^B00:00:01 >> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^M00:00:05 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:18 >> Well, good afternoon and welcome to the Library of Congress. I'm John Cole. I'm the director of the Library Center for the Book, which is the reading promotion arm of the library. And we promote books, reading, literacy, and libraries in many different ways. We're closely involved with the National Book Festival, which we finished about a week ago on a wonderfully warm, well...wonderful day. It was a little too warm, but we had a large crowd. And on the table, as you come in, I put some extra copies of the program, if you didn't get one, and there are some other handouts out there, including Center for the Book's schedule and other items related to our activities. Here at the library, one of our major activities, in addition to the book festival, are Books and Beyond talks. We thank you for joining us for John Hench's talk. These are talks by authors of new books that have some kind of relationship to the Library of Congress. Often, they are based on our collections. Often, they are a result of a project that has been developed with one of the divisions of the library, and we're always pleased to have project co-sponsors. But, invariably, they are a reflection of the Library of Congress, as well as the book and the author, and we do it to make the point that on all of our reading promotion activities, often we forget about the importance of one of the end results. And that is: books, books, books. And we are deeply involved in the promotion-end of things. These talks are videotaped for later viewing on the Library of Congress's website, and for that reason, I ask you to turn off all things electronic. We will have a presentation from John about this wonderful new book published by Cornell University Press. Then, they'll be a brief period of questions and answers. And John will repeat the question through the microphone, and I want to say that by participating in the question and answer session, you are becoming part, with your permission...could be part of the web cast, eventually. So, you have an important role to play. The books itself is "Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II." And John will be telling the story behind the book, as well as making the point about this unusual partnership that resulted between the U.S. government and American book publishers. I've known John Hench for many years. I worked with him when he was at American Antiquarian Society, as a former...he was a former vice-president for Collections and Programs at AAS. Their titles are almost as complicated as those here at the Library of Congress. He worked there from 1973 until he retired, he determined, just four years ago. And I know, to John, he couldn't believe it's been four years, but here it is. But, he's put his time to very productive use because this is a book that I was privileged to learn about early on. I recommended it to Cornell University Press for publication. It is beautifully produced, I think, by Cornell. And it's going to be a pleasure to learn about it from John. I also should mention that the Center for the Book is joining the trend. We have a Facebook page. This book is already on it. You can learn about it. You can learn about previous talks. You can make comments about it. You can make comments in exchange with some of the program's future authors, as well as past authors. I now would like to...and then, the book signing will follow the presentation, roughly at one o'clock, after the question and answer period. It is now my pleasure to present my friend, and a friend of many people in the audience, John Hench to talk about his new book, "Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II." Let's give John a hand. ^M00:04:40 [ Applause ] ^M00:04:47 >> Thank you, John. I'm delighted to be here, and I appreciate your hospitality on this occasion as on so many other occasions that I have attended programs here of one sort or another. ...nice to see relatives and old friends in the audience and a contingent of people from the National Endowment for the Humanities without whose support this book would not exist. So, thank you very much. I want to give you a brief, informal overview of the book before questions. I expect that I am the only person in this room that has read the book through and through. I may be wrong, but whether you've read the book or not, by now it doesn't really matter because you can certainly ask questions, whether you've read the book or not. And I've found, actually, in other occasions, that some of the best questions come from people who haven't read the book. And they're asking questions that allow me to say, "Now, why didn't I think of that," or something. I should've. And make a note for second edition, or something like that. So, think about questions as we go along. I'll start with actually two very brief readings. One from page one. ^M00:06:05 [ Pause ] ^M00:06:10 This is the opening two paragraphs of the introduction, titled "Books on the Normandy Beaches." "On June sixth, 1944, D-Day, more than one hundred fifty thousand allied troops, transported by the largest invasion fleet ever assembled, gained a beachhead on the Normandy cost, beginning the campaign that lead to the defeat of Nazi Germany and the liberation of millions of people. From these French beaches, the invading armies spread out, capturing the strategic port of Cherbourg, and, in time, taking Paris. For several months after the first wave of forces had moved on, great numbers of