The wildly popular WWII program that gave our soldiers books and helped create American classics
‘The Great Gatsby’ owes its popularity to ASEs
What our soldiers needed was food, ammunition, and…books?
As America entered World War II, the country made itself into a population of participants. Citizens reframed their previous roles in society to assist the war effort, and even literary folk — publishers, authors, librarians — considered how books could help. This led them to establish the Council on Books in Wartime, an unpaid, non-government agency dedicated to stirring inspiration and defiance in the corresponding “war of ideas.”
The Council’s masterstroke was a program named the Armed Services Editions, which distributed cheap paperbacks to soldiers and servicemen and women abroad. The initiative lasted from 1943 to 1946, and printed literary masterpieces and the day’s bestsellers for 5.9 cents a copy. By the end of the program, 122,951,031 Armed Services Editions had been distributed to Americans overseas.
In 1942, as the United States began to deploy troops abroad, an army librarian named Ray L. Trautman noticed an environment in which the demand for books could flourish. The key was to be able to print them cheaply. Thanks to a drop in consumer production, rotary presses used to manufacture digest magazines were available to the government, if they could pay to run them. It was these machines that provided the books with their distinctive shape.
Rather than use the whole-magazine format, Armed Services Editions were printed together in one volume, one on top of the other. The single volume was then cut across the cover horizontally, producing two individual books. This meant each ASE was wider than than it was tall. It also required that each page was set in double-column text for ease of reading. But even more crucial, the books were light, cheap, disposable, and easy to carry in a soldier’s hip pocket or stuffed in a duffel bag.
But mechanical ingenuity was not enough to make the Armed Services Editions a tenable program. Publishers at the time saw their goods as luxury items—they’d been selling hardcovers at two dollars apiece in the midst of the Great Depression, and needed to be convinced that cooperation with the military wouldn’t harm their revenue stream.
One of the leading publishers at the time, W. Warder Norton, was chairman of the executive committee that oversaw the Council on Books in Wartime. He argued that the production and wide distribution of cheap books would be an overall boon to anyone dependent on books to make a living. “The fact that millions of men will have the opportunity to learn what a book is and what it can mean,” Norton wrote in a 1942 letter to the council, “is likely now and in post-war years to exert a tremendous influence over the post-war course of the industry.”
Norton was right about the program’s benefits, but it’s unlikely anyone imagined just how beloved the Armed Services Editions would be. As scholar Michael Hackenberg has noted, soldiers spent their deployment in “periods of boredom alternated between periods of intense activity.” They were, in other words, the perfect literary audience.
The ASE ended up distributing a catalog of 1,322 different titles, catering to a catholic variety of tastes. Military officials preferred lighter and more entertaining fare for their troops, such as westerns and mysteries, while publishers advocated for more serious books. They published the esteemed literary writers of the day, like Katherine Anne Porter and Wallace Stegner (as well as titans like Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck), and worked to provide abridged versions of classics, including Oliver Twist, Moby Dick, and Jane Eyre. Altogether, this diversity of titles was essential to the program’s appeal and success.
Soldiers went crazy for the books. “As Popular As Pin-Up Girls,” read one 1944 headline in The New York Times, borrowing a phrase from a marine’s own testimony. Even at the program’s maturity, when 100,000 books were delivered per week, it wasn’t enough to keep up with demand. The giveaway cultivated a large population of men — many of whom hadn’t finished a book since high school — who now clamored for books, devouring them, cracking their spines, trading them, splicing them in sections to share with buddies. They read them aloud. They used them to pass time before battle and while healing from wounds. They even hoarded them as prized possessions. When one soldier received one of the program’s most popular novels, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, he slept on it to keep it safe from theft.
Soldiers wrote troves of letters to the authors who moved and surprised them. The likes of H.L. Mencken, E.B. White, and Esther Forbes received two to five hundred pieces of mail from admiring servicemen abroad. Betty Smith received ten times as much mail from soldiers as she did from civilians. One of the most admired authors was Katherine Anne Porter, who found herself the recipient of some 600 items of mail from fans, many wishing to discuss matters of writing advice and techniques.
A newfound admiration for reading was the least of what people expected to acquire as soldiers abroad, but conditions proved ripe for such a surprise. In July 1944 in The New Yorker, reporter A.J. Liebling spoke to a Brooklyn-born soldier on the eve of D-Day, and noticed how avid reading could live side by side with the red-blooded heterosexual-male soldier stereotype:
“There are some nice broads in Tunis,” [the soldier] said. “I had a hell of a time.” He nodded toward the book he was holding. “These little books are a great thing,” he said. “They take you away. I remember when my battalion was cut off on top of a hill at EI Guettar, I read a whole book in one day. It was called ‘Knight Without Armor.’ This one I am reading now is called ‘Candide.’ It is kind of unusual, but I like it. I think the fellow who wrote it, Voltaire, used the same gag too often, though. The characters are always getting killed and then turning out not to have been killed after all, and they tell their friends what happened to them in the meantime. I like the character in it called Pangloss.”
With the editions, the average infantryman could not only play the role of the skirt-chaser, but of the literary critic, as well.
When soldiers returned home, they brought back with them an admiration for reading and helped reinvigorate American literary culture. Many went right to the university system, enjoying the benefits of the GI Bill or teaching within academia’s very halls themselves. A 20-year-old Gore Vidal had the honor of having his own debut novel, Williwaw, published as an Armed Services Edition before the program ended in 1946. He had written the book as a serviceman while sailing aboard a Navy vessel.
Even modern tastes owe a debt to the soldiers who pored through ASEs all those decades ago. The Great Gatsby, greeted as a dud upon its 1925 release, enjoyed a print run of 155,000 copies in the Armed Services Editions, and its happy readership helped greatly to lift it from obscurity.
The impact of these books still remains with their audience. In the 1980s, a librarian at the University of Alabama reported that the university’s near-complete set of ASEs drew frequent comments from veterans, who would delight in pointing out the books they had read during the war.
