When Books Went to War (11 page)

 

—
PRIVATE W. R. W. AND THE GANG

 

T
HE PUBLISHERS FACED
a forbidding task: fashioning a new style of book suitable for mass production while operating under wartime restrictions. For starters, there was paper rationing. In 1943, publishers were allocated only 37.5 percent of the paper they used in 1939. Many found this constraint infuriating when the country was in the midst of a war of ideas. As a columnist for the
Chicago Daily News
said: “We don't burn books in America, we merely slash the paper allotment. The motives are vastly different, but some of the results are the same.” But the government considered books a necessary piece of equipment; just as aluminum and rubber were funneled to factories to produce airplanes, the government agreed to provide nine hundred tons of paper per quarter year for the production of Armed Services Editions (ASEs).

To maximize the number of books that could be printed with this supply, and to ensure that the ASEs best fit the servicemen's circumstances, the council resorted to unprecedented formatting and manufacturing techniques. Of course, the council had to rely on paperbacks. This saved space and weight, and the books gained pliability so they could be tucked more easily into a pocket or full pack. Next, the size of each book had to be reduced. In the 1940s, a standard small hardcover book was five by eight inches and could be up to two inches thick. The ASEs would be produced in two sizes: the larger would measure six and a half by four and a half inches—similar to the mass-market paperbacks in drugstores—and the smaller, five and a half by three and three-eighths inches. The largest ASE was only three-quarters of an inch thick, and the smallest was less than an eighth of an inch thick. These measurements were not arbitrary. The council researched the pocket dimensions of standard military uniforms to ensure that the larger ASE could fit in the pocket of a soldier's pants, while the smaller could be tucked away in a breast pocket. Even the longest ASE, which was 512 pages, could slip into a hip pocket.
The smaller books were essentially the size of a wallet. Even soldiers on the frontlines could stow away or summon such a book in an instant.

No book press existed that was capable of printing such tiny books. The council solved this problem by turning to magazine presses. Many benefits flowed from this decision. Perhaps the most important was that these presses used thinner paper than what was normally used for hardcover books. This helped keep ASEs incredibly light and slim. Thanks to their paperback cover, small size, and featherweight pages, the ASEs weighed one-fifth or less than their hardcover counterparts.

Since magazine presses were not designed to produce pocket-sized publications, the council printed the books “two up”: two books were printed on each page, one above the other, and were then sliced into two by a horizontal cut. The magazine presses for
Reader's Digest
were used to produce smaller books, and the larger were printed on pulp-magazine presses. One disadvantage to the two-up method is that it forced the council to yoke one book to another, requiring staff members to count pages, words, and characters in order to match similarly sized books. This was a chore that was both time-consuming and tedious. If different-sized books were coupled together, the shorter book would have blank pages—blasphemy in the age of paper rationing. Indeed, when the Army noticed blank pages in some early ASEs, it insisted that the council fill up these pages with biographies, puzzles, or the like. The council obliged by including an author's biography when space allowed. Over the course of pairing books, the council took great pains to ensure that they were not edited to achieve a desired word count or size. If a book was condensed, the front cover always included a disclaimer.

Knowing that battle conditions were stressful and lighting conditions were unlikely to be optimal for reading, the council aimed to create books that would be easy on readers' eyes. Traditional hardcovers had four to five inches of text per line, and were taller than they were wide. For its ASEs, the council bound the books on their short side, making them wider than they were tall, so that each page could accommodate two columns of two and a half to three inches of text. It was believed that battle-weary soldiers would find the shorter lines of text easier to read. Another benefit of this double-column format was that 12 percent more words could be squeezed onto a page. The finished prototype was “small, light and attractive . . . and completely readable even under trying conditions of light and motion,” the council said in a memorandum on the project.