fresh troops, along with military supplies, food, and medicine, were offloaded at various points along the forty miles of coastline that extended from Utah to Sorre [phonetic] beaches, or in the large ports like Cherbourg and L'hav [phonetic], after they were captured by the allies. With the early landings came an unlikely weapon of war, crates of books. Only a few weeks after D-Day, these boxes, each weighing about eighty pounds and containing between ten and twenty-seven copies of two dozen different British and American books divided equally between the two nations, were deposited on the beaches. Like the brave soldiers who had landed earlier, this odd cargo also suffered casualties. Weather and tides obliterated labels on a number of the boxes, causing damage and delays in getting them to French bookstores and news dealers. But in good time, the books reached the outlets, where they were eagerly snapped up by customers desperately hungry for reading material from a world different from the one they had inhabited for too many dreadful years." And now, my second reading, even briefer, is actually of the three epigraphs that are on page VII of the book. ^M00:08:09 "Books cannot be killed by fire. People die but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp, forever. No man and no force can take from the world of books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know, books are weapons." That was part of a declaration by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Second one. "Books do not have their impact upon the mass-mind but upon the mind's of those who would mold the mass-mind, upon leaders of thought and formulators of public opinion. The impact of a book may last six months or several decades. Books are the most enduring propaganda of all." And that was written by an official of the Office of War Information, which was the government's chief propaganda agency during the war. And the third one is, "The opportunity exists, as it never may again, for American books to have an inside track to the world's bookshelves." That, too, is written by another Office of War Information official. I think these...if you haven't read the book, maybe all you really need is to read those three epigraphs because, in a way, that sums up, those three sum up, the basic themes of the book. And I just, in kind of giving you an overview of it, I want to tackle those three, in turn, and to kind of give you a sense of why they are there, and why they are important to the narrative and argument of the books. First of all, the one about books as weapons. President Roosevelt made that a very major pronouncement, during the war, for both domestic morale purposes, as well as for the purposes of this program that I'm going to be describing today, which was very decidedly one for overseas consumption. But, actually, the notion of books as weapons, had actually been earlier formulated as almost an unofficial motto of the Council on Books in Wartime, which was a private, non-profit wartime organization put together by the American books publishers as their way to concentrate their efforts on helping win the war by continuing to raise morale at home, as well as overseas. And it was actually coined by the chairman of the Council on Books in Wartime, who was W.W. Norton. You've seen his name on more than one book. I'm sure. The notion of...and, oh, the Office of War Information, of course, also used this widely, that motto. Now, you know, all of us, here, are interested in books, and we, I think, tend, often, to sacralize books, which is good. But, the notion that if people read, they automatically, of course, develop good thoughts and honorable behavior, and all this sort of thing, well, of course, that isn't actually true. And books are such...have been, throughout history, such a double-edged sword. Books can build up. They can tear down. They can be on the side of the angels. They can be on the side of the devil. They can create, and they can destroy. They can format revolution or they can support the status quo. The former Librarian of Congress, Archibald McCleash [phonetic], who I'm sure would've spoken from this podium had this building been built... ^M00:12:04 ...when he was Librarian of Congress, once wrote...he challenged Americans to recognize the power of books as truly as the Nazi mob, which dumped them on the fire. And I'm sure many of you do know that, shortly after Hitler took power, his Brown Shirts had this enormous series of bonfires in Germany where all of suspect literature, much of it, of course, by Jewish authors or Communist authors or those would be in any way unfriendly to the Reich, were literally burned. And that became such a powerful symbol of the Nazi regime. And even though books, themselves, may take on, may produce evil results, I think most sane people don't condone burning them. So, that was an important part of this notion of books as weapons. Hitler used the burning of books as weapons, and, of course, he used his own book, "Mein Kampf," as a powerful weapon of war. And so, what McCleash was doing was trying to get the Americans to realize that books could also be useful to tear down what Hitler had tried to create. The second epigraph, the one that...oh, let me...actually, I have one more point I want to make about books as weapons. And that is that the notion of books as weapons implies that books, someway or another, have the power to perform cultural work, that they have the power to perform political work, that they have the power to influence history, in some way or another. And you think