Hello, and welcome to Western SIEV. In this bonus author interview, I
sit down with return guest historian Andrew Pedigree, and we talk about his most
recent book, happily titled The Book at War. The Book at War is
a stunningly in depth look at the rule that literature, the novel, the
book, the scientific journal, has played in our greatest conflicts in human history.
And not only that, he delves into how books have served as tools
of war, both during the conflict and in the years leading up. As
always, the links are in the show note if you would like to purchase
a copy of the book, which I encourage you to do. I've also
included a link to my previous interview with historian Pedigree and a link to his
previous book, because they are, as you'll find out in the interview,
somewhat connected. And welcome back, and I'm sitting down here with historian Andrew
Pedigree. We are talking about his most recent book, The Book at War,
and it's a fascinating story and a look at the interesting ways that books
and literatures have been a part of some of the most important conflicts in world
history. I want to start out with the idea behind the book, because
a lot of times I will read the press to the book and authors will
state their intention, their purpose behind why they're doing this, and I always
think that that's interesting because it gives you an insight into what the historian was
thinking at the time that the idea first struck them. And this is an
interesting story, I think, So would you mind enlightening us Why did you
write the book? Well, it won't surprise you that the book started as
something quite different. I was at an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum on
how paintings were protected from bombing during World War Two, and I found myself
asking, well, what about the books. I mean, Britain had many
wonderful collections of books at the time, and so little attention has been given
compared to the attention given to lost, stolen, or sequestered art, so
little has been given to books. So I began working on the fate of
books in wartime and the destruction of books, particularly by artillery and bombing.
And it's a very sad story, and it's often as far as the story
gets. But I began to see something much more nuanced in this because it
became increasingly aware that in wartime books are not just victims. They're also protagonists.
They spread the ideology ideologies that lead to war in the first place.
They provide the justifications and the means with which to fight, and they pour
scorn on the nation's enemies and crow over victories. Book production is totally changed
during wartime, and often with the publishers full consent, particularly in the Total
War of the twentieth century. War changed everything. Publishers, authors, academics,
teachers, and librarians by and large rallied to the cause. Publishing was
transformed books for troops, books for prisoners of war, books for the war
industries, books about the war. And they were also changed by the fact
that in many cases war entailed a restriction of raw materials. Paper was highly
rationed, and at the same time the government was needing more of that paper
for its own purposes. So there were so many changes to the book industry
during wartime, and in an era which produced Hitler's Mind Camp, it became
increasingly difficult to argue that books are always a force for good, which is
the assumption with which we start whenever we're talking about the fate of the book
or the future of libraries. But it's not always so Yeah, I think
I think that that's really interesting and will definitely come back to books as vehicles
for ideology, and I think a lot of us can wrap our minds around
that idea. But we'll come back to that in a little while. There's
an interesting quotation from the book. I think it's a reflection, if I'm
not mistaken from nineteen forty five quote war modern war at least cannot be fought
without the most complete library resources and quote. I don't know that most people,
when we think about war, think about books. I think, especially
when we think about resources, certainly think about oil, right about iron,
think about you know, precious materials and food. All those sorts of things
are things that we think of, but we don't put books in sort of
that same category. And as I was going through the book, I kept
thinking, I think that's a mistake. How big of a mistake is it
for us to sort of disregard the importance of books, specially in modern warfare?
Well, I think in twentieth century warfare, both sides are always trying
to get ahead in terms of science. Now science can only make progress because
of literature in peace time, in essence, and in principle, science is
international. People feed off each other's discoveries in medicine, in physics, in
chemistry as a way of pushing forward scientific frontiers. In wartime the process changes
completely. Now it's a matter of trying to make those advances in the development
of weaponry, in the development of armament, and in the developer of a
new defensive technologies. Radar is a very good example of that, an offensive
and a defensive technology. So we're left in a situation when scientists community turns,
sometimes with reluctance, because scientists are by nature unpolitical animals, when science
turns to trying to maximize the advantage their own country is going to have in
conflict. And that could be in small incremental changes of artillery scope or that
sort of thing, or it could be in fundamental changes like the introduction to
warfare of aircraft, which is probably the most fundamental change of the twentieth century,
but also the tank and the submarine, which came to have an enormous
significance in the twentieth century. So of these all of these things need designs.
