The National Emergency Library Is a Gift to Readers Everywhere

The Council on Books in Wartime, founded in 1942, effectively gave away over a hundred million books to U.S. servicemembers.Photograph from Getty

This week the Internet Archive, in San Francisco, announced—and, in the blink of an eye, opened—the National Emergency Library, a digital collection of 1.4 million books. Until June 30th, or the end of the national emergency in the United States (“whichever is later”), anyone, anywhere in the world, can check books out of this library—for free. As Brewster Kahle, the digital librarian at the Internet Archive, wrote in an online announcement, if you can afford to buy books, please buy books! Bookstores still need your business. But, by God, if you can’t afford them, or if the books you need aren’t in any bookstore, and, especially, if you are one of the currently more than one billion students and teachers shut out of your classroom, please: sign up, log on, and borrow!

Meanwhile, not to be sneezed at is the sheer pleasure of browsing through the titles. “How to Succeed in Singing.” “Interesting Facts about How Spiders Live.” “An Introduction to Kant’s Philosophy.” Those are all from 1925. Nearly all the books in the collection come from the last century or so. I looked up “Proust,” which brought up four hundred and forty-eight titles. You can read Beckett on Proust, or Bloom on Proust, or just “On Proust.” I found about a hundred more books about moose, mainly children’s books, including a Dr. Seuss book, “Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose,” but also an illuminating natural history from 1955, “North American Moose” (“the first comprehensive book of its type”), by a curator from the Department of Mammalogy at the Royal Ontario Museum. I did also look up books with the word “virus” in the title. Blech. I do not recommend this search. Still, if you sort the virus books by reverse publication date, and only look at the jackets, you get a freaky little mini-history of the visual iconography of virality. It passes the time.

Is this legal? All this falls under fair use, at least for the duration, is the thinking here. As the copyright lawyer Kyle Courtney has pointed out, libraries have copyright superpowers that they can use in an emergency like this one. Other collections should follow Kahle’s lead. Factiva, JSTOR: unlock the gates.

Has this ever happened before? Not that I know of, but maybe there’s a book in the National Emergency Library that will contradict me. It reminds me a little, though, of the Council on Books in Wartime, a collection of libraries, booksellers, and publishers, founded in 1942. William Warder Norton, of W. W. Norton & Company, was chair of the council, which issued a statement declaring that “books are useful, necessary, and indispensable.” F.D.R. agreed, writing to Norton, “a war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships.” The council picked over a thousand volumes, from Virginia Woolf’s “The Years” to Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep,” and sold the books, around six cents a copy, to the U.S. military, as Armed Services Editions, books for soldiers and sailors and Army nurses and anyone else in uniform. As Yoni Appelbaum wrote in The Atlantic a few years ago, the council effectively gave away more than a hundred and twenty million books—their very best titles—and created a nation of readers. Emily Graff, who was, a long time ago, a student of mine but who is now an editor at Simon & Schuster, once went to the council’s archives at Princeton to read the letters written to the council by servicemen and women. One ship captain wrote, “We live on books.”

But the council did even more than give away books. It also commissioned the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Vincent Benét to write a play about the Nazi book burnings in Berlin, in 1933. On the ninth anniversary of the book burnings, in May, 1942, Benét’s “They Burned the Books” was broadcast on NBC radio. Toward the beginning, a narrator asks, “Why bother about books?”

This battle is not just a battle of lands,
A war of conquest, a balance-of-power war.
It is a battle for the mind of man,
Not only for his body. It will decide
What you, and you, and you, can think and say,
Plan, dream, and hope for in your inmost minds
For the next thousand years.
Decide whether man goes forward toward the light,
Stumbling and striving, clumsy—but a man!—
Or back to the dark ages, the dark gods,
The old barbaric forest that is fear.

Two days later, the council held a symposium, in the New York Times Hall. You can read the proceedings in a book digitized by the Internet Archive. And a year later, on the tenth anniversary of the book burnings, the council launched a national campaign that included a performance on the steps of the New York Public Library, at noon on May 10, 1943, when a thousand New Yorkers gathered between the library lions, Patience and Fortitude, to watch. Ralph Bellamy, a dashing movie star, read from Benét’s play. This is why we bother about books.

The Council on Books in Wartime did one thing more. It ran a radio program, which I bet Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive and the National Emergency Library would really like. It was called “Books Never Die.”

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