WHEN BOOKS WENT TO WAR

While the Nazis were burning hundreds of millions of books across Europe, America printed and shipped 140 million books to its troops--the stories of how they were received, how they connected soldiers with authors, and how an army of librarians and publishers lifted spirits and built a new democratic audience of readers (and engineered the paperback revolution), is as inspiring today as it was then.

Like The Book Thief or The Bookseller of Kabul, The Monuments Men or The Boys in the Boat, WHEN BOOOKS WENT TO WAR is the story of books in wartime and it is dramatic and deeply poignant. It will appeal not just to a World War II audience, but to book lovers everywhere. When America entered World War II in 1941, the enemy had banned and burned over 100 million books, and caused fearful citizens to hide or destroy many more. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to showcase America's freedoms— the Victory Books Campaign — and organized a donation program that elicited 20 million hardcover books from volunteer donors across the land, to be sent to military facilities at home and abroad. By 1943, however, it was clear that hardcovers weren't sufficient, and the range of available books wasn't always what the soldiers needed. In response, a council of publishers worked with the War Department to launch an extraordinary program: packaging, printing, and distributing 120 million small, lightweight paperbacks, at cost, for troops to carry in their pockets and their rucksacks, in every theater of war, on land, sea, and in the air. Comprising 1,200 different titles of every imaginable type, these paperbacks were so beloved by the troops that they became hot tickets, with long waiting lines and sharing schemes. Soldiers read them while waiting to land at Normandy; in hellish trenches in the midst of battles in the Pacific; in field hospitals; and on long bombing flights. They wrote to the authors, many of whom responded to every letter. They helped rescue The Great Gatsby from obscurity. They made Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, into a national icon. They also revolutionized the publishing industry and built a new, democratic generation of book readers. When Books Went to War is an inspiring story for history buffs and book lovers alike. Molly Guptill Manning is the author of The Myth of Ephraim Tutt and several articles appearing in publications such as the Columbia Journal of Law andthe Arts. She is an attorney for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York City. Molly lives in Manhattan with her husband and collection of Armed Services Editions.