"Books are not mere merchandise”, the President of the Publishers Association,
Geoffrey Faber, wrote to the philistine Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir
Kingsley Wood, leading a united front of bookmen against a proposed new
purchase tax on reading matter: “Books are a nation thinking aloud”. His
vehement letter was dated June 21, 1940, when Dunkirk had just been
evacuated, France was surrendering to Hitler at Compiègne and Britain stood
alone against the Nazi domination of Europe. One merit of Valerie Holman’s
handsome book, Print for Victory – the first in-depth study of British
publishing during the Second World War – is its focus on the material
consequences of those events.
The German invasion of Norway cut off the supply of wood-pulp, the principal
ingredient of newsprint and low-grade paper. In fact, it is surprising to
learn, the great majority of pre-war British books were manufactured from
esparto grass, from French North Africa, and the instant absence of superior
esparto (272,000 tons were imported in 1939) meant that paper-makers had to
use instead lower-quality domestic oat, wheat and barley straw, as well as
salvage from rags and waste paper. The pulping of old books was stopped when
it was found that irreplaceable volumes were being mulched for
munition-wadding and cartridge-boxes. There were problems with staff as
well: publishing was not a reserved occupation, so key personnel were called
up. And books were vulnerable to the Blitz. On the night of December 29,
1940, German bombs destroyed the premises of seventeen publishing firms in
Paternoster Row, as well as the offices of the Bookseller and the warehouse
of the country’s largest book wholesaler. (Liberated from its non-selling
stock, Longman was the first company to turn disaster to profit.)
Holman explains just how paper-rationing, which lasted until 1949, affected
the government, the trade and the reading public. Publishers had their
wartime paper quotas set at 60 per cent of what they had used for books
issued between September 1938 and August 1939. Macmillan did well because of
its bestseller Gone with the Wind, as did Hutchinson, the English publisher
of Mein Kampf. Holman’s statistics reveal that while books, newspapers and
periodicals in wartime used only a quarter of the paper they had before the
war, the government’s own wartime consumption of paper and board quadrupled
to nearly 180,000 tons. By 1942, the War Office, that HQ of bumph, was
getting through more paper than the Post Office, the Inland Revenue, the
Board of Trade and nine other wartime government ministries, combined. Even
though book publication was halved in the war, book sales doubled and
booksellers made money.
The need to conserve paper led in January 1942 to the Book Production War
Economy Agreement between the Ministry of Supply and the Publishers
Association. Holman’s scrupulous treatment of this subject sent me back to
my bookshelves. I paid £24 for Guerrilla War in Abyssinia by Captain W. E.
D. Allen (126pp, Penguin Travel and Adventure, 1943), seven years ago in the
Charing Cross Road, and read it without ever noticing its breach of the war
economy agreement regulations: “There must be no blank pages between
chapters. In fiction, chapters must run on with a gap of no more than eight
lines”. Every chapter of Guerrilla War in Abyssinia begins on a right-hand
page, leaving six versos blank. After running off 60,000 copies, Holman
tells us the printers were reprimanded for wasting 360,000 pages.
In the wartime command economy, when the government controlled not just the
paper supply but official propaganda, it was perhaps inevitable that His
Majesty’s Stationery Office should end up as an uneasy rival to the
publishing trade. No one has yet written a history of the wartime Ministry
of Information but in her second chapter, “Publishing and the State”, Holman
gives a convincing overview of its evolution from the bureaucracy satirized
by Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and George Orwell, among others, into an
effective war-time government organization that could marshal civilian
talents for cultural ends. Holman quotes a telling statement by the former
Daily Herald leader-writer Robert Fraser who, together with Max Parrish,
late of Odhams Press Ltd, was responsible for the MoI’s idea for an entirely
new – and popular – kind of publication:
[XSOLID]The book must be cheap. Its treatment must be dramatic, human, lively.
