The Book at War Quotes

“For libraries, from the time of Ancient Greece and Rome to the public library movement of the nineteenth century, had never simply been collections of books. They were also a public demonstrations of a society's values...”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Book at War: Libraries and Readers in an Age of Conflict

“Even humble comic books could not escape the new puritanism. In 1952, comics were removed from the on-board bookshops of the US Pacific Fleet, on the grounds that they were too violent and graphic for marines and sailors.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Book at War: Libraries and Readers in an Age of Conflict

“America’s bookselling infrastructure fell far short of a national network. Most of the 4,053 bookstores were concentrated on the east and west coasts; in the hinterlands between, two-thirds of counties and half the towns and cities with populations between 5,000 and 100,000 had no place at all where books could be purchased. A quarter of the country’s publishers were based in New York City.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading

“Put simply, it is hard to define a nation without geographic representation. Maps are expressions of power, and as such inherently rhetorical. The choice of what to include (battlefields), and what to exclude (nuclear waste dumps), is deeply political. Maps are not simply representations of physical geography; they are also mirrors of the societies that made them, their social priorities, their self-image and their ambitions. They played an essential role in modern warfare; and they could not have been made without the wholehearted collaboration of a nation’s scholars, and the exploitation of their libraries.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading

“War is good for cartography. Troops, navies and airmen need detailed maps of the theatre of action. On the home front, the civilians of both combatant and neutral nations are introduced to a mass of previously unknown locations: Anzio, Iwo Jima, Pearl Harbor, the Solomon Islands, Narvik. Provision of a good map, atlas or globe was an early priority for many households.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading

“As long as there has been writing, men have written about war.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading

“Gandhi’s creed of non-violence was attracting increasing attention, not least in the United States, though his particular interpretation of Hindu teaching did not go unchallenged. In a shrewd move, in 1939 the British authorities in India sponsored the publication of The Bhagavad-Gita Philosophy of War. The Bhagavad Gita was one of the most revered of Hindu texts, and surprisingly warlike. Robert Oppenheimer, witnessing the first detonation of the atomic bomb his genius had done so much to create, was quoting the Bhagavad Gita when he reflected ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading

“<...> важко назвати народом тих, хто не представлений у географії”
― Ендрю Петтіґрі, The Book at War: Libraries and Readers in an Age of Conflict

“<...> книжки - агенти цивілізації, бездушні місіонери вищої мети <...>”
― Ендрю Петтіґрі, The Book at War: Libraries and Readers in an Age of Conflict