The council aimed to make the exterior of the ASEs as attractive and functional as possible. Rather than shrink the image of the hardcover edition's dust jacket to fit the smaller size, book covers were redesigned. A thumbnail image of the original dust jacket appeared on the front cover, and the book's title and author were prominently displayed. The covers were printed on sturdy, heavyweight paper in vibrant colors. To alert readers of the other titles that were available in that month's batch of books, the inside back cover listed the council's latest offerings. The back cover of each ASE provided a brief description of its contents.

Book covers were printed by one firm, the Commanday-Roth Company, and were distributed to the several printing houses that reproduced the interior pages. The ASEs were then assembled and bound, and the conjoined books sliced into two. Although hardcover books were typically glued and sewn together, the early ASEs were bound by staples instead. (According to one newspaper, staples were favored because many servicemen were stationed in locales where insects would feast on glue, or the dampness of jungles and other wet climes would cause the glue to loosen or dissolve.)
Once production was complete, the ASEs were shipped to distribution points selected by the Army and Navy.

In addition to being made a convenient size and weight, the books needed to be as affordable as possible, to meet the budget constraints of the Army and Navy. The council agreed to sell the ASEs to the government at cost, plus a one-cent royalty that was split between the author and the original publishing company. According to the council, “the prices at which [the ASEs] are being manufactured are probably the lowest at which comparable books have ever been produced in the United States.” Initially, the average cost of each book was only slightly more than seven cents per copy. They were such a sensation that demand necessitated the production of additional millions per year, dropping the average cost of production to 5.9 cents per book.

 

At the project's inception, the Army and Navy requested that the council provide 50,000 copies of each of fifty titles—or 2.5 million books—per month. Eighty percent would be distributed to the Army, and the rest to the Navy (which was in rough proportion to the number of men in each service). By the time the council signed its contract with the armed forces in July 1943, its initial goal was reduced from fifty to thirty titles each month, since the manufacturing and editorial challenges were daunting.

A three-part process was used in selecting titles. First, the publishers gleaned from their stock lists books that would be appealing to servicemen. Next, the council's staff of readers, a group of people outside the publishing industry who provided their opinions about each book's merit, narrowed the selections. The third step was to seek government approval from Lieutenant Colonel Trautman on behalf of the Army, and Isabel DuBois, the head of the Library Section of the Navy. At any time, however, the Army and Navy could request that the council print certain titles, and feedback from the servicemen was always welcome. The main consideration in book selection was variety. The goal was for each series to consist of a range of titles so there would be a book to fit the tastes of every man. The most popular genre was contemporary fiction (almost 20 percent of the ASEs fell under this category), followed by historical novels, mysteries, books of humor, and westerns. Other categories included adventure stories, biographies, cartoons, classics, current events, fantasy, histories, music, nature, poetry, science, sea and naval stories, self-help and inspirational books, short story collections, and travel books.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the council's ASE endeavor was that it set broad benchmarks and worked to avoid censorship of the soldiers' reading. This is not to say that the council was permitted to print any book regardless of content. Once publishers and the council narrowed their list of potential ASEs, the council's readers flagged any passages that might be offensive to America's allies, give aid and comfort to the enemy, conflict with the spirit of American democracy, or be offensive to any religious or racial groups, trades, or professions.
These guidelines were liberally interpreted, but they did prevent the issuance of certain books. For example, although it passed the Army and Navy's review, the council recommended dropping George Santayana's
Persons and Places
(an autobiography) because the book expressed a view deemed “dubious as to democracy.” When Zane Grey's
Riders of the Purple Sage
(a western whose heroine befriends gunslinging cowboys who urge her to break away from the evils of the Mormon Church) was on the verge of being printed, a reader objected to it because of its “bitter attack on the Mormons.”

Both books were rejected.
The council generally believed it was better to not print a book than to perform surgery on it to eliminate offensive words or passages. The latter reeked too heavily of censorship, and the council did not want to skew an author's intent or story. As the government was funding the project in the name of boosting morale, it is understandable why the council avoided books that were objectionable to or discriminatory toward certain groups.

