#molly guptil manning

[evidenceof]

Armed Services Editions (ASEs) WWII - paperback, pocket-sized (4 by 5 ½ inches, slim, and no more than 3/4 of an inch thick), text printed in double columns per page for better readability

“Dog-eared and moldy and limp from the humidity those books go up the line. Because they are what they are, because they can be packed in a hip pocket or snuck into a shoulder pack, men are reading where men have never read before—in this SWPAC [Southwest Pacific] theatre anyway. I’ve seen GI’s with them[...]three days after the beach head at Hollandia. The kids were hungry[...]but there they were, guarding a captured Jap plane against souvenir hunters or in their sack in the beach camp or mooning out after . . . chow, reading a book.” - Charles Rawlings correspondence taken from When Books Went to War, Molly Guptill Manning

"Dell War paperbacks, for example, carried the following message: "BOOKS ARE WEAPONS—in a free democracy everyone may read what he likes. [...] This book has been manufactured in conformity with wartime restrictions—read it and pass it on." Modern technology...enabled the mass production and circulation of of approximately 123 million ASEs made exclusively for overseas distribution to military personnel. Soldiers read them even in the landing crafts on their way to Normandy." - Soldier's Heart Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, Elizabeth Samet

Images source: The Huntington Library

[aint-love-heavy]

France and Britain each knew they would be attacked after Poland, but France was more vulnerable, with its long land border with Germany. Hitler prepared for battle by infiltrating France's airwaves. Germany hired native-French broadcasters to lure unsuspecting listeners to tune in to amusing radio shows and popular music. Many listeners were oblivious to the propaganda that was subtly included. These radio commentators expressed worry over the German army's dominance and military strength, and predicted that France could not withstand an attack. The doubt Hitler's radio programs planted in French minds quickly spread. Edmond Taylor, a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune who lived in France during this period, witnessed Hitler's intricately choreographed propaganda campaign and how it crumbled France's resolve. Describing it as a "strategy of terror," Taylor reported that Germany spent enormous amounts on propaganda and even bribed French newspapers to publish stories that confirmed the rumors of Germany's superiority. According to Taylor, Germany's war of ideas planted a sense of dread "in the soul of France that spread like a monstrous cancer, devouring all other emotional faculties [with] an irrational fear [that was] ... uncontrollable." So weakened was the confidence of the French that something as innocuous as a test of France's air-raid-siren system generated ripples of panic; the mere innuendo of invasion somehow reinforced the idea that France would undoubtedly be defeated. Although the French government made a late attempt at launching an ideological counteroffensive by publicizing the need to defend freedom, it was as effective as telling citizens to protect themselves from a hurricane by opening an umbrella. When the invasion finally did come, France capitulated in six weeks.

Reading Molly Manning's When Books Went to War and doing some reflecting on my own doomerism and what it accomplishes 🫠

*emphasis in the text is mine

[happilylostinwords]

Cleaning the slate, i.e. 2023 in review

I set a humble goal (via the ever trusty and gentle-pressuring Goodreads) of reading 48 books in 2023. As of today, December 29, 2023, Goodreads tells me I have read 59 books. And I’ve got 10% left in the one I’m reading now so I will hit 60 books this year. Yay me! And before I get too confident, I’m setting the goal for 2024 at 48 books too. Four books a month is entirely doable without…

[popculturelib]

Do you prefer your books horizontal or vertical?

Armed Services Editions (ASEs) were softcover paperbacks distributed to American soldiers during World War II. After campaigns to collect donated books for soldiers fell through -- in part due to books' large size and hardback covers -- the Council on Books in Wartime (CBW) developed a plan to print pocket-sized softcovers of hundreds of books and deliver them to overseas soldiers.

Many ASEs were printed on presses normally used for magazines, which were too large for soldiers' pockets, so publishers printed two copies per magazine page and cut them in half, resulting in the horizontal format. Seen here are two paperback copies of Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood (printed in 1945 and 1940, respectively) for comparison.