of ways, of course, in which books have influenced history. And "Mein Kampf" is certainly one of them. But, others would be, or print, the works of Martin Luther, and the works of the encylopedists [assumed spelling] in the coming of the French Revolution. But, another point I want to make, in this regard, is that this notion that books have the power to do work culturally, and to influence history, was really part of the professional ideology of book publishers. Book publishing was as much a craft as it was a business. Nobody wanted to lose money, but they didn't put all emphasis on the bottom line. They wanted to publish good and important books. They felt they were doing good work and that this is one of the things that differentiated them from the maker of Widgets and soap, bathroom soaps and toothpaste, and so on. And it was very important for them to understand. That was the kind of psychological benefit that got many of them to work for wages that were far below what they might've made in other forms of business enterprise. Okay, now that the books do not have their impact upon the mass-mind...this statement was an important influence on the creation of this program that I started to describe in my first reading. And, that actually was an important part of what was called "consolidation propaganda" during the war. There are all sorts of different kinds of propaganda, but consolidation propaganda is a form of propaganda that follows battle-time propaganda. During the war, of course, lots of propaganda was used, both domestically, to keep the home front's morale up, and used against the enemy to try to break his will, to try to create disinformation, to create targets of opportunity, or to persuade them from creating targets of opportunity upon the...and primarily, on the battle field, propaganda was designed to get the enemy soldier to surrender. But, consolidation propaganda was different. It really was kind of a program that was put into place in that period of time between the cessation of battle and the full coming of peace and security. The job of consolidation propagandists was varied, but among the goals was to maintain calm. Right after D-Day, for example, consolidation propaganda of various forms was introduced into France, and this, of course, proceeded throughout Europe and the rest of the world. But, to maintain calm...there was no way to know how the French would respond, entirely, to the American troops, and so, another one was to ensure compliance with the orders of the liberating armies and whatever temporary military government might ensue, as well as to, and this is one of the chief military goals...was also to reduce the need...by calming the population, getting them to obey orders without protest or insurrection was a way of reducing the need for occupation troops, or as many occupation troops as they might otherwise need. And remember, the end of the war in Europe was not the end of the war, the second world war, as a whole. I mean, when France was liberated, there were still were many other nations to liberate. And even when Germany surrendered, there was still Japan to worry about, and the military did not want to commit more than the minimum amount of forces in Europe because they would be needed to fight and to win, finally, over the Japanese. Another role of, particularly as it affected the psyche of civilians, was to disintoxicate, as one of the officials said, to disintoxicate the European people from German propaganda, the propaganda that Goebbels had been so successful in disseminating in the years that the Nazis had been in power and the years that they had ruled over the overrun countries. The notion was that the...that's about all that Europeans had had, was Nazi propaganda, Nazi censorship, for four, five, or six years. They'd heard nothing from the free world other than scattered broadcasts on the BBC, which they listened to at the risk of their lives. And so, this was designed to kind of counteract that, to disintoxicate them. The other notion of this, of course, was that books were a special medium among media. They, primarily, were a way of getting at the opinion makers in any society. Not that there weren't popular books, but these would have to be thoughtful books, books that dealt with ideas and policies, and so on. And that, by aiming them at the leaders of opinion and the elites in the overrun nations, and eventually in Germany itself, they figured that this would get more bang for the buck because these people, in effect, would create reading communities. They would influence their family members. They would influence their associates, their employees, the people in their community, and so on. And, obviously, books could only play overseas, a significant role during the consolidation phase because books were not very useful for getting the German G.I.s to surrender, or for getting the German public, through the underground markets, to read a book when they should be reading little pamphlets, and so on. So, but it was particularly useful in this particular consolidation phase. The third epigraph, where it says that the opportunity exists for American books to have an inside track to the world's bookshelves, is the most important factor in explaining why the American book publishers were so involved in this program that I have written about, here. American book publishers had been, for the most part, very little interested in taking, working very hard to get their books abroad. They enjoyed a continental market, here, in North America, that was large enough to provide them with