How millions of little books helped in Word War II

I have a photo of my father, sitting on a log on a beach somewhere in the South Pacific during World War II. Herman Kogan was a United States Marine Corps sergeant, a combat correspondent who fought and reported on the battles of Guadalcanal, Okinawa and elsewhere and, of course, returned safely to Chicago.

He wrote stories for this newspaper during the war and he also read books. I look at this photo and imagine one of these books tucked into a pocket of his fatigues, and I know he was not alone, as over 120 million books were distributed to soldiers fighting in World War II.

He didn’t talk much about the war when I was growing up, but he told me about some of the books he read when the guns were silent. This is one of the most remarkable, if relatively forgotten, stories of that war, but this book account of the battle has returned with a vengeance with the release of the latest limited edition from the always imaginative company called Field Notes.

About four times a year since its creation in 2007, this local outfit offers these limited editions. The previous 68 of them have covered topics such as baseball, dime novels, space flight, national parks, the Great Lakes, and more.

This new book is called “1943” and is based on the Armed Services Editions, a series of fiction and nonfiction books published and distributed to the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1947. More than 120 million copies of 1,200 titles were issued to troops in a small paperback format designed for a soldier’s pocket.

The story came to Field Notes’ attention earlier this year when one of the company’s recently hired young designers, Casey Rheault, found images of the ASE books online. He showed them to Field Notes boss Jim Coudal and asked, “Have you ever seen this?” Coudal hadn’t and later that day he bought a few historic examples on eBay.

Coudal explains Field Notes’ philosophy to me: “We like to dig deeper into topics. We like to sell notebooks and we like to tell stories. This edition checked all those boxes. We don’t worry about things, we just believe that if we’re curious about something and excited about the process, people like us will enjoy it too.”

The “1943” edition “mimics the horizontal orientation of the ASE. Although this is our usual 5.5″ x 3.5″ notebook size, they are the first to have two staples on the short side instead of three on the long side.” They come in bright red, yellow and blue.

Coudal had called his friend, novelist and frequent collaborator Kevin Guilfoile, to express his enthusiasm for this project. And they brought something extra, inspired by the “gold mine” found by digging and reading “When Books Went to War,” a 2014 book by Molly Guptill Manning.

The book inspired a rare Field Notes podcast featuring Guilfoile in conversation for an hour with the sharp and intelligent author.

But wait, there’s more, and it comes in the form of “The Maltese Falcon” by Samuel Dashiell Hammett. Although Guilfoile writes that it “was never published in an armed services edition, it is the kind of sexy, gritty, gritty novel that would undoubtedly have been a troop favorite.”

It is now published as a Field Note Brand Books release, available as part of a “1943” package or as an individual title. It is the second such book, following Guilfoile’s “A Drive into the Gap,” about baseball and fathers and sons, and which Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago author Jonathan Eig called “an extraordinary, (a) beautifully written story about baseball and memory. Simply amazing.”

Guilfoile also recounts the happy fate of what many consider the great American novel “The Great Gatsby.” Most forget that it attracted only modest attention and dismal sales when first published in 1925. But after being reprinted as ASE, it was, Guilfoile writes, “a huge success…(It) would almost certainly never have made it onto your 21st century high school reading list without the ASE curriculum.” » (Poor F. Scott Fitzgerald will never know; he died in 1940.)

Guilfoile also tells us the censorship-shaded publication story of “The Maltese Falcon,” which was first serialized in five issues of Black Mask Magazine, and he solves one of the mysteries from the 1941 film version of the book, which starred Humphrey Bogart as private detective Sam Spade. Guilfoile writes about a pivotal phrase in the film, when Bogart refers to the falcon as “the stuff dreams are made of.”

As Guilfoile explains: “This line, the most famous in the film, appears neither in the novel nor in the screenplay. It is adapted from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest,’ and legend has it that Bogart suggested it to (director John) Huston on set, during the filming of the final scene of the film.”

That’s good to know. As for the entire ASE saga, Guilfoile says it “transformed many soldiers into avid readers,… comforted millions in combat zones, and fostered a culture of reading… The program transformed forgotten works into beloved classics, expanded the market for affordable books, and promoted literature for both entertainment and the public good.” »