The books chosen for ASEs were a wide range of subjects and genres, including fiction and non-fiction, and were hugely popular among soldiers -- many authors received large quantities of fan mail from soldiers who credit them with keeping up morale during the war. The success of ASEs encouraged publishers to print more softcover books after the end of the war, leading to the mass-market paperback industry still seen today.

For more information about Armed Services Editions, or these specific editions of Captain Blood, check out the books below:

Books In Action: The Armed Services Editions (1984) ed. by John Y. Cole

When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II (2014) by Molly Guptill Manning

Captain Blood: His Odyssey (1940), published by Pocket Books

Captain Blood (1945), published by Editions for the Armed Services

The Browne Popular Culture Library (BPCL), founded in 1969, is the most comprehensive archive of its kind in the United States.  Our focus and mission is to acquire and preserve research materials on American Popular Culture (post 1876) for curricular and research use. Visit our website at https://www.bgsu.edu/library/pcl.html.

[alinasjornadas]

Indicação Semanal = “quando os livros foram à guerra"

🖋 PUBLICAÇÃO DE = Molly Guptill Manning

📃 PÁGINAS = 272

Avaliação: 5.0 ⭐

Obra excepcional que impulsiona compreensões basilares sobre o que os livros significam para os indivíduos, sociedades e governos, da mesma forma como encoraja visualizações imersivas sobre como os mesmos são designados como os famigerados recursos cruciais no que concerne à uma Guerra das Ideias. Essa produção é mais do que um ganho para que se enxergue os horrores propiciados pelas conflagrações globais, mas uma verídica lupa para que se vislumbre com que eficácia um livro provoca, reconfigura ou encarcera.

#quandooslivrosforamaguerra #MollyGuptillManning

[readreadbookblog]

Books that I’ve Read

Here is all the new movies that I consumed in the year of 2022. I only put here the new items that I previously never have experienced before. Listed in the order that I saw them in. Lets hope that 2023’s list is greater. 

Books

Empire of Mud: The Secret History of Washington, DC by J.D. Dickey REVIEW

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata REVIEW

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown REVIEW

The Incredible Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson REVIEW

To Hell and Back by Audie Murphy REVIEW

The China Mission: George Marshall’s Unfinished War, 1945-1947 by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan REVIEW

When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning REVIEW

A Cool Breeze on the Underground by Don Winslow REVIEW

Nights of the Living Dead Anthology edited by Jonathan Maberry and George A. Romero REVIEW

Goosebumps Slappyworld The Dummy Meets the Mummy by R.L. Stine REVIEW

Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II by Robert Matzen REVIEW

The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800 by Conor Cruise O’Brien REVIEW

Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel by Dan Ephron REVIEW

My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix REVIEW

63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read by Jess Ventura and Dick Russell REVIEW

Follow Me Down by Shelby Foote REVIEW

Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power by Garry Wills REVIEW

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham REVIEW

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson REVIEW

Trotsky in New York 1917 by Kenneth D. Ackerman REVIEW

Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis REVIEW

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis REVIEW

That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis 

The Burning Edge: Travels Through Irradiated Belarus by Arthur Chichester REVIEW

Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix REVIEW

Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long by Richard D. White Jr. REVIEW

Best Movie Year Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen by Brian Raftery REVIEW

Lost in a Good Game: Why We Play Video Games and What They Can Do for Us by Pete Etchells

Conquistadors by Michael Wood

Humanity: How Jimmy Carter Lost an Election and Transformed the Post-Presidency by Jordan Michael Smith

The Captured: A True Story of Abduction of Indians on the Texas Frontier by Scott Zesch REVIEW

Jaws by Peter Benchley

Pimp: The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim REVIEW

1920: The Year That Made The Decade Roar by Eric Burns REVIEW

The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry by Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne REVIEW

Black Cop’s Kid: An Essay by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar REVIEW

The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell by W. Kamau Bell REVIEW

Maestro Mario: How Nintendo Transformed Videogame Music into an Art by Andrew Schartmann REVIEW

The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service by Laura Kaplan REVIEW

The Last Conversation by Paul Tremblay REVIEW

[tvindek]

An Armed Services Editions copy of “The Great Gatsby,” with a banner saying whether it had been cut, a reflection of concerns over censorship. A new exhibition at the Grolier Club in New York tells the story of how the Armed Services Editions, a series of pocket-size paperbacks, played an outsize role in U.S. soldiers’ fight for freedom. (Collection of Molly Guptill Manning via The New York Times)

[ricardoreading]

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.

