First published in Scroll.
By definition,
world-changing events change the world, but we don’t necessarily see the shape
of these changes until we are equipped with hindsight. What can a series of
wartime efforts to motivate American soldiers tell us about how the publishing
industry was completely revolutionized by the middle of the last century? And what
can that tell us about what we are faced with today?
During World War II, Armed Services Editions or ASEs—paperbacks
that could fit comfortably in the pockets of soldiers in uniform—were designed,
produced and distributed to American soldiers away at war by the Council on
Books in Wartime, a cooperative effort of the US armed services and the
publishing industry. The impact of this initiative would not be known until
four years after the war.
Paperbacks did exist before World War II. Allen Lane himself
had sparked off the paperback revolution in the UK in 1935 to immediate success
(raising a few eyebrows in the process by selling his sixpence reprints at the supermarket
chain Woolworths). Lane came close on the heels of Albatross Books, the German
publisher who had produced the first modern mass-market paperback in 1932. In
the US, Simon and Schuster had launched the Pocket Books label in 1939, the
year the war began. Other publishers all over the world too had begun to join
the paperback bandwagon. (And well before the 1930s, as early as the 1500s,
Aldus Manutius in Venice issued what they called ‘portable’ editions of Greek
and Latin classics, while in 1841, Christian Bernhard of Tauchnitz Publishing in
Leipzig produced paperbound volumes as reading material for travellers on the
newly opened Leipzig-Dresden railroad.)
But the initial success of this little idea, while significant,
spoke more of a thrifty subculture than of a viable alternative, more
bargain-basement and magazine kiosk than high-street or storefront. The
paperback did not really ‘disrupt’ the industry until after the war, when
American soldiers returned home, pockets full of books. (Soldiers wrote that
the ASEs were 'as popular as pin-up girls'.)
In 1946, the Council on Books in Wartime
announced that 105 million copies of 934 titles published as ASEs had
been distributed. That was a staggering number of copies to be in circulation
at any time, much less wartime. Some even still were in circulation after the
war.
In fact, soon after the war, paperbacks found their way into
the regular trade market at a rate they hadn't before. Bookstores that had been
embarrassed to carry them began to display them prominently. By 1949,
paperbacks were outselling hardcovers in the US, a sales figure that could admittedly
be just as easily attributed to more books being available in paperback than
ever before. It did also bring about the phenomenon of first-edition paperbacks,
as opposed to paperback editions of existing hardcover editions.
Today, the paperback is a ubiquitous reality in book
publishing. But irrespective of where it began—the canals of Venice, the railroads
of Leipzig or the aisles of Woolworths—one of its catalysts came later, in the
shape and size of the pockets of the American cavalry. Which is to say: while
paperbacks always existed with some degree of success, it can be argued that
they didn't really break out until a world-altering event like World War II led
to ASEs, leading to an actual craze.
In fact, in a prescient 1942 letter (the ASE operations began
in 1943) to the council, W.W. Norton, chairman of the executive committee
overseeing the Council on Books in Wartime, wrote: ‘The net result to the
industry and to the future of book reading can only be helpful. The very fact
that millions of men will have an opportunity to learn what a book is and what
it can mean is likely now and in post-war years to exert a tremendous influence
on the post-war course of the industry.’
That same year, President Roosevelt wrote to Norton, ahead of
a meeting of the council: ‘[A] war of ideas can no more be won without books
than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest
armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns. I hope
that all who write and publish and sell and administer books will, on the occasion
of your meeting, rededicate themselves to the single task of arming the mind
and spirit of the American people with the strongest and most enduring
weapons.’
After that meeting, the publishers choosing the books made a
bold gamble. While it was clear that crime and romance were the popular
paperback sellers, they deliberately chose poetry and literary fiction to send
to the soldiers—in addition, of course, to potboilers, or what the Gathings
Committee, a select committee of the United States House of Representatives
which launched a Congressional investigation into the paperback industry in 1952,
would later refer to as ‘pornographic materials’. Their decision paid off when
these books were found to be just as easily devoured as a Western. (An unlikely
success among these battle-hardened men was Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a poignant coming-of-age novel about a
bookish little girl in the tenements of Williamsburg.)
A cynic might argue that the soldiers had no choice in the matter, that they had to
choose from what was on offer. But the change showed itself only later. When
paperback sales slumped in 1946, it became clear that it was the lighter fare
(traditionally reserved for paperback) that suffered, not the ‘serious’ books
that had found their way into the paperback format by then. Change had arrived.
In the current context, we are indeed facing a world-altering
event. What it's doing to us, to our psyches, will not be known for a few
years. Revolutions in book-consumption don't occur with creation of format, as
paperback publishing has taught us, they occur when we change.
It took nearly four years from the time American soldiers
came home from war hungering for paperbacks for change to be visible in the
data. But the years that preceded that moment were quivering with human change. War had taken a toll on
the world in ways that required countries and economies to rebuild themselves. There
was also a toll on the imagination. Throughout history, it had always fallen to
troubadours and poets, storytellers and philosophers, to rebuild that world, the one that existed outside
treaty rooms and boardrooms. After World War II, rebuilding of that world
necessitated a most unromantic thing – the cheap, small paperback.
Today, if our time in solitude changes us, can it be a change
like that, even if it takes years for us to see its impact? If in our solitude
we are still enough, lonely enough, hungry enough, silent enough, curious
enough, might we reacquaint ourselves with an old habit? If we find ourselves, in these
moments of solitude, reaching for a book, not for escape and solace, although
there’s that as well, but for deep social connection, yearning for stories and
companionship and intimacy, might we discover, to our own immense delight, that
the deeper we travel into another world the closer we might feel to our own?
Might we measure out an antidote of fiction for our loneliest hours, great
characters to fill our empty homes, and thoughtful conversation to drown out
the silence?
