Early in 1941, the editors of reference books such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary, and Cram’s Popular Atlas of the World were having trouble keeping up. It was the war, you see.
Cram’s atlas (was there ever a less mellifluous brand name?) is new to my shelves, a manifestation of my mania for books that attempt to organize all that was known about the world at a given moment. But in 1941, the facts to be known about the world were alarmingly fluid. Cram’s knew well they would be out of date before the printing plates were even inked.
The Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary’s editors knew they, too, would be overtaken by events. The book sits on my desk, some 3 1/2 inches thick and weighing in at some 6 1/2 pounds. Published by Columbia Educational Books of Chicago (one of the many impostors using the name “Webster’s”), it competed in the crowded dictionary marketplace by being hefty and compendious. Advertised as a “Library of Essential Knowledge,” the tome included a collection of world maps. The problem was that Adolf Hitler’s armies were busy forcibly redrawing the lines. The essential cartographic knowledge of one week was out of date the next. What to do?
The Chicago publishers decided to brass it out and use the maps that illustrated the moment — the moment being determined by the publication calendar. And so, even though the publication date is 1941, long after France had fallen, the maps represent a narrow window in early 1940 when Poland had been carved up, but the low countries and France had not yet been invaded. The maps resort to a dizzying collection of narrow stripes to explain who is doing the oppressing where. There is “Polish Territory and Danzig Annexed to Germany” (red and white diagonal stripes), “Polish Territory Occupied by Germany” (red and white horizontal stripes), “Polish Territory Occupied by Lithuania” (diagonal stripes in purple and pink), and “Polish Territory Occupied by the U.S.S.R.” (diagonal stripes of yellow and green).
The publishers knew they were going to be overtaken by events and offered this caveat: “Due to political upheavals” — that’s one way to describe the carnage wrought by panzers and Stukas — “it is impossible to determine precisely the boundaries or political status of a number of countries.”
The folks in Indianapolis putting together the 1941 edition of Cram’s Popular Atlas of the World faced the same problem. Having seen the speed of the Nazi blitzkrieg in Poland and France, they threw up their hands in a gesture of defeatism that would have earned them what-for from Winston Churchill. They simply printed a prewar map of Europe and promised to sort it out later with a supplement that would be provided to loyal customers.
Stuck to the front endpaper with a little dollop of glue is a slip of yellowed paper that read, “Self-Revising Coupon.” With the world at war, “no boundaries can change officially until after the war is ended and peace treaties are signed,” the paper explained. It promised that once the fighting was over, the publisher would produce a supplement “showing all changes brought about by the War.” All the owner of the book would have to do was mail in the coupon within three months of a peace treaty being signed, together with “25 cents in coin or stamps.” And so it was that the 1941 Cram’s Popular Atlas of the World showed not just a free France and unmolested Belgium and Netherlands, but a free and independent Poland, too.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica World Atlas also promised wartime customers a postwar supplement — theirs was made to fit in a pocket bound into the atlas — that could be redeemed for a dollar “in U.S. currency or stamps.” The certificate was good for a whole year “after the signing of boundary treaties,” a limit that did not discourage one latecomer from trying to redeem his coupon in 2017. Executive editor Theodore Pappas said Britannica “gladly honored the request.”
And they returned the man’s dollar.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
