Books: G.I.

“There is no explaining wartime reading tastes,” cabled TIME Correspondent William Gray from Manila. “Tonight I climbed to an artillery observation post beside the Pasig River overlooking the besieged Intramuros. Beyond its far wall the Manila Hotel’s north wing was burning. Two hundred yards across the river a concrete building was ablaze. Shells from our Long Toms whistled past. Below us machine guns sputtered. Through it all Captain Francis X. Shannon Jr. of Cincinnati sat in a chair and calmly read a paperbound book. I glanced at the title. It was Margery Wilson’s Pocket Book of Etiquette.”

5,500,000 a Month. The G.I. appetite for reading matter, particularly new and popular books, is virtually insatiable. To help satisfy it, the Government and the Council on Books in Wartime embarked early in 1943 on a mass production publishing venture. Sponsored and paid for (average cost: 6¢ a volume) by the Army and Navy, Editions for the Armed Services has turned out, under the management of Philip Van Doren Stern, over 40 million copies of 500 books. To fit existing presses as well as G.I. pockets, the books are made in two sizes: half that of a standard digest-size magazine, and half that of a pulp magazine. Bound like pocket bird guides, they are printed in double columns of clear type, weigh only two to four ounces.

New titles, chosen by an advisory committee of editors under Army and Navy supervision, are added at the rate of 40 a month, delivered like K rations by plane, ship, train or parachute wherever there are G.I.s to read them. Servicemen in enemy prison camps get them (through the International Y.M.C.A.) at the rate of some 100,000 a month, and in hospitals their lightness is a boon to the wounded.

Treasured Tatters. G.I. tastes, says Editor Stern, have followed those of civilians pretty closely, except that the soldiers have little use for war books. In a list that includes most recent bestsellers, many classics and a few anthologies, the most popular to date is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. One marine, after more than two years in the Pacific, read A Tree and claimed that it changed his whole life.