They also need they also need access to a scientific literature that you can
build on and library. Huge technical libraries are developed, particularly in Germany,
and that's because of the strength of their technological and technical universities. They had
a huge advantage at the beginning of the twentieth century over the Western allies.
And so war becomes a business which turns the normal polarities of science on its
head, and instead of sharing as widely as possible to get the best minds
all working together, it's a matter of trying to discover your opponent's secrets at
the same time as preventing advances in science and physics and chemistry reaching the other
side. So it's a very very different way of thinking of things. Yeah,
it's very much moving from a global view of universities and education and scientific
progress to a nationalist view of sort of the same thing. I mean,
you know, the more things change, the more things stay the same.
We're doing the same right now for superconductor technology when it comes to the United
States and trying to guard some of those secrets from I'll put it in air
quotations enemies, and it would be potential enemies. An enemy is something that
you declare. So one of the one of the other things that I really
think is interesting about books and about the importance of books in military not just
technology, like we can understand that, but I'm going to come back to
it, but also in terms of the quality of the soldier and the quality
of the commander who's leading them. I think books play a role there,
and literacy plays a role that sometimes gets discounted. Listeners of the show will
remember, you know, recently we had an author on talking about the Franco
Prussian War, and one of the advantages that the Prussians had was, you
know, particularly their officer corps was more literate. They could they could read
messages, they could read and understand the maps. They can act more independently,
you know, when you don't have the capacity to transfer information, you
know, using radios and things of that nature. If your front of the
line staff is not literate and the other front of the line staff is,
that's a major problem for them. And I thought that the part of the
book about officer training and the Prussian cadet schools was really interesting. So I
was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about that, because
I saw sort of a tie in between some of the two recent books that
I've been looking at well. I think that books of strategy have been around
as long as there has been writing. The Art of War by Sunsu is
a very famous work of strategic thinking, which was written in the sixth century
BC, but of course it changed incrementally with the invention of printing in around
fourteen fifty. One of the things I do in my daily work is work
on the first two centuries of printing, and we have a collective enterprise called
a Universal Short Title Catalog where we list all that and classify it according to
genre. And we've so far collected three thousand plus military handbooks printed in the
first two and a half centuries of print, which is astonishing really. But
on the other hand, what we're talking about there is books for the gentleman
and amateur, if you like, for the colonel who wants to know about
the latest tactics, who wants to know about sword play, wants to me
about troop found formations. It's only really with the establishment of these of a
professional officer class, which comes in at different points really in the eighteenth and
nineteenth century, very important in the New United States and in Germany, important
still in France and Great Britain, but in cultures which still allow a noble
officer class to have very much the upper hand. I think one of the
most important influences in the development of military strategy is Napoleon, not necessarily deliberately,
but because he was a winner of battles without any equal in the early
nineteenth century, so people started studying Napoleon's tactics, studying his way of making
battlefield war winnable. And that remains the case until these three great victories that
the Prussian Army have in the middle of the nineteenth century over Denmark, after
over Austria, over over France, and people begin to realize that a new
military superpower has emerged in the continents of Europe, almost by stealth, and
so people begin to realize that there's something special about the German waging of war.
And I agree with what your other author has to say about the importance
of cadet education, but I think in some respects it's as is important for
practical training and s breeder corps. And that's one of the things you notice
about the Prussian Army. There's this strong sense of the are leading figures in
a largely militarized society. Prussia was a place where there was compulsory military service
for the whole population, who could then be called back to arms very quickly,
in a way that was still slightly regarded with slight suspicion in somewhere where
like England, where people were always afraid that if you had too much army,
they'd have too much influence in government, which had to be a civilian
affair. So there was also a different national philosophy underlying what happened when these
two countries went to war. Britain was never really a military power in the
sense of an army. It had the biggest navy in the world. It's
navy in the nineteenth century could take on any two hostile navies, but it
didn't have a lot of men under arms on a permanent basis, and that
was what showed up in the First World War. Yeah, it's interesting as
you're thinking and talking about cadet manuals and things that could be used to educate
common soldiers and also tactics things of course I'm thinking of. And the tie
in with the Prussians and the Germans is of course Van vn. Steuben,
you know, one of those famous Prussian military commanders comes over to the United
States or what's going to be the United States. You know, it serves
with General Washington and you know, rights than the military handbook that is used
by the American Armed Forces for for a very long time afterwards. So there
was something that the Prussians and then I suppose by the transit of property the
Germans sort of figured out maybe before everybody else was able to figure it out.
