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There was laughter coming from the foxhole between bursts of the Germans’ anti-tank guns. The American servicemen were in a tight position, pinned by the Boche, but they’d made it to an interesting part of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith and everyone knows how hard it is to put down a good book. The novel—being read out loud by one of the men—kept their spirits up even as they fought for their lives. This was just one of thousands of stories from soldiers, foreign correspondents and military leaders that flooded into the Council on Books in Wartime praising the Armed Services Editions—lightweight paperbacks that were sent to the boys overseas during World War II. The audacious and revolutionary project became one of the Army’s best morale boosters, offering a bit of light during those dark days. It also helped shepherd in an era of paperback supremacy and create millions of voracious readers in the process.

I only learned of this recently from a somewhat unlikely source: Mark Dery's excellent biography of Edward Gorey, Born to Be Posthumous.

"Anchor Books, founded in 1953 by twenty-four-year-old Jason Epstein, was in the vanguard of the paperback revolution. Robert de Graff fired the first salvo in 1939 when he launched the first mass-market paperback line in America, Pocket Books. Publishing’s old guard had pooh-poohed de Graff’s assumption that consumers would buy cheap paperbound reprints of classics and bestsellers. Book buying was an elite pastime, the exclusive province of those with the income and education to indulge in expensive status symbols like hardbound books.

What they couldn’t foresee was a mass audience swollen by the millions of veterans who’d acquired the reading habit overseas, thanks to Armed Services Editions of popular paperbacks distributed free to the troops. After the war, many of them would go to college on the GI Bill, as Gorey and O’Hara had. Vets made up a sizable part of the new book-hungry audience that gobbled up 2,862,792 copies of Pocket’s Five Great Tragedies by Shakespeare the year it was published. Pocket Books were cheap—a quarter apiece—and they were everywhere, not just in tony big-city bookshops: de Graff distributed them to newsstands, drugstores, lunch counters, and bus and train stations. They flew off the racks."

Further down the Literary Hub article they mention When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning, which I immediately added to my TBR.

[ricardoreading]

The internet tells me that one Andy Menschel — pictured here in the middle on an episode of A Cook's Tour (which I also need to get to one of these day) — is the real identity of the infamous KC Bigfoot.

I, for one, believe it, because the internet has never lied to me.

[ricardoreading]

This chapter is probably the best piece Bourdain every wrote. It's also the single most entertaining thing I've read in a good while. I would read an entire book about Bigfoot — the sort of deranged character I find so endlessly fascinating.

Have been making my way through Kitchen Confidential these past few weeks because I recently finished rewatching The Layover and I just miss Tony's voice so much.

[ricardoreading]

hello again friend of a friend