significant profits. They figured that the expense and bother of sending small numbers of copies of American books to booksellers abroad, or even dealing with European booksellers, or British booksellers, to sell the rights to publish their books abroad, just wasn't worth the effort. But, somehow, almost as soon as the war began, they set their sights higher. Even, I found evidence, that even within a month, or so, after Hitler invaded Poland, American publishers...already thinking of ways that they might actually begin to take market share away from the British, which were the publishers who had the best world market system in the world because it was co-equal with the British empire and now the emerging British Commonwealth. So, they'd done very well in creating new markets during the war, mainly the soldier market. And all these guys would be coming back, of course, and hoped that they would buy books when they came back, having read the armed services editions overseas. But, they also, for the first time, wanted to get serious about finding new markets abroad. They were able to do this by capitalizing on two issues, two matters. One, there was an enormous hunger for books overseas. I found, in archives everywhere, countless statements of civilians saying, "I would rather have books than food. I would give anything to have a book that doesn't parrot Nazi propaganda." And so, here was this kind of demand, this sense of demand overseas, for books, and the other reason was, as I've kind of already indicated, the weakness of the other international publishing nations. The British book trade had been severely damaged during the war. It was Britain. The British publishing industry was under far more severe rationing regimentations than the American publishing trade was. Their labor shortage was greater. They also had suffered enormous losses of back stock, of current stock, of their books when the German Luftwaffe bombed warehouses in Germany, in London, destroying, literally, millions of books. And libraries were also destroyed, as well. And the British found, of course, a lot of their lines of communication to markets in the empire abroad were obviously not possible given conditions of war. Germany, which is also another major international book trade, particularly in Science, Engineering, Technology, that trade had been completely, morally, had become morally bankrupt. The French, also, had had a good international book trade, within their possessions abroad, as well as within, say, Quebec, and many parts of Latin America, as well, but it, too, was greatly weakened, as well. But the chief obstacle was the British book trade to Americans efforts to establish new markets abroad. And it was their efforts to take away some markets that got them into battles with the British throughout the war and, actually, for many years afterwards. So, there was a lot of competition going on during this time, competition, certainly, with the traditional British markets, but also a lot of cooperation because this program of getting these books abroad, and distributed abroad, was actually a joint undertaking of the British and American governments directly under the command of SHAEF, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces. And General Eisenhower was really the commander of this program. I mentioned these books that were brought ashore in the weeks after D-Day. That was a program that ultimately did not succeed in doing the job because those books were books that were already, had already, been published, were drawn from publishers' warehouse stock, or from bookstores, or whatever; were not available, because of a great demand in the United States...were not available in the quantities that would be necessary. And therefore, the Office of War Information and the Council on Books in Wartime created a corporation called Overseas Editions Incorporated, which would select, carefully select, and publish new editions in paperback of books that would be paperback, small, easy to transport, that would be shipped abroad, that would be sold through normal outlets, bookstores, whatever; they were not to be given away, and that these were really the books that, ultimately, had whatever effect they had. And there were, ultimately, between the Overseas Editions and a parallel series created out of the Office of War Information Office in London...that did the trick. And those were a total of about 92 separate editions of about 40 different titles. So, it was a relatively small program, but they were carefully selected. So, that's the overview, and I hope this had given you enough of a priming of the pump to ask some questions, either about anything that I've spoken about, or even better, things I haven't spoken about. ^M00:27:48 Yes? >> How long did this program continue and was it [inaudible]... a consideration for reengineering it or using it [inaudible]... the cold war? ^M00:27:56 >> The questions is, "How long did this program go on and was there any possibility it could be repurposed for use in the Cold War?" The program started, actually, in the...not that many weeks, months, before D-Day, actually. And the first effort, of course, was to select the books that would be taken from existing publishers' stocks. The notion of doing the Overseas Editions came a bit later, when it became clear that the existing stocks would not be done, but that didn't really get off the ground for, actually, several months after D-Day for various reasons of congressional funding, opposition to it for various reasons, and so on. And, the books were pretty much