And I think that that that is really important and relevant to analyzing just
how important books are to the ability to fight war, but they're also important
in changing public attitudes and driving nations towards war just as important. And the
book that you talk about, and that is a book that's going to be
familiar to a lot of my audience, especially my American audience that went to
American public schools. I'm talking about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Uncle Tom's Cabin a
critical, critically influential book in really lighting the fires of the American Civil War.
But as you kind of point out in the book, it's in ways
that are a little bit more nuanced than I think maybe oftentimes is taught.
So what could you tell me about that? I thought that was really interesting
because most Americans think of it as like, this is a book that's hyper
critical of slavery, and it gins up this intense abolitionist feeling in the North.
And the picture is a little bit more nuanced than that, isn't it.
Yeah, Yes, it's a marvelus story that when Beachi Stowe goes to
the White House, she meets the president, President Lincoln, who says to
her, is this a little woman who made this great war? What better
you might think? What better representation could you have with books as as influential
in war making. The only problem is is that this seems to be a
story which was invented by the author's family and only appears in accounts after her
death. We know she went to have tea at the White House with Missus
Lincoln. We we know she she may have met the President, but this
particular exchange didn't necessarily occur. And I think the connection between Uncle Tom's cabin
and abolitionism is much harder to make. For one thing, we know that
Northern troops did not sign up to abolish slavery. That was not their first
priority. When surveys were done of troop attitudes, their detestation of Southerners emanated
more from a need to defend the United States and the Constitution and the principle
of fair play and justice. The result of elections, however, well unwelcome,
has to be observed, and many felt if the Union did not prevail
in this war, the United States, the great experiment of democracy, might
be exposed as a failure with consequences that would resonate around the world. So
it was much more about upholding the United States as a principle than it was
about abolition. And indeed, when Lincoln issued his emancipation Proclamation later in the
war, that was very divisive in the army, a great number of people
didn't agree with it. I think the most immediate importance of Uncle Tom's cabin
is in enforcing in the South a sense that they're northern Netherlers, their northern
neighbors would never tolerate slavery for much longer. And that's why I think when
Lincoln was elected, they were not prepared to receive any assurances from him about
their future, and why secession began so very quickly. Yeah, I think
that there's something critical here. So first of all, it is kind of
it is very important, and this is a struggle even when when when I
teach the Civil War here today, because on the one hand, you know,
the simple answer is what's what What was the cause of the American Civil
War? And the answer you could give is slavery, and it wouldn't necessarily
be wrong, but it's it's from whose person perspective are we talking about here?
And Uncle Tom's cabin plays a big part of this. The Liberator,
which is an important abolitionist newsletter William Lawyer Garrison coming out of Boston, is
important. But what this really does is, and you're one hundred percent right,
is it galvanizes the South into this position of a refusal to compromise.
Whereas in the past, you know, the United States had gone through this
period of We're going to continue to compromise on the expansion of slavery. But
the attitude has very much changed. And there's others other events that play a
part in that. Certainly the Harper's Very incident and other things as well are
important. But this notion that the North has become these fire breathing radicals is
something that literature helps to instill in the South. So when you look at
the South and constitutions and Declarations of Independence. Yes, it's clear they're they're
seceding to protect slavery. But the Northern troops who go to war early on
and the Northern states who agree to fight those those battles are doing it to
preserve the union. They're not doing it because of slavery. So it's it's
a really interesting part of the book that I really enjoyed because I like how
it does debunk the myth, and I like that you brought up the story,
by the way to the story that is totally almost certainly fabricated. I
mean, of course we can't can't say that with one hundred percent certainty,
but it seems very likely that it is. Another part of the book that
I liked was the role that print media plays in how should I say,
instilling the patriotism necessary to get people to sign up, Like it's it's all
well and good, you know, to gin up animosity towards your towards the
opponents, but it's quite another thing to get those individuals to get a rifle
in hand and to wear the uniform and to march off to battle. Books
play a really interesting role in that process, especially before introduction of mass media.