[myhikari21things]

My Top 10 Reads of 2021

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (published in 2009)

Set partially during World War II and partially in the 1980s an old man remembers a childhood friend with whom he lost contact with after she and her family are placed in a Japanese internment camp.

When Books Went To War by Molly Guptill Manning (published in 2014)

A nonfiction read of the importance of books during World War II. Begins with Hitler’s book burnings during the 1930s and ending with the rise of popularity of small paperback books in the United States.

The Apartment by S.L. Grey (published in 2016)

After their home is broken into a young couple temporarily relocates to South Africa hoping to heal and rekindle their relationship. However, the apartment is not the warm and welcoming love nest they expect. And upon their return home it seems something has followed them.

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes (published in 2019)

A retelling of the Trojan War from the eyes of some of the women both mortal and Goddess. 

The Poison Garden by Alex Marwood (published in 2019)

After a mass suicide in a reclusive cult one of the survivors is expected to pick the pieces of her life and start over as a ���normal’ member of society. However, she has other plans and won’t abandon what she was taught so easily.

Wilder Girls by Rory Power (published in 2019)

Set on an isolated girl’s school a virus has ran rampant mutilating the students while monsters lurk outside their gates. An extra dollup of paranoia for when some of the students start to disappear and why the few men at the school are killed outright by the virus. Reads a little like Lord of the Flies, but with girls. 

The Ghost Tree by Christina Henry (published in 2020)

In the late 1980s two friends are out playing in the woods when dismembered bodies are found. The lack of investigation is arranged by the mayor of the town who has a secret that needs to be fed. 

Wendy, Darling by A.C. Wise (published in 2021)

Reads like a dark unofficial sequel to Peter and Wendy about what happened to Wendy after returning home from Neverland. Set partially in the 1930s and partially during the end of World War I and into the 1920s Wendy struggles with her inner demons while she waits for the Boy Who Won’t Grow Up to return to her. But when he does it’s not to rescue her. 

Cinderella Is Dead by Kalynn Bayron (published in 2020)

Set a century after Cinderella marries her Prince Charming young girls are now expected to attend an annual ball in hopes of finding husbands. Which sounds glamorous until its reveled that the girls have no say in who their future husband is and abuse reins supreme in the kingdom. And why does the King never seem to age?

Last Night At The Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo (published in 2021)

In China Town in the 1950s a girl makes a friend who introduces her to an underground lesbian club where she begins to make a discovery about herself. 

[godzilla-reads]

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”

— Oscar Wilde

[writer-at-the-table]

As Americans taunted death and marched toward victory in Europe in 1945, they were carrying thousands of copies of titles that were forbidden in the lands they walked on.

When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill Manning, page 151

[aint-love-heavy]

After earning a library degree, Warren secured employment at Chicago’s Sears, Roebuck branch library. Physically connected to a Sears, Roebuck store, and created for the education and pleasure of the store's employees, this library proved to be as hectic and demanding an environment as one could imagine. “Before opening, at the lunch hours, and at closing time I stood in the midst of a throng and learned to hand out as fast as a ticket agent the book that best matched each person,” Warren recalled. “‘Give me a book like The Shuttle!’ ‘I want a new set of adjectives to describe colors in the spring catalog.’ ‘The head chemist in the testing laboratory would like a certain government pamphlet by Dr. Wiley,’” people eagerly barked and yelled over the din of commotion. Warren’s advice and expertise were in constant demand, and she did not disappoint. In one memorable episode, Warren received a trusting note from a woman in the book keeping department via the library's pneumatic-tube system, which ran between the library and store. “It's very slow here on this rainy day,” the bookkeeper complained. “Please send me one of those novels you have had to withdraw from circulation as unfit for a lady to read.” Warren fulfilled the request and was surprised the next day to receive the book back, discreetly wrapped, with the message: “Blessings upon you! You’re quite right. This is not fit for anybody to read. Please send another just like it.”

