Paper salvage: Random House 1945

On the whole, American paper and book-stocks survived the Second World War in better shape than those in the UK, but there was still pressure to minimise paper loss, and a concerted push for paper salvage -- interestingly enough, one of the changes reported in the papers was that graduating classes across the country increasingly chose to avoid burning their textbooks when they graduated, taking their books to the pulping machines instead.

Books tended to become shorter and smaller, and there was less empty space up for grabs -- no luxurious blank pages, for instance, and only very minor breaks between chapters. There were also a series of impromptu design logos, that publisher's placed at the head of their books: the one pictured here comes from a copy of Gertrude Stein's account of life in Vichy France, Wars I Have Seen, published by Random House in 1945. Attractively, the Random House logo is here set against the background of the famous "V for Victory" symbol.