Television and so on and so forth. So I was wondering if you
could talk about that for a moment, because I really enjoyed that part of
the book. Yeah. I think the lesson I took from that element of
the research was that the best propaganda is not written as propaganda. It's just
fed into ordinary day existence as normal reading, fair and looking at it from
the point of view of Britain in the nineteenth century, which was, by
father the biggest economy until it was overtaken by the United States, we have
things like Tom Brown's School Days, Thomas Hughes's novel which has this exemplary sort
of strong Christian inspired Young Gentleman, which was one of the most successful books
of the era. More and more we have The Boy's Own Paper, which
was a weekly paper which achieved what you would think nowadays would be the impossible,
and that was that it was loved by boys, but approved of by
their teachers and their parents as well, which meant that this Boy's Owned Paper
could appear not only in the drawing rooms of the English middle classes, but
it could also be taken by the public libraries and then read more widely as
well. Between the first and the Second World War, we get all the
stories of escape from German prisoner of war camps, which enormously popular, and
of course the adventures of Biggles the First World War and thereafter flier Who Who's
Who was read by I think generations, which is why the RAF found it
so much easier to recruit in the Second World War than the other two services,
because it was by far the most romantic after three. And I can
tell you that when I was growing up, I inherited my my, my
uncle's supply of Biggles Adventures, so I read my way through most of them
myself. And what what what all this brings out is that there is a
sort of natural conservatism in in adolescents who want to succeed in society as it
is, rather to fit in, rather than to change society. And I
think you can see that in all of this literature, which particularly in the
in the British Empire was it was presenting a view of the Brits a strong,
just fair and brave, and that's how school boys wanted to be.
That's that's really interesting. And you know, I also just can't think.
I also think back to all quite on the Western Front that book, and
then you know, the original movie version, you know, is very you
know, it shows the German schoolboys, you know, celebrating the idea of
going off to war and been reading, and their teachers are preaching this idea.
And so it's just books work in sort of an overlapping magnifier sense.
You know. I did my thesis college was on Shakespeare. And you know,
when I think patriotism in war, you know, my mind inextricably turns
to Henry the Fifth and the Saint Crispin's Day speech. It's the it's the
it's the rallying cry, you know, to to beat those pesky French again
back, and as well, it's a fantastic speech. I mean, don't
don't get me wrong, I always love to read it, but it's it's
it's interesting to see that play sometimes performed as this patriotic battle because the book
begins the play, excuse me begins. I know, it's not a book,
so we're kind of going off object here, but it begins with,
I would say, a very much more cynical view of war. You know,
you have the two church officials and I can't recall their titles from now,
who are sort of essentially saying, well, we need to encourage this
new king to attack France. We don't want to look at our at our
books, because you know, we haven't been the most upstanding. And so
if you sort of look at the play from the beginning, it's it's a
much more cynical view of warfare, but it often gets portray in a way
that's very patriotic. And I wonder about books and about some of these print
media things, and this is this this question is definitely taking us a little
bit further afield than the subject matter of the book. But I wanted to
get your opinion on it nonetheless of you know, can we change the way
that the book or the play or whatever was intended to be presented by how
we view it, by how we port how we choose to present it.
