John Hench, the retired vice president for collections and programs at the American Antiquarian Society, is certainly someone you would call a connoisseur of books. Having written previously on printing, the press, and early American society, this time he has turned his attention to the rise of the US publishing industry during World War II. This is a classic tale of public–private cooperation uniting profit and propaganda to spread the good word in times of political need. Others have examined the political dimensions of the book trade in the Cold War, such as Timothy Garton Ash's volume on the Central and Eastern European Publishing Project and Alfred Reisch's study of book programs under the Free Europe Committee. Hench looks at the origins of US publishing's intertwining with government, and he does so in some depth.

World War II is not normally seen as a huge opportunity, but for US publishing that is just what it was. Buoyed by a domestic market that held together during the Depression, the companies bound themselves together in 1942 to form the Council on Books in Wartime (CBW) to promote their activities abroad for the first time. The world market had collapsed, yet books were widely recognized as ideal canisters of ideas that travelled relatively well. Throw in the impact of European emigrés and the machinations of Nelson Rockefeller in Latin America, and you have a potent mix to initiate new schemes to take advantage of this situation. With Franklin Roosevelt looking on benignly, CBW teamed up with the Office of War Information to develop pocket editions of literary and social-science classics – both organizations saw that books were “one of the most useful mediums available for helping the people of liberated areas to rehabilitate themselves” (6). This ensured that officially approved texts soon followed in the US military's wake, the world over.

Britain was the model for much of the US strategy, from the role of the National Book Council to the cheap editions promoted by the Ministry of Information. It was also Britain, with its extensive overseas English-language markets, which had the most to lose from the rising US publishing giant. While the two cooperated via the Psychological Warfare Division of Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, the stage was set for a running competition that extended well into the postwar world as British publishers, desperate for exports, looked to contain US encroachments into their overseas markets. Meanwhile, US public–private collaboration did continue after World War II as the United States Information Agency distributed around 100 million copies of thirteen thousand US titles, but the relationship had changed by then. On the back of the war US publishing had broken out of its domestic markets and had become a major global player in its own right. As a result Hench, who does devote a chapter to the use of books in occupied Germany and Japan, allocates only a brief epilogue to the situation after 1948.

This is a very readable, if at times somewhat repetitive, study of a vital period when ideas, profit and power collided in US foreign policy, the collision caused by that incontrovertible catalyst of change, war. Hench, avoiding any critical judgement and telling it like it was, has done a fine job in chronicling both the personalities and positions behind the rise of US publishing and those in Britain who tried to head it off.