Still, all told, the titles produced as ASEs cut a very wide swath. John Jamieson, an expert on publishing during World War II, said that the ASEs consisted of “just about everything . . . except text and technical books and the juvenile and feminine fields.”
There were classics (
David Copperfield
, Shakespeare's poetry), modern classics (
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Great Gatsby
), westerns (
Sunset Pass, Six Gun Showdown
), mysteries (
Harvard Has a Homicide, The Murder That Had Everything
), biographies (
The Story of George Gershwin, Benjamin Franklin
), comics and art (
Soldier Art, Cartoons for Fighters
, and
The Sad Sack
), and sports (
The Brooklyn Dodgers, The Best Sports Stories of 1944
). Plus, there were books about math (
Mathematics and the Imagination
), the sciences (
Your Servant, the Molecule
), history (
The Republic
), and current affairs (
U.S
.
Foreign Policy
). There were titles to cheer the men up (
Laugh It Off, Happy Stories Just to Laugh At
) and others whose titles posed questions that the men asked themselves (
Is Sex Necessary?, Where Do People Take Their Troubles?
). There was something for everyone. By the time its mission was complete, the council had printed approximately twelve hundred titles.

Authors whose books were selected as ASEs were rewarded with a loyal readership of millions of men. Word spread quickly about the titles that were perennial favorites, even reaching the home front. F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby
, which was written in 1925, was considered a failure during Fitzgerald's lifetime. But when this book was printed as an ASE in October 1945, it won the hearts of an army of men. Their praise reverberated back home, and
The Great Gatsby
was rescued from obscurity and has since become an American literary classic.

For authors, learning that their book had made the cut for ASE publication was a great honor. Emily Kimbrough, who cowrote
Our Hearts Were Young and Gay
, said that she and Cornelia Otis Skinner were “more proud of . . . that edition than of being selected Book of the Month.” David Ewen, author of
The Story of George Gershwin
and
Men of Popular Music
, once explained that the publication of both of his books as ASEs had a “particularly significant meaning.” At the time, he “was in the armed forces and knew only too well what a solace books could be to the tired, lonely men stationed in far-off places.” When David Lavender learned his first adult novel,
One Man's West
, had been chosen as an ASE, he was incredibly grateful to receive such recognition. “Fifty-three thousand copies! I could scarcely believe such figures . . . And I am inclined to believe that having those fifty-three thousand copies spread far and wide gave the book a running start toward three hardcover editions, followed by its paperback reprint.”
To this day, the book remains in print.

 

The books chosen for publication each month were collectively dubbed a series. Each early series was assigned a letter, and each book was assigned a number. For example, the first month of titles consisted of the A-series, numbered one through thirty: A-1, A-2, and so on. Beginning with the J-series, thirty-two titles were printed each month. The Q-series marked the beginning of forty titles per series. The T-series was the last to designate a letter-number combination on the books themselves (although the council's records continued the letter-number assignment; the Z-series was followed by the AA-series, BB-series, and so on); thereafter, beginning with the number 665, each book was assigned a number only. Over time, the print run for each series steadily rose; 125,000 copies of each title were printed beginning with the Q-series, and a staggering 155,000 copies of each title were printed from the W-series to the Z-.

Managing the production of the ASEs was Philip Van Doren Stern. Formerly the executive editor of Pocket Books, Stern had a background in paperbacks and was familiar with both the editorial and production aspects of the paperback industry. The task before Stern was herculean. As manager of the Armed Services Editions branch of the council, Stern had to maintain constant relations with five different Army and Navy offices, a paper firm (Bulkley Dunton) and its mills, five printers, a dozen or more composition (typesetting) houses, the entire membership of the Council on Books in Wartime (both individually as publishers and collectively through the council's management committee), and an advisory committee on book selection. Even with the help of a paid staff of ten people, the magnitude of the project and the number of moving pieces that Stern supervised was mind-boggling. That it all came together, and month after month the books were chosen, printed, and distributed, is a testament to the dedication of all parties involved. The project certainly was not without its headaches.