Books: Books in War

With London’s night life blacked out by war, British publishers last week were all set for a big book boom.

First boom signs: Penguin Books (6d.) were swamped with orders. Book clubs and rental libraries reported big new enrollments. Large stocks moved to libraries for evacuated children, army camps (favorites: Gone With the Wind, Northwest Passage, Anthony Adverse, the Bible). A brisk trade was reported in German dictionaries, purchased by British soldiers who, they said, want to be able to read the signs to Berlin.

Canceling few scheduled books, British publishers pushed books on war background and looked for new ones, issued many a reprint such as Aurel Kolnai’s The War Against the West. At the same time, demand grew for escapist romances.

About half of London’s publishers moved to countryside offices. All laid in big paper stocks in anticipation of such a paper famine as occurred in World War I, when even wrapping paper became almost worth its weight in gold. If paper prices rise, Penguin and other cheap books will suffer first.

Meanwhile, London’s No. 1 best-seller was Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, with Mein Kampf still holding first place among war books.

In the U. S., as World War II trebled sales of Mein Kampf and Inside Europe, publishers facing an enigmatic future looked for clues in the publishing history of World War I. Most startling discovery was that only one book* appeared in the U. S. which even remotely prophesied a European war in 1914. Published in 1913, it sold 500 copies before war came, later sold 50,000.

Nor did last wartime’s best sellers appear particularly relevant: Winston Churchill’s A Far Country, Penrod, Tish, Over the Top, The First Hundred Thousand, Belgium’s Agony.

Certain it was that many publishers, thinking only of the war blast and how to trim their sales to it, were neglecting for the moment their interests in literature of the permanent kind, but farseeing publishers noted one provocative fact in the publishing history of World War I. Buried in the lists were first books of such unknowns as Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson.

*Roland Greene Usher’s Pan-Germanism. Said Professor Usher: “Needless to say, the European war will not involve the United States in hostilities.”