Pilot Project Is Sending Books to American Troops Abroad

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Thursday, November 7, 2002
Pilot Project Is Sending Books to American Troops
Abroad
By MEL GUSSOW

During World War II soldiers carried Armed Services
Editions of pocket-size books and read them avidly
whenever they had time. These were literary classics,
popular novels, plays and nonfiction issued free to
troops around the world. The books, increasingly
dog-eared, were a cultural oasis as well as
entertainment. Some soldiers took them into battle.
Copies were handed out as troops left England for the
Normandy invasion.

More than 120 million copies of more than 1,300 titles
were distributed from 1943 to 1947. These paperbacks
included works by Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and
Tolstoy; classics like Plato's "Republic" and Homer's
"Odyssey"; plays like Shaw's "Arms and the Man";
thrillers and westerns; and nonfiction like Joseph
Dunninger's book on mind reading, "What's on Your
Mind?"

Andrew Carroll, an author and archivist, described the
program as "the biggest giveaway of books in our
history" with the possible exception of Gideon Bibles.
It is, he said, "a great forgotten story" of World War
II. After the war the editions were at least partly
responsible for the proliferation of paperbacks in the
United States.

This month, in a pilot project created by Mr. Carroll,
the Armed Services Editions are returning with 100,000
copies of new versions of four books being printed in
the same wide, brightly colored "cargo pocket" format:
Shakespeare's "Henry V," "The Art of War" (Sun Tzu's
classic 500 B.C. study of military strategies) and two
recent best sellers, "Medal of Honor: Profiles of
America's Military Heroes From the Civil War to the
Present" by Allen Mikaelian, with commentary by Mike
Wallace, and "War Letters: Extraordinary
Correspondence From American Wars," edited by Mr.
Carroll.

Once again they are being distributed to American
troops abroad. They are being published by Hyperion,
Dover Publications and the Washington Square Press of
Simon & Schuster.

[...]

Mr. Carroll has had informal talks with Scribner and
Little, Brown and plans to approach other houses. "If
publishers get behind this," he said, "there's no
reason we can't start sending out hundreds of
thousands of books." Some authors he would like to see
included are Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor,
James Baldwin, Stephen King and John Grisham.

[...]

For the rejuvenated project the choice of books
emphasizing the military was coincidental, Mr. Carroll
said, and was driven by the immediate availability of
publication rights. (The Dover books are in the public
domain.) The Pentagon approved the selections, he
added....

[...]

In "Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions,"
published some years ago by the Library of Congress,
John Y. Cole wrote about the Council on Books in
Wartime, a group of publishers, librarians and
booksellers who decided to use books as "weapons in
the war of ideas." The books, he said, were sold to
the military at cost (6 cents a volume in the 1940's)
and distributed only overseas so as not to interfere
with the domestic market.

"Portability was the first consideration," Mr. Cole
said. "Each book had to fit in a pocket." For that
reason several novels were abridged, among them
"Moby-Dick" and "Forever Amber."

There were only a few cases of censorship. Zane Grey's
"Riders of the Purple Sage" was dropped because a
proofreader thought it was "a bitter attack on the
Mormons," although nine other Grey titles were in the
series. E. B. White's "One Man's Meat" was temporarily
banned. Mr. Cole quoted the author as saying that he
"was never told why, but I always like having a book
banned" because it showed that "somebody has read it."

[...]

In an essay in The New York Times in 1985, the German
author Hans Magnus Enzenberger remembered his
introduction to American literature as a teenager in
Bavaria in 1945. He was living near an Army
encampment. "One day I stole a crate of Armed Services
Editions," he said, "thick, oblong paperbacks with
covers rather in the style of movie posters. Thus, by
courtesy of the American taxpayer, I was introduced to
Hemingway, Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well
as Louis Bromfield. I devoured them all," and novels
by Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka, which were unavailable
in Nazi Germany.

The editions eventually became collector's items....

[...]
 
Echoing his predecessors during World War II, Mr.
Carroll said he wanted "to promote the love of
reading." He was adamant about using the original
format as an act of nostalgia and "a tip of the hat to
this great project."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/07/books/07ARME.html?todaysheadlines

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive greatest hits videos
http://launch.yahoo.com/u2