I don't know, what do you think about that? Sometimes I wonder when
I read that play, well, you've actually sort of brought just to one
of my favorite scenes in Shakespeare when Henry the faces at his court and he
said, tell me, Archbishop, would I be justified in going to invade
France? It's oh, yes, yes, sir, And it gives a
long speech about it, and it just brought home to me how how much
political thought from that period is basically telling rulers what they want to hear and
giving them justifications for what they want to do. I think we can sort
of link together in the way Henry the Fifth and earned all quiet on the
Western Front because all quite on the rest in Front. Brilliant book and a
brilliant film. I saw the black and white version when it first came came
out, and it makes clear that the sort of sheer brutality and I think
remark was making the point the sheer pointlessness of war. But this was a
view which only began promote being promoted in literature in about nineteen twenty nine to
nineteen thirty two, when there was this glut of memoirs on both sides of
the conflict pointing out the sort of rather pointless lot of lies, the slaughter
on the Western Front, of which it must be said much of the home
population was totally unaware during the war, accept in so far as their own
children came back maimed or were killed. Because at the time, if you
look at the poetry of the war written during the war, it was ninety
five percent in favor of the fighting. It was deeply patriotic and in Britain
Journey something like seventy percent of it was written by women who were they,
you know, by by far in that respect, the strongest supporters of the
war, and made life very uncomfortable for conscientious objectors and others who might have
misgivings about the war. If we come back to Henry the Fifth, it's
worth remembering that the great film of Henry the Fifth with Lawrence Olivier, was
first shown in nineteen forty four. It was a war film, and it
was deliberately created to provide the view view of the British, as they liked
to think of themselves, the plucky underdog, although we were one of the
great military and naval powers in the world, and here you have this small
army of humble archers up against the might of the French nobility, coming through
against the odds. And that was meant, I think, to be a
sort of proverbial rendering of Britain alone in nineteen forty against the ever triumphant Germany.
And I suppose by forty four it was a sort of celebration of that
image, even though everybody already in Britain already knew that there would be a
terrible cost to be paid for this war in terms of economic strength and future
world's role. I'm glad that you brought that up, because I always always
bring that up to students, that that film came out in nineteen forty four,
and that that's not that's not a mistake, that's that is one hundred
percent an intentional decision. And a way to try to you know this is
this is the traditional waving of the flag. You know, much in the
same way that you know in the United States, we tend to go back
to our founding documents and the Declaration of Independence and all of these sorts of
things when whenever we need to do that sort of patriotic fervor. But I
want to go back to a topic that we kind of hinted at at the
beginning of this conversation, and this is the part that I think people can
wrap their mind around. But as much as you can wrap your mind around
it, I don't think we give it the credit that it deserves. And
that is the extent to which books and the production of knowledge win wars because
of technical knowledge. It's not about once I mean, once we get past
I'll say, perhaps the Napoleonic Wars, but maybe we need to go back
further. But once we get past that point, it's no longer necessarily about
who has the most men anymore. Now it becomes much more about who has
the most up to date military technology, and the person that has the most
up to date military technology is going to win the war. So I would
argue, and I'll ask your opinion on this, that books, particularly scientific
treatises, and which are treated as state secrets during these wars, you play
just as much of a role of winning the war than your strongest general on
the field. What do you think about that? I maybe went too far.
I think that's very important. You can take that back in some respects
almost to the to the beginning of the print era, when when Portuguese sailors
or Spanish sailors or Dutch sailors went on voyages of discovery. On their return
they were required to give over their log books and any topographical maps they had
drawn and charts to their employers. It was not theirs to keep because these
two were regarded as state secrets. There's a long, long tradition of science
as secret particularly the science of war in the Second World War. This is
actually a very difficult part of the book to write because scientists who have talked
about their role in the war, the inventions that they had to produce,
and so on and so forth, they don't put themselves in libraries very often,
and it's hard to have them to find talking about libraries because I think
to science, literature is so much of a given, and particularly periodical literature,
scientific journals. And this was realized right at the beginning of the twentieth
century, when both in England and Germany there were efforts to digest all the
foreign periodicals that were taken by different institutions into a central catalog. So if
you needed a particular Swedish physics periodical, you would know which institutions in your
country owned it. And there was a sense that Germany had a great advantage
in this, which was eroded during the Weimar period because of the collapse of
the German currency and most German libraries ended up canceling a lot of scientific periodicals.
So you occasionally find scientists in their memoirs saying, oh, yes,
and I've found the solution to this particular problem in a very obscure Russian periodical.
