At dinner parties, it has always been a struggle to get random people to be interested in my work as a librarian. Indeed, throughout my career, I have battled with stereotypes of my profession. We are often pigeonholed as being nerdy, rules obsessed, tweed wearing, bespectacled, and, above all, “dusty.” At least “nerd” has been transformed from negative to positive since the rise of digital technologies over the past few decades. Sometimes, with strangers, I have used the term “archivist” to describe what I do, but that hasn’t helped much.

So my heart rate soared—as would that of any librarian like me—at the idea suggested by the mere title of Book and Dagger that librarians and archivists could be involved in secret and dangerous tasks in a war, risking their lives and taking an active role in fighting against an evil tyrannous oppressor. Perhaps those tweeds are just camouflage.

During World War II, as shown in Elyse Graham’s new book Book and Dagger, librarians, archivists, and scholars played an unexpected and important role in the intelligence services of the United States (and to a lesser extent, of Great Britain). She writes with verve and pace, making this book an easy and enjoyable one to read. Best of all, Graham argues that the humanities—and those librarians and scholars that came from within the discipline—brought special expertise, experience, and attributes that were critical to the direction of strategy, the ultimate victory of the war, and the defense of democracy in the face of tyranny.

Her book covers much ground that is familiar to those interested in the history of the war. The book includes, for example, extensive discussion of such familiar episodes as the attack on the Vemork hydroelectric plant in Norway, which was a base for the production of heavy water for the Nazis (this attack was made into the movie The Heroes of Telemark starring Kirk Douglas in 1965). Heavy water was a substance that could be used to create atomic weapons: the existence of the plant was uncovered by Allied spies in Sweden analyzing recent scientific literature, and a team of Norwegian saboteurs eventually destroyed the plant, halting the Nazi plans to develop atomic weapons. Another well-known episode she covers in detail is the prelude to D-Day and the role of misinformation and deception in the lead-up to the Allied invasion of Europe (especially through the movie The Longest Day, released in 1962). Extensive treatment is also given to the work of the “Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Division” of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) whose activities were turned into the movie The Monuments Men in 2014, directed by and starring George Clooney. Ben Macintyre’s revelations of “Operation Mincemeat,” a critical example of disinformation as counterintelligence, and made into a TV series, also features in Book and Dagger.

What is genuinely new and interesting in the book are the sections that show the development of the OSS itself. What is particularly engaging are the individuals who were pivotal in getting the OSS established, in arguing for resources to develop its work, and for ensuring that its work would be considered as genuinely strategic by those directing the conduct of the war. It is here that we see the role played by the humanities (and the social sciences) in having trained a generation of scholars to assess and analyze large amounts of data, often patchy in its coverage, and to draw accurate inferences, even (and sometimes especially) in the gaps.

We also are shown the importance of the surrounding scholarly infrastructure of libraries, archives, and scholarly publishing, and the skills of the staff who are necessary to run those organizations. (To the historian this should not be a huge surprise: there are echoes of the links between knowledge gathering and analysis, espionage, and state strategy with figures like John Dee, who accumulated a great library of arcane but erudite knowledge which was put at the service of Elizabeth I through his connections to Sir Francis Walsingham.) Graham highlights, for example, the paucity of high-quality mapping of Japan and the islands of Pacific East Asia at the time of Pearl Harbor, and therefore the importance of the map collections of the New York Public Library and of the library at UCLA. Similarly the library of the Association of American Railroads provided information from its collections that was vital to the American invasion of North Africa. The organization still exists, but no information on its library can now be found on its website.

Graham’s book is a timely reminder that the skills that are taught and honed in the humanities are of vital importance not just to study the past. They are crucial to defend us in the present, so that we all might enjoy a secure and free future.

Graham introduces us to academics such as Wallace Notestein, the distinguished Yale scholar of early modern Britain who recruited some of the early figures in the Office of the Coordinator of Information, the predecessor body to the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS, which was based initially in an annex of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Among Notestein’s recruits were Joseph Curtiss, another Yale scholar (whose expertise was on the 17th-century astrologer William Lilly), and Sherman Kent, a curator at the Yale University Library, who joined the Research and Analysis Branch to head up its North Africa section. Much of the work that Sherman Kent directed—analyzing maps, commercial directories, and a mass of other seemingly innocuous and boring information gathered from libraries and through the book trade—would be vital in supporting the American invasion of North Africa, which helped push the Wehrmacht out of North Africa.