distributed by the E-Day and VJ-Day, and the Office of War Information, actually, was disbanded about a month after, one or two months, after VJ-Day. And the Council on Books in Wartime was disbanded at the end of 1945, so those programs did not exist. Some of the machinery that these had put in place, that is, using government officials abroad, eventually through the U.S. Information Service, to broker the sale of American book rights to European publishers as soon as they got back in business after the war was over, that continued. And that was a mechanism by which a lot of American cookbooks got into Europe and Asia after this program was disbanded. The U.S. government did mount a lot of programs during the Cold War, some of which were certainly, the notion of which, were inspired by these projects, but there was no direct continuation. ^M00:30:00 >> Can you compare the book program to the film program, where people, like John Forde, Frank Capra, made propaganda films for [inaudible]? ^M00:30:24 >> I can't, I don't really know an awful about...oh, the questions is, "What are the similarities and dissimilarities between this program and the government's film program?" The Office of War Information was also involved in some domestic book programs, as well. Those were not terribly successful, and there was a lot of suspicion of those from Congress, particularly from Republicans and southern Democrats who thought all of this would be Roosevelt propaganda. So, that was abandoned fairly early. Then, the Capra films, and so on you're talking about, were mainly for domestic use of wartime morale. And, of course, these were for the folks overseas. There was...OWI also had a parallel consolidation phase program of films overseas, as well, which actually paled in comparison to this one. And I find that a great irony, while we're on the subject of films...that one of the sources of Goebbels' most telling propaganda, that is, the notion that America was a nation either of dissolute capitalists or gangsters, was very much, very obviously to many people...it was a product of the popularity of American Hollywood films during the 1930's. The Ginger Roger, Fred Astaire films, where they were all, you know, club-goers and this sort of thing...or the George Raft and...whatever the other great...Cagney and so on was...and, literally...so, I find it a great irony that this not quite so mass medium of books was tasked to undo the damage done by American films during the war. And it wasn't just the people in France, or in Germany, that felt this way. Our closest allies, the Brits, had the same stereotypes of us, as well. Melissa. ^M00:32:39 >> What are some of the titles of the books distributed? Were they political? Were they fiction? [inaudible]...standardized criteria, selection criteria? ^M00:32:46 >> They did. They were primarily non-fiction. Very few works of fiction, but let me begin by saying that almost all of them were books that had been published within the last four or five years. They were books that had been popular in the United States. They were books that many of them had been bestsellers, Book of the Month Club selections. They were works, for the most part, of middle-brow appeal, and the importance of this was at least two fold. One was that these were the books that were hot properties for the American publishers, and they hoped would be hot properties for the European publishers who might buy the rights to translate them or publish them in Britain, and so on. They also, because they were books that had been produced for the American public and were now being selected for their propaganda value, that they would not seem to be, they were not made to be propaganda. They were books that ordinary Americans were reading. They had not been written by the government to try to tell, you know, to convey the government's propaganda on them. Among the novels were "For Whom the Bell Tolls," William Saroyan's "The Human Comedy," but most of the books were books of non-fiction, books about public affairs, current affairs, books, for example: Walter Litman's "U.S. Foreign Policy and U.S. War Aims," Nevin's and Comeger's [assumed spelling] "Brief History of the United States." A surprising number of books were about the war itself and, particularly, about the war in the Pacific. And, at first, I thought, you know, the last thing, if I were in France, would want to read about, probably, was war. But, that was very poignant, and that goes to your question about the criteria. They had to meet, you know, to counteract Goebbels, they needed to put America's best foot forward. But, the books that were about the Pacific war were intended to tell Europeans what we'd been doing during the war, which they, actually, knew, apparently, not an awful lot about: the fact that we were not just waging war in the European theater, but also in the Pacific. And so, you know, the G.I.'s might have been greeted with kisses and flowers, but maybe a few days later, they were saying, "What took you so long," you know? And this was by way of saying, "This is what had taken us so long. We've been fighting the Japanese, as well." And this notion of these books about the specific war were particularly useful for France and for the Netherlands because we wanted to convince them, number one, that they could not expect us to do much about restoring the economy, rebuilding the economy and infrastructure of Europe, until we defeated Japan. And, you know, "You in France and the Netherlands, you lost colonies to the Japanese. And, we would welcome whatever you can possibly