertisements is probably no accident.

Typical Armed Services Edition back cover.

Interior Design:

Title page to The Armed Services Edition of The Call of the Wild.

The main thing to note about the interior design of the Armed Services Editions is that the text was not set in a single column as with a typical hardcover of the time. Composing the text in two columns was useful because it allowed more text to fit on each page (which means less pages and less paper needed). The text appears to be 10 point Caslon with 11 point leading. Comparing to some 1940s hardcover books I own, the ASE text is one or two points smaller.

Sample page from The Armed Services Edition of The Call of the Wild. 

Further reading:

Check out this website for a whole bunch of scans of ASE covers.

Schreuders, Piet. The Book of Paperbacks: A Visual History of the Paperback Book. Virgin Books, 1981. This book includes a bio of Sol Immerman, and a description of WWII era paperback book publishers.

The Armed Services Editions of WWII

Armed Services Edition of The Postman Always Rings Twice. From my collection.

Thanks to donations by the American public, the Victory Book Campaign of 1942 and 1943 was able to distribute 10 million book to the troops. Unfortunately, this was a very inefficient program: Over 8 of the total 18.5 million books collected had to be discarded because of poor physical quality or undesirable subject matter. The books that were acceptable were bulky hardcovers which took up valuable cargo space aboard supply ships.

American publishers at this time had yet to embrace the more utilitarian paperback. The Army purchased 3 million paperbacks directly from publishers in 1941, 1942, and 1943, but few titles were available in that format. Bestsellers and new books were only released as hardcovers.

The chief of the US Army Library Section, First Lieutenant Ray Trautman, proposed a solution. In January of 1943 Trautman and the chief Navy librarian Isabel DuBois approached the Council on Books in Wartime with a concept for a cooperative publishing project. The enthusiastic CBW, an association of the US publishing industry, sprang into action. Their project called for the publication of current and popular books as lightweight paperbacks paid for by the US government and distributed exclusively to American troops overseas. These were the Armed Services Editions.

“...more popular than pin-up girls.”

—NYT Book Review on the Armed Services Editions

Management:
Editions for the Armed Services, Inc. was managed by CBW member Philip Van Doren Stern. Stern had been executive editor of Pocket Books (a publisher of paperbacks). As manager Stern had to coordinate the committees of the CBW, representatives of the Army and Navy, publishers, printers, and paper suppliers. In December of 1945 Stern resigned and was replaced by Stahley Thompson who had been working with the Army’s Yank magazine.

Selection process:
The military wanted recreational reading that would suit a range of tastes. As a result ASE titles were a mix of fine literature and popular fiction. The preference was for current books. Unfortunately, the war years saw a decrease in new writing, so older books from the 1930s and classics were also published. An effort was made to keep the books unabridged, and the writing was not censored. All books entered into the ASE program had to be approved by the CBW committee and representatives from both branches of the military.

Production:
To keep costs to a minimum publishers and authors agreed to each receive a royalty of only a half cent per copy. Five printing companies offered rates at half of their usual profit. H. Stahley Thompson, the graphic arts specialist in the Special Services Division (responsible for  entertainment in the Army), had the idea to use magazine printing presses to produce books inexpensively. The books were printed two-up and cut in half, resulting in thin pocket-sized books bound on the short side. The text was printed in a small point size and in two columns per page to lower the pagecount and save on paper.

Distribution:
One of the requirements set by publishers was that ASEs be distributed only outside the US. There was a fear that after the war the military would dump their stock of books, which would disrupt the civilian market. The ASEs were most easily found behind the front lines where troops had the most spare time and access to supplies, but books also made their way to combat troops in action. The largest single distribution was in the run-up to D-Day. Each soldier waiting in the marshaling areas in England was given a single ASE to read while waiting to board the invasion fleet. After their departure the crews cleaning the camps found very few books left behind.

Reception:
On the whole GIs were happy to have the reading material. Boredom was a key problem in military life, which ASEs helped alleviate. The New York Times Book Review called the Armed Services Editions “more popular than pin-up girls.” A private from Brooklyn who was to be part of the Normandy invasion was interviewed by a New Yorker correspondent: “These little books are a great thing. They take you away... This one I am reading now is called Candide [by Voltaire]. It is kind of unusual, but I like it.” Millions of American sailors and soldiers were exposed to books that they would not ordinarily have read. An Army officer in England wrote to the CBW, “you can find boys reading as they never read before. Some toughies in my company have admitted without shame that they were reading their first book since they were in grammar school.”

Postwar:
By the Autumn of 1946 the Armed Services Editions included 1,180 titles. Over 123 million copies were sent overseas at a cost of just over $7 million. The US War Department bestowed an award to the Council on Books in Wartime, “in appreciation of the patriotic services of Editions for the Armed Services, Inc.” It was the publishers’ view that GIs returned home with a new thirst for reading and contributed to the postwar boost in book sales. The great success of the program helped encourage book publishers to push forward with the “paperback revolution” in America. While the ASEs were meant to be disposable, many have survived to this day and are valued by collectors (check out eBay).

FURTHER READING

Books:
Cole, John Y. Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions. The Center for the Book, Library of Congress, 1984.

A History of the Council on Books in Wartime, 1942–1946. New York, 1946.

Jamieson, John. Books for the Army: The Army Library Service in the Second World War. Columbia University Press, 1950.

Websites:
www.ArmedServicesEditions.com This website was built by a collector of ASEs, Russ Meekins.

Books Go To War This website was built by The University of Virginia, which held an exhibition of ASEs back in 1996.

Books in Action The Library of Congress put up the full text of this book on their website.

WWII Military Library Book Stamps

Title page from Webster's New Handy Dictionary, Armed Service Edition 717, printed 1945.

In early August I received an email from Brian Anderson, asking me about the above page scan. Anderson is a collector of the WWII era Armed Services Editions. These were cheap paperbacks distributed to the troops for recreational reading during the war. This particular ASE had an interesting unit insignia stamped on the inside. It turns out the book was part of the library of the 13th Major Port, a unit to which my grandfather's battalion was attached during service in Antwerp, Belgium.

The cover of the Armed Services Edition book that has the above 13th Major Port cat stamp.

I was happy to be able to confirm what unit the cat/13 insignia came from, and I was very interested to hear about Anderson's collection. He has multiple books with stamps which show they were held in the libraries of army bases, hospitals, and naval ships. I thought it would be cool to post them here. While the other stamps lack a stylish graphic, the variety of rubber stamp typography is interesting for a designer like me to see.

The stamps also provide a little bit of context into the book's life, that would otherwise be lacking. For instance, one of these stamps says "U.S.S. Ranger Library". It's fascinating to know that this copy of A. Wolcott: His Life and His World was read by sailors who were aboard the aircraft carrier that took part in Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa.

Title page of  A. Wolcott: His Life and His World. ASE 931, printed 1945.

Title page of  Mr. On Loong by Robert Standish. ASE 1281, printed 1947.

Title page of Klondike Mike by Merrill Denison. ASE B-58, printed 1943.

Title page of The Uninvited by Dorothy Macardle. ASE B-51, printed 1943.

Title page of Colonel Effingham's Raid by Berry Fleming, ASE D-095, printed 1943.

Title page of Deep River by Henrietta Buckmaster. ASE R-39, printed 1945.

Title Page of Round Up by Ring Lardner. ASE F-172, printed 1944.

Title page of Mr. Winkle Goes to War by Theodore Pratt. ASE A-07, printed 1943.