It must, above all, use pictures. Indeed, it must so use pictures as to
become two books in one – a picture book and a text book – and it must carry
the full propaganda message once in the text and for a second time in the
pictures and captions which together must tell the continuous story to those
who will not read continuous text. It seems that when these qualities are
added to a good manuscript which has the status of being official,
propaganda best sellers can be created.[/XSOLID]
The Battle of Britain (1941) by Hilary St George Saunders, who had once
written thrillers as “Francis Beeding” and was later to become Librarian of
the House of Commons, began this new kind of official publication. By the
end of 1941, The Battle of Britain had sold 4.8 million copies in the UK,
and in the following year it appeared in forty-two editions in twenty-four
languages. In Informing the People (1996), his study of 120 HMSO paperbacks
(which is not cited in Holman’s bibliography), Anthony R. James estimates
that total sales of that one book may have surpassed 15 million.
The covers of The Battle of Britain, in Portuguese, German, Greek, Arabic and
French, form the final images of the October 1941 Ministry of Information
propaganda film The Battle of the Books, (which Holman does not refer to).
This seven-minute short, produced by the documentary film pioneer Paul
Rotha, opens with a screen caption quoting Churchill – “Books in all their
variety offer the means whereby civilisation may be carried triumphantly
forward” – swiftly followed by footage of German students in May 1933
burning 25,000 proscribed books, including volumes by Sigmund Freud, Albert
Einstein and H. G. Wells. The film shows Britain’s bookshops and bookstalls,
public and mobile libraries all full of military and civilian browsers, free
to choose what they want, or to receive books as gifts: “Books for the
fighting forces can be handed in at any post-office, unwrapped, unaddressed,
unstamped. You just leave them at the counter”.
The Red Cross and the Order of St Johnm collected and distributed millions of
books for the war-wounded and prisoners- of- war. When Germany and Britain
agreed in 1941 to allow prisoners of war to sit examinations, an
international inter-library loan system was organized from the Bodleian
Library, using Basil Blackwell’s book-dump in Geneva. Two Oxford dons, C. S.
Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, devised – and marked – an English Honours degree
for “kriegies” behind the wire. In 1945, the Inter-Allied Book Centre,
occupying the old Daily Chronicle offices, distributed 1.5 million books to
liberated countries and assisted GER, German Educational Reconstruction.
The wartime demand for books was prodigious and paradoxical. The leisured read
less, and the hardest-working read more. Where British firms could not meet
the demand, publishing began to flourish in Australia, Canada and India.
Print for Victory also shows how new and untapped markets for publishers
began opening up in sub-Saharan Africa, led by thousands of askaris from
across the continent who were eager for literacy, education and
independence. (This section is followed by an interesting disquisition on
the increasingly lucrative rise of English as a Foreign Language.)
By the end of the Second World War, the people of Britain were hungry for
change. Holman’s final chapter, “Publishing for Peace”, gently refutes the
Correlli Barnett thesis that the “New Jerusalem” thinking behind Clement
Attlee’s Labour Party victory in 1945 was largely a middle-class fantasia
and “not a spontaneous effusion of the nation”. She suggests that the sales
figures for books on planning and rebuilding the country, together with
POWs’ requests for government White Papers, and debates over the 1944
Education Act, etc, indicate “at least a shared preoccupation with the
issues”. No doubt the political discussions of the Army Bureau of Current
Affairs and the “British Way and Purpose” lectures of the Army Education
Corps played their part, too.
British publishers had a good war, and this book will interest many students
of that period. Valerie Holman concentrates on contemporaneous material,
turning over trade correspondence, minutes of meetings and official reports
to find items of information that are well annotated on the page. With eight
colour plates of jacket designs, twenty-eight black-and-white illustrations,
thirteen useful appendices and a good bibliography and index, Print for
Victory not only celebrates the book world in tough times, but exemplifies
its careful craft.
Valerie Holman
PRINT FOR VICTORY
Book publishing in England 1939-1945
304pp.British Library. £30.
978 0 7123 5001 3
Nicholas Rankin's most recent book, Churchill's Wizards: The British
genius for deception 1914-1945, was published in 2007.
