The "1943" Edition and When Books Went to War

Staple Day: The Field Notes Podcast

This episode of Staple Day explores the inspiration behind Field Notes' 69th Quarterly release, the '1943 Edition,' which pays homage to the Armed Services Editions

Key takeaways

• The Armed Services Editions were a massive WWII initiative that distributed over 120 million paperbacks to U.S. troops, significantly boosting morale and literacy.
• Publishers kept the program secret from the public to protect hardcover profits, fearing consumer backlash over low-cost paperbacks.

Main topics

• Armed Services Editions (ASEs) in WWII
• Field Notes' '1943 Edition' release

Notable quotes

They printed more than 120 million books representing over 1,200 titles—just for the troops.

Conclusion

The episode celebrates the enduring legacy of Armed Services Editions through Field Notes' creative

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:05) Hi, it's Jim Kudol from Field Notes. Welcome to our very infrequent podcast, Staple Day. Staple Day is traditionally observed when a writer reaches the exact middle of a Field Notes brand memo book, revealing the metal fasteners which bind the cover and the interior pages together. It's also the name of our monthly newsletter. You should probably sign up for that. Speaker 1 (0:28) In today's podcast episode, we're discussing our 69th quarterly release for the winter of 2025 and the inspiration behind it. Many of our limited editions have explored interesting chapters in the history of American printing, publishing, and design. And this one goes deep and sideways into just such a story. The release is called the 1943 edition and includes unique two-way memo books and a very special subscriber bonus item. Starting in 1943, the American government and publishing industry collaborated on creating what came to be known as the Armed Services Editions. More than 120 million books representing over 1,200 titles were printed and distributed to troops overseas during the Second World War. The books were printed in a custom horizontal format, and that was what first caught our attention. But it turns out there's a lot more to this story, and as we are wont to do, we got completely obsessed with it. We not only created the very first horizontal Field Notes memo books with two staples on the short side instead of the traditional three on the long side, but also we have now published Daschle Hammett's great hard-boiled detective novel, The Maltese Falcon, in the style of the Armed Services editions for our Field Notes brand books imprint. Central to our investigation of this subject is an excellent book written by Molly Manning entitled When Books Went to War. We've invited Molly to join us today, and we hope you enjoy this conversation between her and longtime Field Notes co-conspirator, author Kevin Guilfoyle. Kevin also edited and wrote the foreword for The Falcon. For much more on this subject, and to purchase the 1943 edition memo books and The Maltese Falcon, visit fieldnotesbrand.com. Or better yet, Start a year-long subscription to our quarterly editions and get the Maltese Vulcan free with your first shipment. Subscribers are the very heart of Field Notes. Your faith inspires us to be ambitious and to take chances with what we make next. Just wait. You'll see. Now here are Kevin and Molly. Speaker 3 (2:38) Hello and welcome to the November 2025 edition of Staple Day, the Field Notes podcast. My name is Kevin Guilfoyle and I'm a frequent merry prankster with my friends over at Field Notes. I am also the author of the memoir, A Drive Into the Gap, which for the last 13 years has been the only release by the Field Notes brand book imprint. That has now changed and we are here to talk about the long-awaited second Field Notes brand book, a reissue of Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel, The Maltese Falcon. printed as an exact recreation of the Armed Services Editions of World War II. I'm very excited about this project, and here to talk about it with me is Molly Guptill-Manning. She is an associate professor of law at New York University Law School, and she literally wrote the book about Armed Services Editions. To be clear, her book is not the Newfield Notes book. That's the Maltese Falcon. But her book is terrific. It's called When Books Went to War, The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II. Thank you so much for being with us, Molly. Speaker 2 (3:36) Thank you for having me, Speaker 3 (3:37) Kevin. Now, you tell a fascinating story in When Books Went to War, and we're going to get to all of it in a minute. But I want to ask you something first. I think the thing that drew Jim Cudall and the folks at Field Notes to this project, and this is true for me as well, is the fact that we had never heard of armed services editions. And Jim and I both consider ourselves pretty knowledgeable about both literary history and U.S. history. Yet this story was news to us. So the first thing I want to know is, how did you first hear about armed services editions, which I should say, once again, were specially editions of popular books that were published by the U.S. Department of War and distributed to millions of U.S. soldiers on the battlefield during World War II? What was your introduction to them? Speaker 2 (4:17) So I was actually researching my first book, and it was about an author named Arthur Train, who was kind of the John Grisham of the early 20th century. And I was going through his publisher's archives. to try to learn everything I could about his publications. And there were these files that were so thick and filled with letters from troops overseas talking about how they had read a paperback of one of Arthur Train's books. And I had been researching him for a while. There were no paperbacks that I ever came across. And so first I thought maybe they were confused or there was some kind of miscommunication. And then finally, one of the soldiers said that they read an armed services edition. And I had no idea what he was talking about. So I did some research and it was actually hard to find any information about what they were. And when I finally tracked it down and I discovered that this was an amazing paperback giveaway by the government to troops, 123 million paperbacks being given away for free just from 1943 to 1947. And the titles and the quality, it was just... astounding to me. And I thought, this is a story that really everybody should remember and know. And so that's why I ended up writing When Books Went to War. Speaker 3 (5:30) Yeah, we had the same reaction. We kept looking at like, how do we not know about this? They printed so many of these books. They had such an impact on the soldiers during the war and afterwards too. And we were just sort of blown away by the story you tell in your book. Speaker 2 (5:44) Well, part of it, too, is that the publishers didn't really want anyone to know because they were afraid that if the American public found out that they could print paperbacks for five cents each and that they refused to print these paperbacks for the American public, they thought there was going to be backlash with the public thinking, you know, we're not going to spend two and three and four dollars for a hardcover book when we know you can print a paperback for five cents. And so the publishers intentionally tried to keep it a secret. for as long as possible. I mean, obviously the soldiers knew about it, but the American public didn't