What America did : $b A record of achievement in the prosecution of the warKelly, Florence Finch
History
What America did : $b A record of achievement in the prosecution of the war
Kelly, Florence Finch
World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
The American Army was a reading and thinking army and that one of the
seven great big-brothering organizations which undertook to supply it
with reading matter, the American Library Association, was kept busy.
The Library War Service of the Association had in each of forty-eight
large army and navy training camps and in seventy hospitals in the
United States a central library building, or library quarters, with
branches and stations radiating all over the camp or hospital area
to render its volumes easy of access. It had collections of books
in nearly two hundred hospitals and Red Cross Houses. It equipped
with these collections over five hundred military camps and posts
and aviation fields, schools and repair depots. It supplied with
libraries 260 naval and marine stations and 750 vessels. It had nearly
2,000 branches and stations placed in Y. M. C. A. and K. of C. huts,
barracks and mess halls. It shipped overseas 2,000,000 books and
64,000 magazines and distributed 5,000,000 magazines donated by the
public through the mails. In its war service libraries there were
over 5,000,000 volumes. Three hundred and forty trained librarians
supervised its service. Accepted books to the number of 4,000,000 were
given by the American people, who provided also the money with which
were bought 1,300,000 more. Book donations were well sifted before
the books were accepted for war service and the authorities of the
association estimated that probably twice as many were given as were
finally used.
But even these enormous quantities of books and magazines were no more
than sufficient to meet the desire for reading shown throughout the
Army and the Navy. The Library War Service of the Association did its
best to supply to every fighting man in the training camps at home,
on the transports, on the cruisers and battleships, in the stations
overseas, in the camps and rest billets, the book he needed when he
wanted it, whether it was light fiction, or a technical treatise, or a
work of history, economics, philosophy or travel. It supplied books
in practically all the modern languages--about forty were represented
in each of the large camps--for both study and reading and its lists
were filled with titles of scientific, technical and other works that
covered the whole range of modern knowledge and activity, philosophy,
literature, history, biography, poetry, art, music, fiction, drama,
economics, sociology, business, travel. There was demand for them all.
Toward the end of the war and after the armistice the Library War
Service bent its energies to meeting the greatly increased call for
vocational books that would enable the fighting man to become more
efficient in his special job or to get a better one when he should
presently be returned to civil life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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