Armed Services Edition books: abridgements and pocket-editions for doughboys

Enoch_Root sez, "The blog The Art of Manliness has a great post about Armed Services Edition (ASE) books produced during World War II. The idea was to print as many books as cheaply as possible and get them into the hands of GIs for free. There was also the considerations of ruggedness and size for wartime use. The titles range from Plato to contemporary westerns. Perhaps the best part of the article is the poster at the top 'Books cannot be killed by fire' and 'Books Are Weapons In The War of Ideas.'"

Literature on the Frontlines: The History of Armed Services Edition Books (Thanks, Enoch_Root, via Submitterator!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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SciMom

I got my introduction to some classic literature from reading my father’s copies of these books — they were wonderful, and I have kept some of my favorites to remind me of him!
kip w

I’ve got the Armed Forces edition of Gene Fowler’s classic Timber Line, from which one half of one page is strangely missing. I like the format â€” easy to hold and read, and even kinder to a pocket than a Pocket Book. I also have one called Soldier Art, which was apparently the catalog to an exhibition, which contained one of my favorite weird paintings, The Dust is Whirling in the Dust.

Alas, it’s not in color. The b&w scan is from my book. I scanned it after a Google search failed to turn up any other image of the tempera painting online at all. All there was was a reminiscence of the piece by a man who saw it as a soldier in WW2 and never forgot it.
Dr. Pasolini

My great aunt and uncle had a copy of “The Grapes of Wrath” in one of these editions. Hard to imagine the military being comfortable putting its imprimatur on something like that nowadays.
Anonymous

Am I really the only one to find it ironic that the books that are being advertised here with the slogan “Books are weapons in the war of ideas” happen to be “abridged” (read: censored at worst, gutted at best)?
- blurgh
  
  If you read the article, you’d have seen that only a small fraction of the books were abridged, and then apparently for reasons of length. The range of books available also looks pretty impressive given the target audience.
- Bavi_H
  
  Although the headline of this post says “abridgements”, notice each of the four covers pictured says at the bottom “This is the complete book – not a digest”.
dr

For anyone interested in the ASEs, here’s a complete listing:
http://www.armedserviceseditions.com/
I occasionally assign Lieber and Lieber’s The Education of T.C.Mits (recently back in print) in my classes, and the students find it interesting that their grandfathers might have carried this book (which uses free verse and then-modern art to forge a link between pure mathematics, such as non-Euclidean geometry, and human freedom) into war.
dagfooyo

I want to see the Mythbusters test the idea that “books are weapons”. I envision a pneumatic book gun and for the finale a book made entirely of thinly-pressed pages of C4.
Anonymous

That’s cool. The Roosevelt quote on the poster reminds me of a very famous quote from one of the greatest Russian language books (and possibly one of the greatest books period) of all time, “The Master and Margarita”

The main character, the Master, has written a book that is rejected and censored by the Party. One day he goes mad and burns the only surviving copy, the checks himself into a state run nut house. When his Mistress teams up with Satan (yes..Satan, who goes by the name Volland) to free him, he is presented with a copy of his works by the Devil. When the writer cries out that he had burned it, Volland replies “Manuscripts Don’t Burn.”
Maxload

hey, i’ve got this edition of moby dick! it was my grandpa’s. my grandma meg explained to me that the reason that they where bound landscape rather then portrait was so that service men could put them in there pockets and the binding would be pointing upwards rather then the tops of the pages, to protect the book from mud and water on the battlefield. awesome.
Anonymous

Does anyone know what year the armed forces edition of Father and Glorious Descendant B-45 by Pardee Lowe was published?
Anonymous

I heard that the shape of the books and–if I’m not mistaken–the easy tear pages made these an ideal source of toilet paper–sort of a “read & wipe” system. I’ve run into a couple with about half the pages missing.
Anonymous

Ruggedness? Actually they were designed to be LESS rugged than normal hardbacks in the hope that they wouldn’t survive long enough to come back home and affect the normal market. And the strange format was mostly a side effect of the fact that they were multiples were printed on “digest” sized presses and then cut appart.
Anonymous

The range of books available also looks pretty impressive given the target audience. Well there was a very broadly based draft, so their target audience was pretty much a complete cross section of society. The fact that you say that speaks to a dismissive attitude towards the intellect of those in the service driven in part, I think by the fact that the all volunteer force tends to draw from a narrower segment of society. When my father was in the Army in the late 50s his masters degree was insufficient to make him the most educated private in his company.
mrgnexus

I have a ton of these — ordered from ebay over the last couple of years. I love them deeply. I don’t know if anyone carried them into combat, but they all look as if they’ve been through hell.
Anonymous

The way the US military has been overrun by religious fanatics, the only book likely to get this treatment in the 21st century is the Bible. Those folks don’t need or want any other book.
Anonymous

“Books as weapons” is pretty simple to observe. Take your average mass market paper back, hold it in one hand with one finger in the middle of the book for extra grip. Smack something or someone with the spine. As weapons, tools for concentrating and delivering force, books are often surprisingly effective and durable.
jjasper

These days, we have Operation Paperback, which I am proud to have donated to.