do to help us defeat the Japanese." Now, all of these books about the Pacific war were somewhat mooded [phonetic] because these had thought to be important during the year, or so, it was expected to take to defeat Japan. But, of course, the bombing of Hiroshima just kind of, just cut that motive dead. Other questions? Yes? ^M00:36:37 >> Obviously, the chief story, here, is about Europe, but I'm also interested in knowing, and having read the book, I know you address this a little bit, but I wonder if publishers thought about doing [inaudible]? ^M00:36:50 >> Yes, it was a totally different story. The way in which the structure of the American book program for Asia was quite different than from the American book program for Japan, and China, and other parts in the Far East. And that was for a number of reasons. Originally, there had been thoughts of having Overseas Editions published, translated into Japanese and Chinese, for use over there. But, again, there was...that program had really not even started before Hiroshima. And so, there was nothing ready at that point. They had begun the OWI of Pacific people, and the army Pacific people had begun to stockpile some books in places like the Philippines, once that was re-liberated. But it was not, there was no coherent program to actually choose and to publish separate editions of these for those markets. Eventually, and actually it took a while to get a formal program going of translations, but, basically, and whereas...another enormous difference is that in Germany, for example, the military government completely tore down most of the institutions of German life and cultures and, certainly, the mass media, of all. So, you know, when Germany surrendered, there really was no printing, publishing, broadcasting, book trade left. And that would be re-created through programs of licensing and registering. And, as part of that, was meant to be a program of checking on the wartime record of the individuals, you know...getting into who had applied to get back into publishing, or to get into publishing...what had they done in the war, and how strong were their Nazi connections, and so on? That petered out after a while. The effort to do that petered out after a while, after the threat to compete in propaganda against the Soviets became stronger than the desire to route out every last branch of Nazism. So, in Japan that was not the case. The Japanese publishers, and printers, and so one, were allowed to stay in business, basically. They were under a close supervision of the SCAP, Supreme Command Allied Powers, under General MacArthur, and a book and the be approved to be re-published over there, but the Japanese publishing trade got into business almost immediately. And they first started, or, actually, just probably re-printing books from their, you know, that they had published before. And there's a fabulous collection of the books that were published during the U.S. occupation of Japan at the University of Maryland library, the McKelvin library, thanks to Gordon Prang who wrote the history of Pearl Harbor. He worked for military, the information division over there, and somehow managed to get those books for where he taught, the University of Maryland. I don't know why they didn't come here, or whatever, but a great coup. Does that sort of answer your question? John. ^M00:40:40 >> John, I'm trying to, I learned a lot from reading your book, and some people know we work, we do have a collection at the Library of Congress [inaudible]. I'm certain [inaudible] an archival set, which is in Rare Book division. And I was fortunate enough to work on that collection, in this sense, that we had a kind of an oral history project [inaudible] in 1983, a number of people who'd worked on that project. But, your project gave me a new perspective of the ASE's that... Am I right in thinking that, perhaps, the ASE's, compared to the Overseas Editions, really fell more in the category of recreational reading for the troops rather than having, as the Overseas Editions did, really this long-range publishing look at what was going to happen after the war to... >> Yeah. >> ...the apparatus? ^M00:41:36 >> Yes, that's the case for the most part, though my sense is that as, you know...the extreme probability, if not the certainty, that we were going to win the war, came upon us, that the earlier goal of the Armed Service Editions to provide mostly entertainment for the troops, westerns, some...lots of fiction, westerns, mysteries, but a lot of classics, as well...you know, poetry...no Shakespeare. I'm struck by the fact that there was no Shakespeare, and he wasn't...his works were in the public domain. You know, it wasn't any problem. But, toward the end of the war, more of the titles seemed to be books about the future after war, about the peace. They were either kind of outlining what the goals of the United States would be after the war, as well as training, getting the G.I.'s to think about what they might do. One of the titles is "So You Want to Go into Radio," or something like that. And, it was in other books that might give some sense of what careers might be hot after the war. There certainly were careful, I mean...these were forty titles. Armed Services Edition was over thirteen hundred titles. >> And twenty-two million... >> ...and twenty-two million copies. And so, it was much a greater undertaking, in that regard, and not every book was selected. They were...they...again, there was a piece of legislation called "The Soldier Voting Act," which...while setting up the groundwork for soldiers to vote