Book jacket designer Arthur Hawkins, Jr.

Arthur Hawkins, Jr. was a prolific book cover designer in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. He designed the iconic jacket of The Postman Always Rings Twice (Knopf, 1934), which appears on the Armed Services Edition paperback below.

Hawkins was a member of the Book Jacket Designers Guild, which was formed in 1947 in reaction to the crass and sexual pulp covers that had proliferated in that time. The guild put on exhibitions of the best dustjackets and paperback covers as a way to promote quality design that supported fine literature.

1945 Armed Services Edition of The Postman Always Rings Twice. From my collection.

Hawkins specialized in jackets, but he also worked on paperback covers: Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory (Pocket Books, 1944), Malice in Wonderland (Penguin, 1946), The Purple Onion Mystery (Penguin, 1947).

Steven Heller wrote a piece about Hawkins’ book cover work on the Print website.

There is more info about Hawkins and the Book Jacket Guild in The Book of Paperbacks by Piet Schreuders.

1940s book ends and bookshelves

My great-grandfather was a handy guy. In the 1940s he built a bunch of furniture, lamps, door knockers, and various home do-dads that can still be seen at our family cabin. He owned a couple Popular Science craft books which got passed down to me: Cyclopedia of Things to Make (1937) and Complete Home Workshop Cyclopedia (1945). I was paging through these books and found several book related projects (click images to see larger):

Storing your books under a homemade fish tank doesn't seem too wise. View larger.

My great-grandpa used this tree stump guide to make a pair of lamps. View larger.

Novel garden-gate book end decorated with jig-saw cat and dog engaged in argument. View larger.

Log cabin book ends for rustic settings. View larger.

This guy doesn't seem too pleased with his end table. View larger.

This newspaper rack isn't necessarily for books, but I'll allow it. View larger.

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.

Transit passes advertising the 1942 and 1943 Victory Book Campaign

On eBay this week I found a 1942 St. Louis transit pass to go along with my 1943 find from last year. They both advertise for the Victory Book Campaign, a book donation program for GIs in WWII. See my previous post describing the VBC.

Illustrator C. B. Falls and the Victory Book Campaign

"Kate Smith, honorary chairman of the radio board of the Victory Book Campaign with the nationally known illustrator C. B. Falls, who designed the official poster. Mr. Falls also designed the official poster for the book drive during the last world war." —original photo caption from January, 1943. Photo from my collection.

To design their official Victory Book Campaign poster of 1943, organizers hired an accomplished illustrator and poster artist, Charles Buckles Falls (1874–1960).

C. B. Falls’ poster design for the Victory Book Campaign in World War II.

Falls’ poster was most likely paid for by The Office of War Information. The VBC’s annual report for 1943 says, “The O.W.I. Graphic Division also provided for the design and printing of 100,000 colored posters for the campaign.”

C. B. Falls was fond of woodblock prints, which this 3-color VBC poster appears to be. He didn’t trust the wood carving skills of printing shops, so he cut the blocks himself. I think he came up with a fun and engaging poster. The lettering is all hand-done. His rendering of the GI’s M1 helmet doesn't look right, but I'll admit those curves are hard to draw. He signed this poster with his initials and full last name, but his work was often signed with a simple “F” in a box.

Falls began designing posters around 1910. His first clients were theaters in New York City. During the First World War he volunteered for the Division of Pictoral Publicity, which was part of a government propaganda agency known as the Committee on Public Information. Falls joined their group of artists who produced graphics for the government and civilian organizations during the war.

C. B. Fall's poster design for the American Library Association's book drive in WWI.

The most circulated poster of the war was Fall’s design of a smiling Marine holding a stack of books urging the American public to give books to the troops. A miniature version with different text was pasted into the books donated to the military. This poster was commissioned by the the American Library Association, and its success lead to the ALA (then co-sponsoring the Victory Book Campaign) approaching him again during WWII. The image is still popular today. It’s often shared by book lovers online, and at the Last Book Store in Los Angeles I recently saw a sculpture based on his poster. At the end of WWI Falls continued to design recruitment posters for the Navy and Marines, and he taught art lessons to disabled veterans.

Another book drive poster for WWI.

Falls worked on book design early in his career. After leaving his home state of Indiana, he got a job with the Decorative Designers in New York City. This firm created designs to decorate the cloth bindings of books in the days before designed dustjackets were common. After two years with the firm Falls left to became a freelance artist (sometime around 1903).

A black and white photo of Falls’ case stamp design for the binding of The Flight of a Moth, 1904.

Illustration and title page for All's Fair in Love, 1904.

His work on books expanded to include interior illustrations, endpapers, and title pages. Most of this work was for children's books, school texts, and history books. He was often commissioned to illustrate bookplates for individual book collectors. His woodcut and his pen illustrations appeared on magazine covers and their interiors. Falls continued illustrating books and book jackets until his death in 1960 (at age 86).

