|
Armed Services Editions (ASEs) were small, compact, paperback books printed by the Council on Books in Wartime for distribution within the American military during World War II. This program was in effect from 1943 to 1946. The ASEs were designed to provide entertainment to soldiers serving overseas, while also educating them about political, historical, and military issues. The slogan of the Council on Books in Wartime was, "Books are weapons in the war of ideas." == ASE Titles == The ASE program featured an array of fiction and non-fiction titles, including classics, contemporary bestsellers, biographies, drama, poetry, and genre fiction (mysteries, sports, fantasy, action/adventure, westerns). Non-fiction books included biographies, religious/self-help titles, and science titles. Most of these books were printed in unabridged versions. Authors included〔Cole 1984, p.33+〕 Hervey Allen, Robert Benchley, Stephen Vincent Benét, Max Brand, Joseph Conrad, A. J. Cronin, Eugene Cunningham, Clyde Brion Davis, Walter D. Edmonds, Edward Ellsberg, Peter Field, C. S. Forester, Erle Stanley Gardner, Edmund Gilligan, Arthur Henry Gooden, Zane Grey, Ernest Haycox, MacKinlay Kantor, Frances and Richard Lockridge, Jack London, William Colt MacDonald, John P. Marquand, Ngaio Marsh, W. Somerset Maugham, Clarence E. Mulford, John O'Hara, George Sessions Perry, William MacLeod Raine, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, Craig Rice, Charles Alden Seltzer, Luke Short, Thorne Smith, John Steinbeck, George R. Stewart, Grace Zaring Stone, James Thurber, W. C. Tuttle, Mark Twain, H. G. Wells, and Philip Wylie. The distinctive covers bore the description, "Armed Services Edition: This is the Complete Book—Not a Digest." Seventy-nine (79) of the titles printed were abridged, usually for length rather than content. These bore the slogan, "Condensed for wartime reading," or slight variations such as "Slightly condensed for rapid reading." Over the life of the program, over 123 million copies of 1,322 books were printed. This makes the ASE program one of the largest wide-scale distributions of free books in history. Of the 1,322 books, 1,227 were unique titles and 95 were reprints of titles issued earlier in the series. Sixty-three (63) of the titles were "made books"; they were collections of short stories, poems, plays, essays, or radio plays, usually by the same author, that were assembled and published together for the first time. A complete, extant collection of all 1,322 ASE books is held at the Library of Congress. For a list of titles in the series, and to see how the books were numbered, see (). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Armed Services Editions」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|