And I think they say that as much to let you know that they
read Russian, rather than because this was a particularly unusual event. But the
Americans, but then the supply of periodicals, current periodicals from from Germany and
Italy, drew up, dried up completely. So in America they passed an
act where the copyright of enemy combatant nations was canceled, so they took it
upon themselves the right to reprint copies of foreign periodicals, which they then distributed
to university libraries and laboratories. And of course, the Second World War in
that respect was really important for American science because the universities which until the Second
World War not a lot of Americans had read, no had had won Nobel
prizes. Germany was very much in the lead in that respect. But with
the Second World War and the American government's total dependence on places like Harvard and
Yale and Stanford and Berkeley for scientific libraries and labs full of highly qualified people,
labs even fuller, it must be said, because the Germans decided to
expel Jewish scientists from academic professions, an enormous own goal in terms of what
might have been particularly for the atom bomb, if Germany had not expelled all
of its physicists. But there is a moment, I think in nineteen forty
two the British and Americans were very worried about Germany getting to the atom bomb
first. But there was a moment when one scientist realizes they've given up their
research into atomic technology. And this is through a volume which listed all the
physics lectures which were going on in different German universities, and the fact that
all the people who might have been contributing to atomic science, we're just teaching
their normal lectures gave the game away that they were no longer in competition for
this, and in fact they'd put all their efforts into this rocket technology,
which led to the V two rocket, which was incredibly effective piece of war
making, but just too late in the war to make a difference. The
other place where print is very important, of course, is in intelligence.
Intelligence too had a complete change in the Second World War. We move on
from spies and interrogations to what was known as open source intelligence. That is
the idea that you get there's much information about your adversaries simply by reading newspapers
and telephone directories and annual reports, as you do from anything a spy can
provide. Spies play remarkably little influence in the Second World War, notwithstanding the
amount of anxiety and rumors they created in populations that a spy was around the
corner. But actually it's this open source intelligence and the creation in consequence of
huge card indexes of knowledge by the various intelligence agencies. It's interesting. I
never thought about that, but you know, the United States. One of
the reasons it becomes, you know, the world superpower after World War Two
is yeah, I mean, it's intellectual institutions take off to an extent that
would not have been possible. And you're very It's worth always pointing out that
one of the great weaknesses of the Nazi ideology, and there were many,
but one of the great weaknesses was to ignore the potential contributions of people who
did not fit in their vision of the world going forward. We can only
be too thankful sitting here today that they were tremendously biased. Otherwise some of
those scientists may have well stayed in Germany and the world may have been a
very different place. Well, I want to ask a question that I think
it just isn't obvious enough, And that is the transition to paperbacks and how
that influences were because if you talk about if you talk about how soldiers are
going to be reading at the front lines and stuff, and then you look
at your bookshelf, if those of you who are at home right now look
at your bookshelf and you think, well, how am I going to get
that huge hardcover book? You know, overseas to these individuals like this isn't
going to work. But then you look at your little Penguin paperback you think,
Okay, well this is this is doable. And you point out in
the book how the warplays a really interesting role in the transition to the paperback
and to how those technologies and the way that they almost even the business model
works develops. And I think that's really interesting. So if you wouldn't mind
talking about that, I really thought that was kind of neat. Neat,
Yeah, I mean, I think the invention of the paperback is the most
significant transformation of print culture since fourteen fifty and it came at just the right
moment. I mean, if you compare books for the troops in World War
One and World War two. World War One, it consists of rummaging around
in your cupboard to find things that can be sent off, which will be
hardback books or magazines. Fifty of this was totally unsuitable. What you even
of what was reckoned to be suitable. It was the tastes of middle class
households being sent to be read by on the whole working class troops. So
it didn't work at all. Well, Penguin and the paperback came along at
just the right time nineteen thirty five when Penguin Books got going and they had
a few good years before the war, which meant in Britain that they got
a tremendously good deal in terms of the paper rush. So they were able
to put these six Mani books out into the public domain, which people regarded
as disposable six months the cost of a packet of cigarettes, and so they
could read a book and then pass it on, or they could just throw
it away. And if you get I've begun collecting these wartime paperbacks when I
was working on this project, and many of them have a little notices which
says, when you finish this book, do take it along to the post
office and it can be sent to a member of the forces, who wants
to read this book? And it's true. Penguins had an enormous impact.