ABC Book by C. B. Falls (1923) on display in the Random House office lobby in NY.

The First 3,000 Years book jacket lettering and design by C. B. Falls. Viking, 1960.

Resources: 

A collection of Falls’ sketches, scrapbooks, and printed samples is held at the Chapin Library at Williams College.

The Library of Congress has a collection of some of Fall's posters.

The Graphic Art of C. B. Falls: An Introduction. Chapin Library Williams College, 1982. This was a booklet published to go along with an exhibition of Fall's work held in 1982.

Publishers Weekly, August 8, 1942

The cover of Publishers Weekly, Volume 142, Number 6, August 8, 1942.

I had been meaning to read a copy of Publishers Weekly from the war years. Unfortunately, the magazine’s digital archive doesn’t go back that far, and I couldn’t find a library nearby that has back issues. So, I went ahead and bought a random issue that I found on abebooks.com. Boy, oh boy, did I ever luck out.

I was surprised to see that August 8, 1942 issue focused most of its articles on book design. And the issue itself was the debut of a new look for the magazine. After flipping through a bunch of ads for new book releases, the articles are preceded by an editorial by the magazine’s editor Frederic G. Melcher (who was also one of the directors of The Council on Books in Wartime).

This opening editorial describes the process behind the new 1942 design of Publishers Weekly. (get a closer look to read the text)

Charles C. S. Dean was the outside designer hired to work on the redesign. There is a nice biography of Dean further on in the issue. I really like his hand lettered treatment of the magazine title. Such a contrast to today’s app button style (and how long is that treatment going to last now that “flat” is replacing skeuomorphic design?).

The bio explains that Dean took the Goudy of the magazine’s previous masthead and modernized it. I’ll have to find a 1941 issue to compare the cover designs. For the body text he chose the font Caledonia, designed by William A. Dwiggins in 1939. This issue I bought also has an article about Dwiggins, which I'll scan for a upcoming post.

Charles C. S. Dean, designer of the new for 1942 Publishers Weekly. (get a closer look to read the text)

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.

Farrar & Rinehart logos

I just started reading Hothouse by Boris Kachka. It’s a history of the publisher House, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. I read this bit on page 10:

“Cofounder John Farrar had been ousted from his own firm, Farrar & Rinehart, while lying in an Algerian hospital during World War II.”

That reminded me that I had seen logos from Farrar & Rinehart in a Clarence P. Hornung’s book Trademarks (1930). Hornung designed two for the press:

You can read more about Hornung’s career in an earlier post of mine.

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.

Alanson B. Hewes: Book Illustrator and WWII GI

Council on Books in Wartime logo scanned from the copyright page of the book Report from Red China (1945).

The Council on Books in Wartime had a very charming logo (it reminds me of that 1943 Warner Brothers cartoon where Daffy Duck dive-bombs a villainous vulture). One use for the council’s book-toting eagle was on the title pages of books printed during the war. I haven't seen where else it might have been used, but I imagine it was printed on letterhead, business cards, etc. The words, “Books are weapons in the war of ideas” were developed by W. W. Norton (founder of the book publisher). There’s a story surrounding this slogan that deserves its own future post.

The official history of the CBW conveniently named the artist behind the design: “The Information Committee secured the services, gratis, of Alanson Hewes, who designed the Council’s colophon.” I wanted to learn more about Alanson’s career, so I started a Google search. Unfortunately, the only things that turned up were five books that he had illustrated: The Yankee Cook Book, published by Coward-McCann (1939); The Martha Washington Cook Book, published by James Direct, Inc. (1940); Songs of American Folks, published by The John Day Company* (1942); The Lady and the Painter, published by Coward-McCann (1951); and McKay's Guide to Africa, published by David McKay (1954).

Alanson Hewes’ illustration for the Poultry and Game chapter in The New England Yankee Cookbook (1940).

You might notice that there was a nine-year gap between the third and fourth books. I discovered that this was partly because he was drafted into the Army in December 1943. I found Alanson’s enlistment record on the National Archives site. I know for sure that it’s him, because his civilian job was listed as “Artists, sculptors, and teachers of art”. We also see that he was a resident of New York, NY (which makes sense since he worked in publishing). Many of the National Archives’ personnel records for WWII were lost during a 1973 warehouse fire, so we’re not likely to find out where he served during the war. Hewes was 38 years old when he was drafted (an old man by Army standards), so I doubt that he was put in front-line combat.

I was hoping to find a period article or even an obituary that would offer more of a biography, but the enlistment record and his book illustrations will have to do.

Alanson Hewes’ illustration for the Cider Champagne recipe in The New England Yankee Cookbook (1940).

Cover illustration from Songs of American Folks (1942).

Cover illustration from Songs of American Folks (1942).

*The founder of The John Day Company was Richard J. Walsh, Pearl S. Buck’s husband.

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.