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So, way back in, um, August,

skygiants posted about Armed Services Edition paperbacks that were printed in special editions for serving military in WWII, and I mentioned I owned one and said if I could ever figure out where it was shelved I would post pictures.

Well, I didn't manage to find it until November, and by then I had quit Tumblr for self-defense, so my lazy method of using Tumblr as an image host wasn't happening. But DW just rolled out a gui for its image hosting! So, only six months later, here are the pictures!

The one I own is "An Almanac for Moderns", which is basically a book of 365 short essays about nature and science, to be read one a day for a year. So I was almost right when I said I thought it was a field guide, yet couldn't find it shelved with the field guides. It's pretty fun, actually, but I could never stick with one chapter a day. As you might guess for an edition that was meant to be small and was published during the WWII paper shortages, the pages are very thin and very delicate seventy years later. (And I still haven't figured out why the sideways binding; to me it makes it more difficult to read, although maybe when it was newer it meant you could lay it flat on a table to read more easily?)

Front cover, with a standard mass-market paperback for scale

Armed Services Edition blurb

Attempting to read it

And flat

List of other titles

Back cover

(There's a few more uploaded in my dw images, if you can figure out how to get there....)

As is visible in a couple of the photos, my book has a single staple reinforcing the binding, which is a large part of what makes it hard to read. I can't tell if this was part of the standard binding or it was added by a later owner. It doesn't seem to be a later addition? It's definitely not a standard staple - you would have needed a heavy-duty stapler and staples - and the binding isn't falling apart in such a way that it seems needed. So IDK unless

skygiants knows!

And while I am posting images of cool old books I own, if you have ever been to an American public school you are probably familiar with the idea of a "marble composition book." I don't know if you ever wondered why those were a thing, but I bought a couple of marble composition books about a year ago that had somebody's school exercises from the mid-19th century in them, and the covers were actually marbled! It does make sense, I guess, that "not quite the cheapest" notebooks in the past would have actually marbled covers, but that's so divorced from what we get today that it never even occurred to me.

(the set of books I found also included an account books of day-to-day expenses in the late 19th century. Someday I am going to figure out where the dude was living and donate it to a historical society. They came with 0 provenance, so that didn't help.)

I am actually continuing to make substantial progress on the "sort all the books" project! I may start posting polls so you all can help me decide what to read off my long-unread fiction piles next - I am thinking "fuck, marry, kill" format where you get to decide if I have a sudden night of ill-considered passion, or continue my long-term relationship with having it in my bedroom, or get rid of it unread.

And finally, here is a picture of a cat:

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Would the awkward format add up to a regular larger, regularly folded magazine format or such if you put two or three together? Maybe they just had certain paper formats available and wanted to repurpose it for small books and could get the most out of it if cut this way.

It's almost exactly the size of a mass market paperback, though, just bound on a different side? And they did have mass market paperbacks then. It's glue-bound, so I don't think they were dealing with signatures.

The only thing I could think of is that somehow by putting the text in two columns per page, they were able to condense it more easily.

If my (hazy) memory serves, that was the reason -- the two columns of text -> less paper overall -> more likely to fit in a service pocket even if the book itself was somewhat long. I think. (I do not remember at all about the staple, though!)

I feel like I read that somewhere too but I don't really see how two columns makes it smaller! it's the same amount of text either way, there's more margin with columns, and it was all letterpress so it's not like they were just scaling down existing plates to fit two on a page or something.

it's easier to read with columns in the long format but if they bind it the other way that wouldn't matter.

I don't think it's that. I think it's configuring the book to have the 'binding' where the grabbing happens. Lots of cheapish (aka clothbound when leather was still a thing) birding and plant guides were also narrow side bound (though stitched) intended to fit into a pocket.

I have some field guides from the 30s that are bound pretty much like this one, except without the staple, actually! And there are still quite a few guides published in that format - Audobon Society does a series of them, among others. I though that was more for quick-reference purposes, giving you a column of words and a column for the picture, though.

I googled it and it looks like you were mostly right! Apparently they used presses and binding machines designed for magazines, printed two or three together, and then chopped them apart.

