BOOKS FOR THE TROOPS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 74, 22 November 1940, Page 3

BOOKS FOR THE TROOPS

Illustrated Magazines Are Most Popular

ROOPS in New Zealand camps eat so many hundred tons of meat a day, sO many vegetables, so much bread, butter, milk, and cheese. Food pours into the camps in a flood that drains the surplus from farm, factory, and garden everywhere. ’ But men are more than their stomachs, and there is another stream going out to the camps from Wellington which in many ways is quite as important. It begins in the old Wellington Public Library buildings. There are busy men here, but they are hard to find behind the great piles of crated reading matter. There are books here, not by the hundred, but by the thousand. There are magazines of every description, piles and piles of them, rows and rows of them; and all this is only the material which has not yet been sorted and cleared from this central station. New Zealand has responded splendidly to the appeals for books for the troops. In Papakura, in Trentham, in Burnham, in Ngaruawahia, in all the Air Force stations, in coast watching points, at batteries, at temporary camps, there are men who want books to read when there is- not drill or duty to be done. New Zealand soldiers are not illiterates performing an enforced duty for a few pence a week. They have cther interests than work and doing nothing. It would be the last crime to treat them as if they were cannon-fodder, yet that is what would happen if we did not constantly remember that each man is an individual when he is not actively engaged as a unit in a machine. They need books, and thanks to the generous people on the other side of the guard house they are getting them. Already 56,000 books and 56,000 periodicals have been sorted in Wellington and distributed. : Demand Increases Daily In the main permanent army camps, libraries have been established and are looked after by some enlisted man who is qualified for the job and has been found unfit for service overseas. In the Air Force training centres the work of librarian is usually carried out by one ‘of the education officers attached to this service. In temporary camps, the work is usually in the hands of the Y.M.C.A. The whole organisation has been created by the Country Library Service, whose officers can be found any day making up bundle after bundle, box after box, crate after crate, of more material to be sent out just as fast as it can be handled. The supply is good, but that does not mean that it should cease. Far from it. The demand increases daily. Transports have to be sent away well stocked, camps overseas have to be remembered. Weekly there are created new points where men are assembled and where men have spare time to read.

The standard of the books is as variable as the standard of taste among the men. You will find just about everything in the clearing house from the topical Penguin to the Sunday School present someone received in the days before excursion trains ran on Sundays. Some must be discarded as beyond repair; but most donors seem to have realised that the camp book service is not just a repository for the rubbish they no longer want. As the books are sorted and repaired they are placed on shelves that look as neat and clean as any to be found in any library. Even paper-backed periodicals arrive in pretty good condition. Among these many of the troops find their most amusing reading. History in Pictures Illustrated magazines are most popular, and the bundles are made up from collections over two or three years. Munich ,is the feature story of 1938, and with 1939 comes Finland and Poland, and, more than anything else, hundreds of pictures of the Maginot and Siegfried Lines. American illustrated magazines featured the war in Spain. It was only a few years ago, but now the photographs seem as out of date as this week’s fire in next week’s newspaper.

There are special issues for Daladier, special issues for Chamberlain, special issues for Gamelin. Winston Churchill appears occasionally, looking pretty grim as a rule. History happens so fast now that the discerning soldier-and he is usually a discerning sort of person-will find much of this stuff as fascinatingly interesting as the discovery of a papyrus scroll in a thrée-thousand-year-old Egyptian tomb. All of them who think at all, and most of them do, are locking forward now to what will happen when they have got the business finished with. What. is ahead they do not know. These magazines will remind them that there has been a past, that it happened only last year or the year before; and they will be very much amused. The Urge to Hoard Evidently New Zealand hoattiers of bcoks and periodicals have realised some of these things and made their sacrifice gladly knowing that what they are doing will give endless pleasure. Books are hard things to part with. No one buys a book without buying something that he wants to keep and have beside him. Even with the cheap

magazine there is an urge to hoard. There is: something that might. be inter esting some day, some article, or illustration to which..the. owner. might.-want to refer another time. If the printed word sells itself, it sélls itself hard, and it’s hard to fart with. : It does hurt to part with a good book, but the best way to give these days ‘is to give until it hurts, and ‘anyone who could see what is happening to book gifts will give gladly, knowing that the more hurt there is in giving the more pleasure there will be in receiving. Have you any books? Hand them over. There is a man in camp’ who wants to read them. He’s a long way from bookshops and public libraries, His main job is soldiering, but he-still has eyes to read and a mind that must be kept occupied. You can help by emptying your shelves so that those in the camp can be filled.