You could easily carry them in your trouser pocket when you were on the front
line. And the Americans came up with an even more brilliant alternative, which
were the American Services Editions, which were books, mostly novels which would appeal
to the gi which were distributed in over one hundred million copies of something like
a thousand copies thousand titles, and they were distributed free of charge to serving
soldiers, and they too would fit in the trouser pocket. So all in
all areas, whether it was the prisoner's war camp or on the home front.
Urban dwellers in Britain would put a few paperbacks into their emergency bag if
they had to go down to the Air Aid shelter or were bombed out of
their house. So an enormous impact. And of course it was a change
which was not going backwards, and it was a real challenge to the public
library because paperbacks, particularly these wartime paperbacks, began to disintegrate after let's say
twenty readings, and so they weren't really suitable for the public library who were
forced to continue to pay about eighteen times as much for a new hardback as
they'd be paying for a paperback. So it was one of the things which
sent public libraries on their trajectory out of the mainstream life of readers. And
by the way, that's a great segue into the reality that you've written another
book about the history of the library, which we did on this show and
talked about so and we talked about paperback. So if you would, if
you're interested, to go back and listen to that interview, I'll put the
link back to that one in the show notes, and I'll put the link
to the library book and the show notes too, because you can pick that
one up. In fact, they would make a great one two purchase.
As we start to slowly transition in the fall into the holiday season that comes
after that, well, we're just about a time here. But I want
to ask one last question if I may, and that question is I was
really interested in the statistic that I saw in the book that forty percent of
those polled who were not soldiers. Okay, so people who are not at
the front line, so we're talking about civilians read less during wartime. Yet
books were eagerly consumed by soldiers at the front. So it's really and I
don't know if we have an answer to this question, because you know,
whenever you ask a question of like, well, what did people think,
you know, that's a difficult wrote a. But if there's an answer,
I'm kind of curious as to what it is because it seems like such an
interesting statistic to me. Well, I think the key here is the complete
revolution in female participation of the war. In the war which came with the
Second World War in Britain, and this survey took place in Britain. Women
were either conscripted to work in munitions factories, on farms or in the forces,
the sort of work which was exhausting and took up the whole day,
or many did voluntary work at home. They went and worked in restaurants or
kitchens for the troops, or raised money in shops. Women were just more
busy. And then there were the families that had normally had domestic help a
cook or a maid or a gardener, and though they all went off to
get more lucrative jobs in war work. So I think that also made a
huge difference that the amount of women authors or women readers who had help in
the house went down precipitously. And then you added into that the experience of
nineteen forty in the blitz, and certainly in nineteen forty a lot of people
in their diaries reported having read so much less because they were simply to traumatize
and traumatize and anxious to read. So there's an awful lot of reasons why
people who are regular readers read less. And on the other hand, people
who hadn't done much reading before, like prisons of war or many of the
troops, read a great deal more, because you have to remember that many
of the troops weren't serving in the front line, but in support units where
for long periods of the war there was nothing to do. They were maintaining
defensive positions which weren't attacked. So for many of many of the troops and
certainly many princes of war took up reading really for the first time. So
I would say about the same number of people were reading lots of books.
It was just they were different people. And the stuff about the prisoner of
war thing that that's really interesting too. I enjoyed that section of the book,
and it is of course worth repeating that you know, not every soldier
is engaged in NonStop combat from the moment that they're conscripted to the moment that
they're done. There's a lot you talk to anybody who's fought in the war,
served in the army, there's a lot of downtime, and paperbacks provided
an avenue for some entertainment during that time period. Well, thank you so
much for coming on the show. It was a wonderful book to read.
Obviously, I like books, so I enjoyed it. And you know,
as someone who grew up a consumer of historical books that talk about war,
it was interesting to think about it. You know, I'll read anything that
tells me how important books are any day of the week. So to me,
to me, that's that's wonderful. But thank you so much. I
really appreciate it. That's my pleasure. It's very nice to be with you again.