This blog post comes to us from John B. Hench, winner of this year's DeLong Book History Book Prize. He writes:
I am grateful beyond words for having been awarded SHARP’s George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize. It is a great honor, considering the strength of our field and the excellence of the previous awardees. My astonishment and my pleasure were all the greater for learning about the rigor of the judging process, as described by Amadio Arboleda in an accompanying blog and by the presentation made at the Washington meeting of SHARP by panel member Marija Dalbello. The panel’s work was incredibly difficult. I salute their dedication and tenacity.
Like a fine piece of jazz, every book is both a collaboration and an improvisation. If there is anything we have learned from the study of book history, it is to understand the roles that mediators and even meddlers of all kinds play in the process that turns a gleam in an author’s eye into a published book. And anyone who has ever written a book knows that it is also a product of trial, error, and reconcepualization, that is, of improvisation.
I would never have written Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets had I not decided, about a dozen years ago, to begin to collect books, magazines, and newspapers published by private and governmental organizations to advance particular wartime agendas. In doing so, I stood on the shoulders of my father, smitten for life by the “gentle madness” of book collecting, whose stateside service in the army medical corps left me with a lifelong interest in World War II. I already knew about most of the wartime publication series. When I encountered one called Overseas Editions, which was entirely unknown to me, I realized immediately that this was something else entirely. Rather than being produced for the education and entertainment of US troops overseas, these books were meant to reach European civilians as soon after their liberation from the Nazis as possible. Produced by a partnership between the US government and American book publishers, the Overseas Editions were considered weapons in the war of ideas. For the government, the books were crucial to a propaganda program to “disintoxicate” European civilians from years of Axis propaganda, and, as it quickly developed, to inoculate them also from the certain onslaught of Soviet propaganda. For the American publishers, the books provided an all-expenses-paid avenue toward unprecedented market share for their wares overseas.
I now had a research project as well as a growing collection, but I was far from having a book. Initial research in the records of the Council on Books in Wartime, the publishers’ organization, at Princeton and in the records of the government collaborator, the Office of War Information, at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland allowed me to write early papers given at American Studies Association and SHARP meetings and to draft a paper for volume 5 of A History of the Book in America (University of North Carolina Press). My initial focus was entirely on the Overseas Editions and its precursors. I had a title for the project, which I loved—perhaps too much. It was “A D-Day for Books Abroad,” because the first books in the program were unloaded on the Normandy beaches only a few weeks after D-Day and were meant to liberate the minds of the newly freed people, just as the military operation had liberated their persons.
Many improvisations and serendipitous discoveries caused me to broaden my research, to look at the larger picture, including the development of book-based propaganda programs earlier in the war and in the UK, their influence on cultural propaganda in the Cold War, the impact on American publishers and their postwar plans for gaining new markets both domestically and throughout the world, and the ebb and flow of public/private partnerships generally. Several short-term fellowships and a nine-month National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship allowed me to research at other repositories in the US and in England--surely one of the loveliest and most productive forms of collaboration.
Colleagues here and there were particularly helpful to me as I worked my way through the project. Trysh Travis, who had done the first real scholarly work on the Council on Books in Wartime and on the concept of books as weapons, generously offered advice and encouragement. Robert A. Gross urged me to look at the role of refugee publishers in the US, most of them Jewish. This led to a number of discoveries and to some of the best human interest elements in my book. Many people working in postwar book history—especially Travis and Amanda Laugesen—gave me lots of ideas and ways to better understand and document the World War II roots of Cold War book-based propaganda and American cultural diplomacy.
Staff at Cornell University Press were wonderful collaborators, especially my editor, Michael McGandy. Michael suggested ways to revise my text to allow the press to market the book as an academic/trade title, with some hope of reaching the time-honored, if elusive, general reader. In urging me to change the title of the book from “A D-Day for American Books Abroad” to “Books as Weapons,” the press’s marketing staff destroyed my illusion that the “D-Day” title was the best thing since the Post-It Note. I resisted this change for some time, but capitulated when it finally dawned on me that Books as Weapons far better suited the heavily revised manuscript.
In re-reading the citation that Marija Dalbello read aloud during the Washington award ceremony, I was most struck by the judges’ acknowledgement of my work as a contribution to diplomatic history and to a fully internationalized view of book history. My book came from nowhere but my longtime involvement in book history. For me, the citation’s assertion that Books as Weapons “will for sure make its mark in many fields, but is deeply embedded in our own,” made every hour of my work researching and writing the book worthwhile.
All thanks to SHARP!
