anti-fascism, librarians, and paperback novels, an American story

What's more American than paperback novels?

Paperbacks are a commodity few people think about beyond their favorite (or next) purchase. Fewer know the anti-fascist, patriotic launch of the humble paperback novel as we know it today. While dime novels had existed since the late 1800s, paperbacks were far from the popularity of the books we buy today.

In the early 1940s, when the United States entered World War II, librarians led a wartime literacy movement. The Armed Services Editions, specially designed paperback books sent to troops during World War II, were created. Spearheaded by librarians across America, these public servants worked with an organization of publishers, booksellers, and authors to build the Council on Books in Wartime. From 1943 to 1947, this publishing coalition produced and distributed over 122 million paperbacks to U.S. Servicemembers for free. Over 1300 titles, from famous works to the veritably unknown, were included in the program. They combated illiteracy and rising fascism and provided soldiers with morale-boosting entertainment they could carry in the pocket of their uniforms anywhere they went.

While not the first program to serve wartime service members, it remains the most ambitious of modern times. Its predecessor, the War Services Committee, was an attempt to do the same after America entered WWI. Led by Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam, the American Library Association collected millions of dollars and books. With the help of the Carnegie Corporation, camp libraries were set up to provide books to soldiers abroad and at home.

The 1942 coalition created books measuring only no more than 4 x 6", each less than ½" thick. These full-length stories were far cheaper and more transportable than their hardcover cousins, weighing only a few ounces.

Soldiers, some of them away from home for the first time, enjoyed slice-of-life stories like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by award-winning playwright and author Betty Smith and Joseph Mitchell's charming collection of stories and essays, McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, and humorous anthologies, including multiple books edited by E.B. White. The titles included every genre, including adventure stories like White Fang by Jack London, along with more titillating works. They were all sent to American service members across Europe to be read, shared, and reread.

Author Kay Boyle later learned that "Avalanche: A Novel of Love and Espionage" was "more or less required reading for them before they took part in missions over France."

Romances such as Arouse and Beware, by Pulitzer Prize winner McKinlay Kantor, were in high demand and are harder to find decades later, as the soldiers were so hungry for romance and smut that they read them to the point of disintegration.

The advent of these paperback novels pushed publishing in a whole new direction of mass marketing that created the industry we knew up to the introduction of digital e-readers and was responsible for a massive spike in literacy in the U.S, as well as narrating the success of authors we still regard as our essential works of today.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" was distributed to the armed forces during World War II at 155,000 copies. That distribution level drove the novel to a success it did not achieve in the author's lifetime. "The Great Gatsby" has sold over twenty-five million copies and still sells over 500,000 copies a year.

So, as it turns out, (not that avid readers with their library cards are the least bit surprised) Librarians are, and have always been, on the front line in the battle against fascism. Perhaps we should listen just a little better, going forward…

Sources:

Introduction - Armed Services Editions Collection at the Library of Congress - Research Guides at Library of Congress. https://guides.loc.gov/armed-services-editions-collection/introduction

Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions | Timeless. https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2015/09/books-in-action-the-armed-services-editions/

List of Armed Services Editions - Wikipedia