Surrounded by Books: The Victory Book Campaign
© Ann Arobr News
The other day I posted some stories wherein I made brief mention of moving into our house — which *also* means eventually getting all our books out of storage and onto this beaut of a book wall — and included this pic with some text like “Me being distracted by unpacking my books.” Which is very true because packing or unpacking usually results in me reading my 4th grade journal, playing around with (re)discovered drum sticks, and laughing/getting mushy over some of our kids’ old school work. (One favorite = daughter’s 2nd grade story “Pick Me Out of Sixty” which boasts the first line “Stacey is getting lonely and bored in prison.”) So, yes, every meme you’ve seen about getting distracted while organizing: It me.
But this is a great image, yes? I think I simply put “woman surrounded by books” in ye olde Google image search and voilà. But I wanted to find out more about this pic because obviously it’s not a generic stock image. (Which means I should be very clear to say that the copyright to this image belongs to the Ann Arbor News. I am nothing if not a rule-follower. 🫡) The caption that was printed with it is “Mrs. Peter Vanderwaart surrounded by books during the Washtenaw County and Ann Arbor Victory Book campaign, February 1943.”
Starting in 1942, the American Library Association, the American Red Cross, and the USO launched a book drive with the goal of collecting 10 million books for American soldiers. One press release read: “A valuable and conveniently packaged projectile of morale is a good book.” The goal was met, although millions of these books were unsuitable for distribution. The Victory Book Campaign was eventually shuttered due to the cost of shipping hardcover books plus the aforementioned condition of many of the collected books.
So there’s your history lesson for today, and I promise that today I’ll wear a suit while going through my books. (And also if you zoom in you can see that one of the book titles is The Case of the Sulky Girl…which maybe describes Stacey in prison.)
originally published on instagram