Absolutely delightful anecdote about Althea Warren, who was president of the American Library Association and led a national book drive to gather books for American soldiers in WWII ☺️

(from the book I'm reading)

[chriswolak]

Armed Services Editions

Armed Services Editions were pocket-sized editions of literary works distributed to service members during World War II. There was a book written about them that has been on my TBR list for way too long: When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win WWII (2015) by Molly Guptill Manning. Publisher’s blurb: Published December 2nd 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt When America entered…

[dycefic]

Hello, I recently read some of your work and I really really like your writing style! I’ve loved everything I’ve read so far and if it is not a burden to you and you are okay with doing so, I was hoping you could answer a few questions?

I was wondering if you had any formal writing education? Any advice for writing? Also wondered what kinds of books and authors you read, if you read?

I am sorry for all the questions, and if they’ve been asked before (I tried to find any answers you may have given to these or ones similar and I’m sorry if I missed them but direct me if need be).

I am also a writer and I’m always very curious about writers I look up to/ really like- most of them just happen to not be among the living so I do t really get to ask them any questions. Thank you for your time! It’s a pleasure to be able to read your writing!!

Thank you!

I am blushing extensively, thank you for all your kind words!

As for writing, I have had no formal education in it. I tried - and might not have dropped out of university if I'd succeeded - but creative writing required higher general scores than I got in school. I've read a lot of books on writing... like, a LOT... and always taken an interest in plot structure. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who walked out of House Of Flying Daggers (I saw it in theatres, I'm that old) rhapsodizing about the way they visually represented traditional storytelling metaphors (ie 'a rain of spears').

I will note that while it seems that absolutely everyone recommends Stephen King's 'On Writing', I've never read it because a) I found the little bit I read wordy and self-indulgent, and b) the very mention of that man's name enrages me because my partner once got into a serious hyperfixation and we didn't have a single conversation in which King's name was not mentioned for OVER A YEAR. This is not King's fault, but the name still fills me with intense fury.

Books on writing I would recommend:

K. M. Weiland's 'Structuring Your Novel': I like her 'voice', and her chosen examples, and pacing longer stories is one of the things I have the most trouble with.

J. Michael Straczynski's 'Complete Book Of Scriptwriting': It's an old book now, but it's still one of the best I've ever read, and my long-standing favourite. There's a ton of fascinating history about the evolution of screenwriting, and a lot of very pithy advice that applies just as well to novels and short fiction as it does to movies and television.

Chris Baty's 'No Plot? No Problem!': I haven't reread this in quite a while, but I remember it as being really helpful as well as fun to read. I also recommend NaNoWriMo in general. I've been participating since 2002 - this year will be my twentieth anniversary of NaNo - and my writing has improved enormously in that time. Writing is like everything else, insofar as the more you practice, the better you get. I've hit 50K every year since the beginning, so even if I never got a novel I wanted to finish, polish, and put out there (and a couple of them are promising), that's still 950,000 words I've written.

Also? Fanfiction. Fanfiction is a GREAT way to practice the craft. Because the characters and universe are pre-built, you can focus on the writing itself, on things like examining nuances of character, identifying and using tropes, and building a compelling story. Between NaNo and fanfiction, over the last 24 years, I have written over 2,000,000 words, and you can't do ANYTHING two million times without getting better at it.

