Field book trade

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Field book trade or front book trade refers to facilities of the German army during the First and the Wehrmacht during the Second World War to supply the troops in the areas occupied by Germans with books and press products. During the First World War, the supply of reading material and stationery was taken over by private companies ( train station bookshops , for example the bookseller Georg Stilke ) or organized by military bodies through the establishment of field bookshops and mobile war libraries . Some publishers such as Reclam , Insel and Ullstein produced book series, field post editions or field editions specially adapted to the requirements of the field book trade . It was mainly about entertainment literature in small-format editions and on particularly light paper.

On the initiative of the War Ministry , in 1916 in conjunction with the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels , the Association of Newspaper Publishers and the German Publishers' Association, the binding guidelines for the establishment of bookshops in the theater of war to satisfy the troops with reading material were issued, which the organizational and logistical concerns of the field book trade regulated.

At the beginning of the Second World War, the head office of the front bookshops was founded in Berlin , which took over the construction and organization of the front bookshops . These were either mobile bookshops in appropriately converted coaches or stationary book sales outlets. The front bookshops were looked after by members of the Wehrmacht. The books were not delivered directly to the bookstores by the publishers, but to the Berlin headquarters, which then distributed them.

literature

  • Hans-Eugen Bühler, Edelgard Bühler: The front book trade 1939-1945. Organizations, competencies, publishers, books. A documentation. Frankfurt a. M. 2002 (Archive for the history of the book industry. Studies. 3.).
  • Ute Schneider: Field book trade. In: Ursula Rautenberg: Reclam's dictionary of the book: from handwriting to e-book. Third, completely revised and updated edition. Reclam 2015, ISBN 978-3-15-011022-5 , p. 162.