ASEs Collecting Armed Services Editions

ome of the more interesting — and seldom understood — bits of WWII ephemera are actually hybrids, part home front, part militaria. The Armed Services Editions (ASE) was a series of 1,322 paperback books totaling more than 122 million copies, printed between 1943-1946. The series was conceived, edited, and printed by the Council on Books in Wartime, a non-profit organization founded by booksellers, publishers, librarians, and others. The Council saw the opportunity to have a positive impact on the well-being of our men and women in uniform by forming an organization to print and distribute books, and to communicate why we were fighting. They chose as their motto““Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas.”