Forthcoming book revisits WWII's 'biggest book giveaway in history'

A forthcoming book is shining new light on the Armed Services Editions, the wartime publishing program that put nearly 123 million pocket-sized paperbacks into the hands of American troops during World War II — a distribution effort historians have called the largest book giveaway ever undertaken.

The program ran from 1943 to 1947 and was the work of the Council on Books in Wartime, a coalition of publishers, librarians and booksellers convened after the U.S. entered the war. The group adopted the motto "Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas," positioning American reading habits as a deliberate counterpoint to the Nazi book burnings that began in 1933.

The driving force behind the program was Col. Ray Trautman, who proposed not merely shipping existing books to soldiers but commissioning special editions sized to fit in a uniform pocket. Printed on cheap pulp paper, the Armed Services Editions — known as ASEs — were light, durable and designed for the realities of combat life. The largest single distribution came on the eve of D-Day, when troops carried them aboard landing craft. Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" was the most popular title in that wave.

The selection was unusually broad for a government-affiliated program. Over the course of the initiative, the council produced 1,322 titles, mixing cowboy stories, Tarzan adventures and the bestselling historical romance "Forever Amber" with literary works including "Moby-Dick," biographies of Frederick Douglass and Queen Victoria, essays by Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and poetry by Longfellow, Keats and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The program had clear limits. The roster of authors was overwhelmingly white, and several titles faced attempted bans during the program's life. Those tensions, and the broader story of the librarians who built the giveaway, are the subject of "A Librarian's War" by Molly Guptill Manning, due out in September.