Armed Services Editions
Armed Services Editions (ASEs) were small paperback books of fiction and nonfiction that were distributed in the American military during World War II.
The ASEs were edited and printed by the Council on Books in Wartime (CBW), an American non-profit organization, in order to provide entertainment to soldiers serving overseas, while also educating them about political, historical, and military issues.
[1] In that year, in collaboration with the graphic artist H. Stanley Thompson and the publisher and CWB executive Malcolm Johnson, Trautman proposed his idea of "Armed Services Editions": mass-produced paperbacks selected by a panel of literary experts from among classics, bestsellers, humor books and poetry.
[2] The CBW appointed Philip Van Doren Stern, a printing expert and former Pocket Books executive, as project manager.
Its initial members were John C. Farrar, William M. Sloane, Jeanne Flexner, Nicholas Wreden, Mark Van Doren, Amy Loveman and Harry Hansen.
The panel mainly focused on selecting recreational reading material, both fiction and nonfiction, primarily drawn from current publications and aiming at "all levels of taste within reasonable limits".
The order of publication was chosen at random by pulling names out of a cookie jar; the first book to be printed was The Education of Hyman Kaplan by Leo Rosten.
But the Army and Navy chief librarians, Trautman and DuBois, made sure that all books were acceptable to both services, and rejected works with "statements or attitudes offensive to our Allies, any religious or racial group, or [...] not in accord 'with the spirit of American democracy'".
The publication of Louis Adamic's Native's Return as an ASE title caused controversy because the novel's first edition had contained passages that were considered pro-Communist.
The act was sponsored by Senator Robert A. Taft, who feared that the Roosevelt administration would distribute propaganda in favor of the president's reelection to a fourth term.
Authors included Hervey Allen, Robert Benchley, Stephen Vincent Benét, Max Brand, Joseph Conrad, A. J. Cronin, Carl Crow, Eugene Cunningham, James Oliver Curwood, Clyde Brion Davis, Walter D. Edmonds, Edward Ellsberg, William Faulkner, Peter Field, F. Scott Fitzgerald, C. S. Forester, Erle Stanley Gardner, Edmund Gilligan, Arthur Henry Gooden, Zane Grey, Ernest Haycox, MacKinlay Kantor, Frances and Richard Lockridge, Jack London, H. P. Lovecraft, William Colt MacDonald, John P. Marquand, Ngaio Marsh, W. Somerset Maugham, Clarence E. Mulford, John O'Hara, George Sessions Perry, Edgar Allan Poe, William MacLeod Raine, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Craig Rice, Charles Alden Seltzer, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Luke Short, Thorne Smith, John Steinbeck, George R. Stewart, Bram Stoker, Grace Zaring Stone, James Thurber, W. C. Tuttle, Mark Twain, H. G. Wells, and Philip Wylie.
A contemporary newspaper article recounted: "The hunger for these books, evidenced by the way they are read to tatters, is astounding even to the Army and Navy officers and the book-trade officials who conceived Editions for the Armed Services".
[1] A study found that the most popular "deal frankly with sexual relations (regardless of tone, literary merit and point of view, no matter whether the book is serious or humorous, romantically exciting or drably pedestrian)".
[16] In November 2002, Andrew Carroll used a $50,000 corporate donation to print 100,000 copies of four new Armed Services Editions to active-duty American military personnel serving in combat zones overseas.
