They also generally look more attractive than the UK editions, with brightly coloured covers, featuring a picture of the book in its original edition. Perhaps their chunkier shape also helped them to survive better.
As well as being printed in larger numbers, they seem to have been printed generally on better quality paper. A quick search on the internet will turn up literally thousands of copies for sale at a range of prices.
In general though, ASEs still seem to be relatively common today, and in my experience much easier to find than UK Services Editions. That’s not far short of 100,000 copies of each book on average, although the size of print runs seems to have varied, so some books no doubt are rarer than others. In brief there are 1322 ASEs, almost twice as many as in the various UK series, and in total nearly 123 million copies were printed. One of the motivations for this website is that there has been, so far as I know, no comparable source of information about the UK Services Editions. Cole (available at ), includes a selection of essays on the ASEs as well as revised lists. More recently, ‘Books in Action’ edited by John Y. It was followed by a history and list of the ASEs by John Jamieson in 1948, and two years later by the same author’s ‘Books for the Army’, a history of the Army Library Service. ‘A history of the Council on Books in Wartime’ was published in 1946 even before the Armed Services Editions had stopped publishing, and included a list of all the books published up to that time. There’s a wealth of information about the ASEs available, including at least three histories published soon after the war.
The US Armed Services Editions (ASEs) are perhaps the best known and the most comparable of the Services Editions from other countries, although they are far from the only ones.
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