In a recent blog, we saw the importance of books to soldiers in the field during World War I and World War II. Several Jane Austen novels, as well as a book about Austen’s work, were among those. Question: How did the soldiers, sailors, and air personnel get their copies?

In the first war, large numbers of books were donated by civilians. Both the United Kingdom and the United States learned that donated books did not always match the interests of soldiers in the field. Consequently, Britain and America in World War II created special editions to provide reading material for soldiers and sailors. Britain had several different military editions. America had one program, the Armed Services Editions (ASE). Most of the books were novels.

Probably the best documented in England was the Penguin Forces Book Club. Penguin, which pioneered inexpensive but high-quality paperbacks in the 1930s, created a program to provide ten titles a month. The cost, just over 3£ annually, would be picked up by the military unit rather than by individual soldiers and sailors. Two of Jane Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were part of the first year’s program of 120 books.

Penguin expected to have 75,000 subscriptions, but the military balked at paying 3£ in advance. The services also found that some of Penguin’s titles, such as Ur of the Chaldees or William Cook—Antique Dealer, were a little rarified for the taste of ordinary soldiers. The company sold only about 6,350 subscriptions, and Penguin likely never produced more than 15,000 books total. Some of these became prisoner of war editions, but it is not certain whether any were ever delivered to POW camps. A later Penguin program also stalled.

As a result of the low production runs, Penguin Forces books are extremely rare. Alastair Jollans, an expert on the war editions, has seen only one copy of Northanger Abbey and none of Persuasion in his thirty years of collecting. Janine Barchas found copies of both on eBay when she began collecting inexpensive issues of Austen’s works for what became her work The Lost Books of Jane Austen (2019).

A much more comprehensive British program, the Services Editions, resulted from the efforts of at least five other publishers. According to Jollans, who has tried to put together a complete collection of these editions, about 30 million paperbacks were produced of about 500 different books between 1943 and 1947, separate from the 120 from Penguin. Intended to be disposable, these paperbacks have mostly disappeared.

One Austen-related book was part of this larger program, Guild Publishing’s “Talking of Jane Austen” by Sheila Kaye-Smith and G. B. Stern. Kaye-Smith was a popular novelist in the 1930s. Stern was a friend and fellow author. The book consists of six essays in which the two go back and forth discussing Austen’s works.

Compared to America’s ASE, which has a complete list of all books published and a complete set of every title in the Library of Congress, the records and copies of the British editions are incomplete. None of the major libraries and museums in England has a set, nor even a complete list. Jollans measures missing books by gaps in the number sequence of the books he has found.

This lack of information is likely the result of the British program being handled separately by publishers—Collins, Guild, Hodder & Stoughton, Methuen, and Hutchinson (which also offered free “victory” books to homecoming soldiers). In contrast, the U.S. books were published by a single nonprofit with support from the War Production Board and more than seventy publishers.

Jollans says that the only lists of the British editions he knows of are the incomplete ones he has compiled, which are available at www.serviceseditions.com. Anyone who has information about any Services Editions book should use the “Contact Us” link to reach him on that website. The war books bore unique designs and colors, making them readily identifiable.

Judging by the available titles, Britain’s Services Editions were designed for recreational reading appropriate for troops. America’s ASE was similar. Its production of 123 million copies of 1,322 titles were mostly westerns, mysteries, sports, and adventure stories. British literary greats such as Laurence Sterne, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Joseph Conrad were included in the U.S. lists, but not Austen. Longer books were abridged to fit into a soldier’s pocket. One wonders what remained of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which normally weighs in at nine volumes.

Books were handed out to soldiers as they departed, on the assumption that they might soon be isolated and experiencing long periods of boredom between their brief periods of terror. On D-Day, books were given to many soldiers as they stepped onto the invasion barges. One GI was seen reading his book across the choppy waters while most of his mates were trying to keep their breakfasts down.

These two efforts, British and American, helped the printing industries to develop the expertise and distribution models that carried on in the postwar paperback booms in both countries. New publishers such as Bantam, Ballantine, and Ace emerged to concentrate on inexpensive editions.

During the wars, Jane Austen and other authors provided a welcome distraction to the troops, especially those serving in distant battle zones. War Illustrated, a popular magazine during World War I, solicited books for combatants. “What is wanted,” the editors said, “is the friendly companionship of a … kindly book to take the mind away from the … terrible environment.”

How important the “friendly companionship” of reading was to soldiers is seen by a reference in Lawrence Durrell’s “Clea” (1960), a novel set in Egypt in WWII. A soldier on leave in Alexandria from desert combat is looking for a replacement copy of “a sodden, dog-eared little book with a bullet hole in the cover, smeared with oil.” It’s Dickens’ “The Pickwick Papers,” the only book the unit has, and it’s worn out from use. He must find a replacement copy, the soldier says, or “the crew will bloody well fry me.”

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Image of the book Talking of Jane Austen, above by headline, is from Alastair Jollans; used by permission.

Image of the back of Northanger Abbey is from The Lost Books of Jane Austen by Janine Barchas; used by permission.

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The Marriage of Miss Jane Austen, which traces love from a charming courtship through the richness and complexity of marriage and concludes with a test of the heroine’s courage and moral convictions, is now complete and available from Amazon and Jane Austen Books.