in elections overseas, also prohibited the circulating to G.I.'s of any books, or magazines, or pamphlets, or whatever, that might contain material, that might be considered soliciting the votes for a candidate. And again, this was another one of the Andy Roosevelt pieces of legislation. So, there were, for example, a major part of the Overseas Edition series: there were two different books about the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the main projects of the New Deal, which were designed very purposely. They were included because they would suggest to Europeans that the United States...Europeans who were used to much more regulated society, certainly in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union and in other nations in Europe...that the United States, that social planning could go on in a democracy. But, these books would not have been allowed, obviously, and were not permitted to be in the Armed Services Editions because they could be seen as political in tone. >> And another difference would be format. >> Format, right. >> ... [inaudible] editions were in all kinds of forms. >> Right. I should've...you know, I meant to bring some of these books, but the Armed Service Editions, if you know anything about them, they were oblong books, like that, and printed that way to gain the capacity of presses that were pretty much idle during the war. The Overseas Editions were upright, more the general U.S. and foreign paperback format. But, when I saw the first one I ever saw, which got me into collecting them, which got me into writing this book, researching, writing this book, it just looked so different. It... >> What was it? >> Well, if any of you...there's pictures in here...if you think of...if you've been to Paris or you've seen French paperbacks from the thirties, or forties, or fifties, or even today, their covers are very unornamented. They tend to be purely typographical, maybe except for a colophon or something like that, usually tan covers with the title in red and the rest of the text in black, and that's what these Overseas Editions look like. And that was absolutely on purpose. They were done that was so that Europeans, beginning with the French, which was the first target audience, would see these as being familiar to them, looking familiar to them. They wouldn't know what to do, maybe, with and Armed Services Edition, with that very odd format. And so, it was a brilliant stroke, I think, on part of Chester Curr [assumed spelling] who some of you may know or know of. Chester Curr was the long-time, after the war, the long-time director of Yale University Press, and he was the head honcho of this particular, the Overseas Editions program. Other questions? Yes? ^M00:46:44 >> I'm just trying to understand who in France is going to read these English language books at that time. They weren't really a great English reading society... ^M00:46:56 >> I should have said that...I apologize. These...the books were...the Overseas Editions were produced in English and in translation into French, Italian, German, and Dutch. So, there were plenty of books in French to circulate there. And although, you know, again, there may have been ways in which they might have done, you know, Danish editions, or whatever. They figured that since these were aimed at elites that elites would probably, in many countries, even in France...elites, some elites at least, would be able to read the English. And certainly, that would've been the case in the Netherlands, and in Denmark, and Norway, and other places. And, in the absence of books in, say, Chinese, or Japanese, some of the English language books were used in Asia as were some of the French language books because, certainly, in parts of Asia, of course, French was a common language. So, it was...but, you know, translation was...that was a factor in helping delay the introduction of these because...and it was probably the one that the Council and the Office of War Information handled less expertly, in part, because even though almost everybody involved with the project, at the government or the council level, had come into these offices from the world of publishing, and they knew how to produce books, edit them, publish them, produce them; they didn't know how to translate them, particularly because an American publisher would normally be, you know, would be...translation, the other way around. And so, but, and I don't know what they would have done. They were saved by the great number of European intellectuals, and academics, and writers, and so on, who had come to the United States as refugees from the Nazis, many of them who settled in New York, which was were both the Office of War Information project was headquartered and the Council was headquartered. And so, it was this group, as well as some other refugees. And others from other universities throughout the country, mostly in the east, were selected to do these. But there was time constraints. It took a lot of effort to get them to do these works on time, and so on. But, there was a cluster of these people that lived, resided, in Kew Gardens, Queens. As a matter of fact, I know where all of them lived. [Laughs] Others? Yes? ^M00:49:56 >> How many copies of these books were, ultimately, printed and distributed? >> My recollection is it was about, in contrast to 122 million of the Overseas Editions, it was about five or six... >> Armed Services... >> Armed Services, I mean...five or six million copies, but there were, you know, hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions, more that were distributed