A LIBRARIAN'S WAR

Fighting “the enemies lurking within—ignorance, boredom, fear, hopelessness”—with books.

Historian Manning, author of When Books Went to War (2014), which recounted a program that supplied books to American soldiers during World War II, writes a lively biography of the man behind it. Ray Trautman (1907-82), a poor farm boy, joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a New Deal program that paid young men to work in park conservation. He was assigned to teach literacy and assemble libraries, work so enjoyable that he returned to college for a degree in library science. In 1940, eligible for the draft and aware that the Army was reviving its library division, he applied and was placed in charge. Most of a soldier’s time is spent waiting around, and fighting boredom is an obsession. “In the oppressive heat and humidity of the South Pacific,” Manning writes, Trautman spoke of how “he had witnessed troops passing along soiled, grimy books because it was all they had to read. Though damp, dog-eared, and dilapidated, they handled them as delicately as ancient artifacts, for there was no knowing if more would arrive.” The traditional army solution—book drives—invariably flopped. Most contributions were on subjects of no interest to young men or hardbound, which few soldiers wanted to carry into the field. Trautman went to work. Most publishers weren’t keen on paperbacks, a new phenomenon, but Trautman, now a powerful figure, persuaded them to reconsider. He devised the Armed Services Editions, specially printed, wallet-sized paperbacks that fit into a uniform pocket. After some arm-twisting, magazines produced shrunken, advertising-free editions. By 1947, 143 million were distributed, along with half a billion books and a generous supply of comic books. Trautman and publishers successfully fended off inevitable private censorship efforts, but Congress was his “most formidable foe” in determining which books soldiers would get. Discharged in 1945, he continued to spread his love of books: advocating rural libraries, libraries in prisons, reading for the visually impaired and those with poor literacy.

A fine biography of an admirable man.