By using those they probably had more capacity for mass production than with the traditional book printing presses, even with paperbacks already existing, iirc those got more popular as book format post-WWII so there might not have been as many pre-war presses for them and as far as machine production priorities go additional printing presses probably weren't high.

Yeah, and I think a lot of magazines stopped/reduced publication during the war, so they probably had the capacity standing empty.

"Fuck, marry, kill" with other people's books does sound like fun.

Doesn't it? Doing it with my own books sounds like hell, though.

That is a very good cat!

She is an excellent cat! I foresee more cat pictures due to easy image posting.

Also, I love the idea of 'fuck, marry, kill' for books and am tempted to steal it.

you should! then I can vote on yours.

Maybe a portrait-oriented book would have required two staples.

I really hope the staple is a non-standard addition because it makes it a lot harder to read. (but if they were bound on equipment for magazines, maybe it was.)

That cat has an excellent blanket! And is an excellent cat, because cat.

That was my first attempt at a scrap-yarn afghan! It didn't come out how I was expecting so I didn't realize just how well it had turned out until I had cats to photograph in its vicinity. :D

It's awesome! :D

*purrs*

Oh, man, that list of other titles is fascinating!

Of forty listed books:

Three are now considered classics, and widely available (Thurber, Thackeray, The Ox-Bow Incident); an additional one is now considered a great childrens' classic (The Yearling). Four authors are, I think, at the level of household name (Thurber, Twain, Whitman, Thackeray), and another several are people one is likely to have heard of if one is interested in their genre (Saroyan, Philip Wylie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Algernon Blackwood).

One is by an author who is a household name but not remotely for this, Ludwig Bemelmans, whom I had not known wrote for adults.

Two I have randomly heard of somewhere but cannot place at all when, where, or why: Young Man with a Horn and Bromfield's The Farm.

And two absolutely shock me, because nowadays they are hard to find, expensive, and sought out only by those who delve deeply into the author's genre, so that I am amazed they were ever issued as widely as they apparently were, and wonder what happened between then and now to cause them to drop out of sight: Elizabeth Goudge's Green Dolphin Street and Thorne Smith's The Night Life of the Gods. (I suppose I had known the Goudge was well-known enough for MGM to make a movie, but that still confuses me, too.)

Actually a pretty good hit ratio for books that are still relevant seventy-odd years later!

Edited (slight clarification) 2017-02-18 07:39 (UTC)

The Thurber and Thakeray and Twain et. al are kind of ringers, though, they were already immortal classics by the time the were picked.

I would probably put Frank Sullivan and Frank Gruber on the "you've heard of them if you know the genre" list, too - Sullivan was in the vicinity of the Algonquian Round Table and I don't know if anyone still *reads* Gruber but if you're into the history of pulps (or Westerns) you can't avoid having heard the name.

Actually, even Peattie isn't that obscure as natural history writers go; I have two of his other books on my "nature books" shelf already and there was a major reprint of his stuff a few years ago.

I suspect they picked books based on a) it's old enough that the publisher will let us have the rights but b) it's still new and popular enough to interest young men. Which probably isn't a bad way to find stuff that will still be relevant decades later!

I read somewhere--don't remember where, I think I saw the original DW post from skygiants and went googling?--that the ASE had some unpredictable lasting effects. Like, there were a few books that had been flops, but got into the program, and became bestsellers because of it. And there were a whole lot of GIs who got into the habit of reading and never got out of it, boosting the numbers of readers in the general public. But the other thing it did was it really smashed several of the classist walls in publishing. Not all of them, of course, but enough to really make the book landscape different forever after. Instead of an ironclad "these books are highbrow" and "these books are lowbrow," and upper class people read highbrow books and lower class people read lowbrow books, it became more of a continuum without hard-and-fast edges. Because you had all classes in the Army in WWII, all reading the same books, with a variety of eruditeness.

I love that image hosting is already paying off!

So many pictures of cats I have not seen before!

Caaaaat!

Also all of the old 19th century Icelandic diaries I've been looking at have marbled covers.

Oooh, why are you looking at 19th century diaries?

Well I was last fall, didn´t I tell you about it at christmas?

No!

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