Molly Guptill Manning, with her collection of Armed Services Edition books, discovered that soldiers liked nostalgic books and those with sex scenes. Armed Services Editions created a new audience of readers back home. A decade after the Nazis’ 1933 book burnings, the U.S. War Department and the publishing industry did the opposite, printing 120 million miniature, lightweight paperbacks for U.S. troops to carry in their pockets across Europe, North Africa and the Pacific. The books were Armed Services Editions, printed by a coalition of publishers with funding from the government and shipped by the Army and Navy. The largest of...
