War Baby, War Books

In the spring of 2010 the Cornell University Press published Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War ii, which I had been researching and writing for a decade. Educated in early American history, I had worked since 1973 at the American Antiquarian Society, a distinguished, two-hundred-year-old independent research library and learned society in Worcester, Massachusetts, that collects and studies materials printed in the United States before 1877. So, given that background, how did I come to write a book about propaganda, publishing, and global markets during and just after World War ii, a period that inside the walls of aas is considered mere current events? Serendipity, no doubt. In retrospect the fact that I wrote that book seems almost preordained by the circumstances of my birth, education, and life, with a bit of blind luck thrown in.

Books as Weapons is my first real book. With constantly expanding duties at aas, I found almost no time to perform any research or to publish anything not directly related to my work at the society. In other words I had not yet written my book, assuming I had one in me. That began to change, however, after I began to collect American books, magazines, and newspapers published during World War ii that were meant to facilitate various kinds of important war work. This collecting led to Books as Weapons. While still fully engaged in my aas duties, I was able to do much of the research—in such repositories as Princeton, Columbia, the New York Public Library, the Lilly Library, the U.S. and British national archives, and the University of Reading in England—using vacation days and unpaid research leave, with modest financial aid from a series of short-term fellowships. I found the time also to write several conference papers, which later were to form the cores of several chapters. I knew that were I to complete the research and writing in a timely fashion, something more substantial would have to happen. Fortunately a year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities provided enough financial support for me to finish the study.

Although I cast a much wider net, Books as Weapons focuses on the partnership between the Council on Books in Wartime, a nonprofit organization the publishing industry set up to channel its war work, and the Office of War Information, the government’s chief propaganda agency. The centerpiece of this public/private undertaking was to put carefully selected, recently published American books, reissued under the imprints of Overseas Editions and Transatlantic Editions, into the hands of civilians abroad after they had been liberated from the Axis forces. Both partners benefited: the government could better carry out a vital end-of-war propaganda program, and publishers were able to leverage the government’s participation to gain new postwar markets for their books abroad.

I would never have researched and written this book had the topic not been of great interest to me, and had my growing collection not been so useful for my purposes. If it seems like it was something I was meant to do, it was because I was born during the war, came from a bookish family, and spent my career in an institution devoted to books.

Born into a World of Books. I grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, where my father, Philip S. Hench, was a rheumatologist at the Mayo Clinic. He shared the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine for 1950 for his discovery of the therapeutic uses of cortisone. My mother’s father ran a hotel that catered to Mayo’s patients and their families. Just as there were a number of inn-keepers in my mother’s family, many teachers, others of academic bent, and scientists may be found on the Hench side. My father’s father taught Latin and Greek in preparatory schools in Pittsburgh. My father’s brother taught Chaucer and researched linguistic Americanisms at the University of Virginia, becoming one of the most prolific contributors of new words and usages to the Oxford...