need to know. And so there wasn't a ton of publicity about the project for most of its existence, just out of that fear for profit margins. Speaker 3 (6:27) You could see in some of those letters that the soldiers wrote that they were almost sort of surprised when the books came in there, and they were so excited when those books would drop. There would be a lot of excitement in the camps when those packages would show up at the PX. Speaker 2 (6:39) Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you can try to put yourself in the shoes of an American soldier during World War II, there was virtually no entertainment once you left, you know, a training camp. Whatever you had on you was what you had to entertain yourself with. Maybe sometimes movies would show up. Maybe occasionally you'd come across a radio and you could listen to something. But for the most part, you know, maybe playing cards, if you had those. And that was often it, really. And so once books started being shipped en masse to troops across the world, I mean, you could get eight, 10, 12 hours of entertainment out of a book. You could swap with a buddy once you were done, and then you'd have another 10 or 12 hours of entertainment. I mean, it just became such a sensation. And I think a lot of people thought, well, we don't really like to read. The title choices were so good. The publishers and everybody involved in the program really tried hard to come up with titles that would appeal to a group of young men. So the titles were wonderful. The content was engaging and troops learned to read and some of them learned to love to read while they were at war. Speaker 3 (7:50) Prior to 1943 and the production of armed services editions, there was something called the Victory Book Campaign. What was that? Speaker 2 (7:58) So the Victory Book Campaign was really an incredible movement across the United States. It was led by librarians. And the whole idea was that librarians understood that books would be a great form of entertainment for troops because even hardcover books, they're relatively small, they're portable, and troops would be given hours of entertainment with each book that they received. And so librarians were trying to fix. a morale problem that the military was having by not having enough entertainment at first, by hosting this nationwide book campaign, the Victory Book Campaign. The public was asked to donate as many good books as they possibly could, and those books would go directly into military training camps across the country. And so in 1942, they collected 10 million books, and then in 1943, they collected another 8 million books. But once troops started going overseas, hardcover books really weren't that practical. They were too heavy for a foot soldier to carry. They took up too much room in their overcrowded pack. And so unfortunately, even though reading was very popular, hardcover books were not. And so troops had to leave them behind. And what they really needed were paperbacks. Speaker 3 (9:15) I have a friend who was a colonel in the Air Force. And every year throughout the 2000s, he would write to me and say, you know, we really need books in Afghanistan. The soldiers are desperate for books. Anything you could do would be great. And so I would contact my writer friends and we would pack up boxes of books and send them over. But he would always say, don't send hardcovers. We don't want hardcovers. We need paperbacks. And if that was an issue in 2010, it had to have been a real problem in 1942. Speaker 2 (9:42) Exactly. After publishing When Books Went to War, I've received so many emails from active duty troops and they have affirmed what you just said. They continue to want. paper copies of books because sometimes you don't have a charger for a device or you don't know when you're going to be someplace where there's enough chargers for everyone. So actually having a form of entertainment that does not require electricity and that allows you to escape your surroundings for a while, it continues to be popular today. Speaker 3 (10:10) And back then in the 40s, part of the problem was so-called respectable fiction and nonfiction wasn't really being published in paperback, right? Speaker 2 (10:18) No. So it's hard to believe, but in the early 1940s, there was virtually no paperback industry in the United States. There were some attempts to get some started, but the main problem was that traditional publishers who published all of the bestsellers, all of the most popular titles, they refused to allow those titles to be printed in paperback format ever. And this came down to profit margins once again. You could publish and print a book of fiction. or nonfiction and earn anywhere from $2 to $4 per book. A paperback was typically sold for $0.25. So you really didn't make very much money off of paperbacks. And so traditional publishers didn't want to have anything to do with them. And so it was a lot of westerns and mysteries and then just classics, stuff in the public domain. And so there weren't that many titles available in paperback format. And there weren't many companies in the United States printing paperbacks just because it was such a hard market to break into. Speaker 3 (11:18) So as a counterpart to the Victory Book Campaign, along comes the Council on Books in Wartime. Who were they and how did they come about? Speaker 2 (11:26) So the Council on Books in Wartime was a group that basically consisted of every major publisher in the United States, except for any paperback publishers. So it was all hardcover publishers. And at first, they were a group that was kind of just searching for a mission. They really believed that books had a... an important role to play in fighting World War II. And mainly that's because World War II really began in 1933 when Germany started banning and burning books and started trying to change the way that people thought by limiting the amount of ideas and the type of ideas that were accessible to them. And so publishers were aware of the fact that one way to fight repressions on books would be to have people read more books and to highlight the importance of books. And so at first they did radio programs and they did some movie shorts and things like that, trying to broadcast the importance of books to democracy. But they didn't really do anything with troops. And it is because of a man named Ray Troutman. He was chief librarian of the army during World War II. He toured the world and heard feedback directly from soldiers who were saying, We want books, but we want paperbacks. We want the smallest possible paperbacks of bestselling titles. Like that is what we want most to read. And Trotman was unable to give that to them because all of the bestsellers were printed only in hardcover. And so what Trotman did is he was working with magazines at the time to try to print the smallest possible magazines for troops. And a lot of magazines were amenable to working with him in doing that. And one magazine in particular, which is now defunct, but it was called Omnibook. Omnibook was willing to really slash its size to get as pocket-sized as possible. And so the publisher of Omnibook gave Trotman a bunch of blank magazines so that Trotman could experiment with sizing and stuff. And what he did is he took an Omnibook, which is about the size of a Reader's Digest today. and just sliced it in half. And it was perfect. He could put it inside his own uniform pocket. It was about three and a half