both before the Overseas Editions were as well as under the auspices of other entities in Europe after the war was over. So, probably...well, I don't know...ten, fifteen millions of these books were specifically brought into Europe after the war. And again, aiming, as they were, at not mass markets, but to get leaders to then communicate the ideas in them to others, that probably did a lot of work. I'm usually asked was there any effort to try and find out what the effect of this was, and the answer is there really wasn't much. Unlike the Armed Services addictions...additions... addictions...additions as John knows, where there is, and I've seen them at Princeton University, where the Council of Books on Wartime archives are, there were hundreds and hundreds of letters, of "thank you" letters, and fan letters from G.I.'s thanking them for these books. A lot of letters were sent directly to the authors of the books, and so on. But in the archives at Princeton for the Overseas Editions, there's only one letter. And it's a rave, but...and I think that the reason for that is, again, the Armed Services Editions were meant for G.I.'s, Americans who would be able to communicate this easily. But, these were meant for Europeans, and Asians, and so on. And, there was nothing on the books that would indicate a mailing address for them to send a letter to. And by the time that people might've gotten around to thinking, "Well, I ought to write a letter," assuming they had any paper to write on, or any postage stamps, they wouldn't have known where to write because, by this time, the Council on War Information...the Office of War Information and the Council on Books in Wartime were defunct. So, there was no effort, really... >> [ Inaudible Audience Response ] >> Right. Would you want to just hold that up, John? There was no real way they could've communicated with them, in any case. And there was nobody left in the agencies to even try to mount some sort of public opinion campaign overseas for it. It's a shame, but they sold well. They were sold. They were meant to be sold, and they basically sold out. Some of the later titles may not have because they might have come a little too late. ^M00:53:18 Other questions? Susan. >> As your sister... >> My sister, here... ^M00:53:26 >> ...I'd love to know whether you're just going to sit back now in your retirement or what you're going to do next. ^M00:53:33 >> This is my sister asking this question. What am I going to do next? Am I going to simply retire? Well, I'd like to...I've told people that the one thing I do miss: I have not had as much time just to read for pleasure, as I had thought I would, and I am looking forward to that. But, I am working on, right now, on another project that, you know, draws certainly on much of the same material as I've work here. And that's on the magazines that were designed for...they were especially published for the American forces overseas, during the war. And there were about...some were, at least two dozen, maybe thirty, of these magazines that did publish special editions for the G.I. to get the support of the government, the military, the army library service, and the counterparts for the Navy and Marines. They had to be printed on lightweight paper, and they had to be printed without advertising that was in the domestic editions. And, about a half a dozen of the magazines went one step further and also reduced, photographically reduced, the size of the magazines, all the greater to save weight for shipments abroad. And the big three were Time, Newsweek, and the New Yorker. And all three of them were printed on reduced-sized lightweight paper, which were varyingly called Pony editions, or Battle Babies, as Newsweek called them. My take on this: I'm really kind of just at the beginning of it. I've done quite a bit of research in the New Yorker archives at New York Public Library. I've done a little bit of research in the Time Inc. archives in New York. But, basically, my take is that these magazines, by participation, just like the book publishers, of these magazines, they were able to help, you know, support morale, support the public interest, do the nation's work during the war. But...and so they were able to do good...but this also enabled them to do well, in terms of financially, and in terms of business ventures, and so on. Just as the publishers were geared up to expand overseas, either through their own offices or through greater activity with partners abroad, the publishers of magazines also were doing the same thing. And, in fact, there is a clear line of dissent, I think it's true with Newsweek as well, but, certainly, with Time magazine, between the creation of editions for the troops overseas, which...as the pacified areas expanded, they were now being actually published, printed, in Italy, or in France, or in the Philippines, or whatever, for distribution abroad. These are the direct ancestors of the multitude of foreign editions of Time magazine that exist, today, abroad. >> John. Time to sign the books. I'd like to thank John, really, for a wonderful talk. And goodness! The wealth of knowledge you have gained form this research, I can see, is going to be the basis for a number of books. I hope. I really hope. >> Do I want to write another book? I don't know. ^M00:57:20 [ Laughter ] ^M00:57:21 >> Well, you have an invitation to come back when that next book is ready. Please join me in thanking John, now, and talking with him later. ^M00:57:29 [ Applause ] ^M00:57:34 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.GOV. ^E00:57:42