As for who I like to read, I can't recommend Diane Duane, Tamora Pierce, and Georgette Heyer too highly. Not only do they write good stories, they were/are very, very technically skilled. Reading their work is an education in itself. I also recommend consuming narratives from other cultures - I learned a lot about different narrative conventions from things like reading translated novels, myths, and fairy tales, reading manga, and watching Chinese and Korean movies and dramas. It really gives you a different perspective on the mechanics of storytelling, and shows you how many 'default' or 'obvious' plot tropes are actually really culturally specific. (I have consumed every re-telling, re-imagining, or re-translation of Journey To The West, including the old tv show AND the Hallmark movie. I really recommend this, as it is FASCINATING how many ways different people interpret the same story. The Korean 'Korean Odyssey' and Netflix's 'New Adventures Of Monkey' are my favourites)

Bonus reading: When Books Went To War, by Molly Guptil Manning. It's not about writing, but it's about why stories are important, the lifeline a novelist can throw to someone experiencing the darkest of times, and what I believe may have been publishing's finest hour. I cry every time I read it, and it makes me proud to count myself a writer. If you ever wonder why you're slogging away so hard at learning so fickle and difficult a craft, this book will remind you.

“The therapeutic effect of reading was not a new concept to the librarians running the VBC (Victory Book Campaign). In the editorial Warren published on the eve of commencing her tenure as director, she discussed how books could soothe pain, diminish boredom or loneliness, and take the mind on a vacation far from where the body was stationed. Whatever a man's need—a temporary escape, a comforting memory of home, balm for a broken spirit, or an infusion of courage—the librarians running the VBC were dedicated to ensuring that each man found a book to meet it.” ― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II

[imagine-organization-xiii]

A list of zexy’s fav boooks???

I really need to get back into reading, tbh

Most, if not all, of these books can be found for under ten (and sometimes less than five!) dollars at thriftbooks.

Want more books headcanons? Click here!

oOoOoOo

Education:

The Well Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had by Susan Wise Bauer

Psychology:

Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon

The Tell-Tale Brain: Unlocking the History of Human Nature by V.S. Ramachandran

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The Symposium by Plato

Autobiographies and History:

My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg

The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century by Peter Watson

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

Books About Books:

When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win WWII by Molly Guptill Manning

I’d Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life by Anne Bogel

The Uncommon Reader: A Novella by Alan Bennett

Fiction:

The Little Parish Bookshop: A Novel by Nina George

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

Prisoner B-3087 by Alan Gratz

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

The Alchemist  by Paulo Coelho

[readreadbookblog]

When Books Went to War by Molly Guptill Manning

https://www.amazon.com/When-Books-Went-War-Stories-ebook/dp/B00LRI90R8

When people think of war, they usual think of soldiers shooting at each or in a foxhole guns up awaiting the advancing attackers. But most accounts of war are of soldiers usually either doing labor work or simply waiting for something (or anything) to happen. Back during World War II, forms of entertainment were very limited compared to today. Books were a popular form of passing the time, and as author Molly Guptill Manning shows, books were a most valuable item during the war.

Guptill begins this book by showing Nazi Germany’s attitude towards books with their mass public burnings. She explains the Nazi’s policy towards banning books and then goes towards the United States following the entry into WWII.

What begun as a small project, The Victory Book Council, soon expanded into large national approved programs. At first books were asked to be donated mostly by the home front and then big publishers. Soon the project evolves into the federal approved Council on Books in Wartime which dictated what titles were to be chosen and special pocket size edition books were made exclusively for soldiers abroad. Guptill also details how difficult the projects were to do since librarians had to deal with condition of books donated, content of the books that soldiers would or wouldn’t want to read, printing cost, and political interference, most notable when Republicans almost got all the books banned in an attempt to stop soldiers from reading political material due to fears that they would end up voting for Roosevelt’s fourth term.

Guptill does an excellent job describing the creation of the books project and how valuable soldiers found it. She includes how soldiers would write about the books and ask for titles and even trade with other allied soldiers. Guptill does make the claim that books such The Great Gatsby were saved from obscurity and made authors such as Betty Smith (author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) into national known authors but expect for Betty Smith, the argument is pretty weak and there isn’t much focus on that.

This book is good book on the role of books during World War II, particularly the United States. I think that WWII buffs and bibliophiles will greatly appreciate this book.