Armed Services Editions

A little while ago, I finally managed to visit Rome’s Porta Portese market. The main stretch is comprised of an infinite number of stalls that sell a depressingly finite range of stock; like a British high street, it seems to be the same half-dozen stores repeating themselves as far as the eye can see. The more interesting, more unique, stalls are in the side streets, where it’s more like a car boot sale. Here, on a table with perhaps a dozen English-language paperbacks, I came across a couple of books of a type I hadn’t seen before.

They were paperback novels, printed wide rather than tall, with two columns to each page. Maybe six titles in all; I bought Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge and a volume containing Typhoon and The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. Perhaps American readers of this blog will be familiar with these editions, but the Brits I’ve spoken to haven’t seen anything like them.

The books are Armed Services Editions, printed for the US army in the early forties. There were 1,322 titles, from authors as diverse as Homer and Jack London, George Bernard Shaw and Raymond Chandler, Longfellow and Antoine de Saint Exupéry. Altogether, over 120 million copies of these books were distributed to US troops between 1943 and 1947. A few were abridged for length, but most were published without change.

The more popular titles were shared between several soldiers, even to the point of being torn in half down the spine, allowing one man to get started on the story while another was still finishing it. It’s even been suggested that they’re partly responsible for the postwar popularity of paperback novels in the USA. Many were destroyed through overuse, but there’s still a thriving collector’s market and there’s normally a few on eBay.

A find like this can hardly help to stir the imagination; perhaps these particular copies came into Italy by way of the Anzio landings of 1944. Then there’s the context in which I found them, on a table with just a handful of other English-language novels. (The only other title I can remember was a copy of Balthazar from Lawrence Durrell‘s Alexandria Quartet, wrapped in coloured paper like an exercise book.) But I do remember that it felt like one person’s collection. The Durrell was an early sixties printing, and the other books were from the forties, fifties, sixties and seventies. So was this the collection of one man, a soldier who came over with the Allied troops at Anzio, fought his way to Rome and then remained in Italy? Did he fall in love with an Italian girl? Was the old woman who sold me the books his widow? What stories of his own took place between the purchase of each of those paperbacks?

You can read more about the history of the Armed Services Editions at the University of Virginia website. Elsewhere you can also read about the Legacy Project’s attempts to bring them back.