It is this process of collating information that comes to the surface very clearly from Book and Dagger. In fact there is very little “dagger,” and quite a lot of “book.” As Graham shows, the big leap that the OSS and other agencies made was book knowledge: that the accumulation of a vast amount of seemingly trivial information, if analyzed intelligently, could surface inferences, which, in turn, would be directly valuable in deciding the direction of individual battles and of the waging of war across entire theaters.

This work is exactly the kind that librarians and archivists undertake routinely, every day. Selecting information to be acquired, managing that information, and then putting it into a condition to be made available. Often the process of analyzing the information is a necessary component in the process of managing it (in order to create catalogues or finding aids) and to answer reference or other queries.

Occasionally, Graham’s account transplants these basic library activities to realms where danger is more directly present than in offices of the Library of Congress. Adele Kibre, a librarian at the University of Chicago (and sister of the medievalist Pearl Kibre), joined the Research and Analysis Branch and was placed on a covert mission in Stockholm, the capital of a neutral country, but a city teeming with spies of all kinds. Her task, under the cover of acquiring books for the Library of Congress, was to obtain books and scientific journals to be microfilmed and sent back to her colleagues in the OSS to satisfy their “glutton’s appetite for paper.”

Graham also shows how technologies used by librarians were an important part of the intelligence armory, and we learn that Eugene Power, the head of University Microfilms International, became a member of OSS, and members of his team joined Kibre in the US Legation in Stockholm. The skills of bibliographers also became highly valued in the intelligence gathering and analysis, with Wilmarth Lewis, a figure normally associated with the study of books associated with Lewis Walpole, turning out to have been one of the intelligence officers who helped fill the gaps in strategically important knowledge vital for the war effort.

In the midst of these revelations—overturning many preconceptions about familiar figures on my bookshelves—it was disappointing to see many of the tired old clichés about the profession of librarian creep in. These individuals are somewhat denigrated by Graham describing them with worn-out old phrases like “humble drudges of the archive” and “bookworms,” and some of the tasks she considers ideal for “a library rat.” There were also a number of anachronisms which this stereotypically pedantic librarian found irritating (such as the reference to Adele Kibre receiving special training at the British Library, which did not come into being until 1973; its predecessor body, the British Museum Library, might well have provided support).

More generally, the book leans heavily on the evidence of published (and occasionally unpublished or privately published) memoirs. These often provide valuable evidence, but must always be treated with skepticism as sources (as any librarian, archivist, and scholar will tell you). I was surprised not to have seen more references to primary sources, especially archival sources, in the National Archives in London and Washington, DC. Even if key sources have remained closed on security grounds, or if the records have not been retained in the public archives, that might have been an interesting point of discussion. Perhaps as a result, the book relies, in places quite heavily, on conjecture. Thus, for example: “It’s easy to imagine Kibre …” and again a little later, “We might imagine, for instance, Kibre wandering around a party …”

Nevertheless, Graham’s study is certainly heartwarming for any librarian, archivist, or humanities scholar seeking confirmation that the skills necessary for their day jobs are directly transferrable to the defense of the realm and of democracy, gaining a utility beyond education, scholarship, and learning to that most visceral of tasks—the waging of war. Also heartwarming is the value which Graham’s account places on the infrastructure of the humanities—the libraries and archives themselves, and the sheer task of acquiring, managing, and preserving knowledge: buying books can keep us free!

Today, the humanities are in a funding crisis, and libraries and archives are being actively defunded by the state. Graham’s book is thus a timely reminder that the skills that are taught and honed in the humanities, in academic departments and in the libraries and archives that support humanistic study, are of vital importance not just to study the past. In fact, they are crucial to defend us in the present, so that we all might enjoy a secure and free future. That’s something I am willing to fight for. 

Featured image: Still from The Monuments Men (2014). IMDb