The box of 30 or 40 books shipped to thousands of units each month might include This is Murder, Mr. Jones or a Zane Grey western, but also Carl Sandburg's poems or Tristram Shandy or The Making of Modern Britain. Almost all were available only as expensive hardbacks on the civilian market, and a few were original compilations made exclusively for the program. The goal, as W. W. Norton explained, was to offer "new books and books of enduring value," that might keep soldiers and sailors "in touch with thought and currents of life in their country." The Council on Books aimed not merely to entertain, but also to educate and inspire.

In this, publishers mixed high-minded idealism with enlightened self-interest. Stranded in overseas bases, fighting off boredom, many readers picked up books they might not otherwise have touched, grateful to have anything to read at all. Some were annoyed to be stuck with histories, poetry, or literary novels. Many more, though, found their first exposure to serious books addictive.

One GI with an unusual vantage point was Joe Allen, who went from the Council directly into the ranks as a private soldier, and had a chance to see its impact first hand. "You are instilling in them, whether you are aware of it or not, a taste for good reading that will surely persist come victory," he reported . "I have seen many a man who never before had the patience or inclination to read a book, pick up one of the Council's and become absorbed and ask for more." Soldiers are "acquiring a new habit, that of reading," concurred a lieutenant in the Pacific, writing that it would "result in additional book sales in the future."

The books belonged to the soldiers themselves. They passed them around. They sliced them apart to share in installments. They read them aloud to their buddies. Literature, no longer restricted to those who could afford it, became their common possession. A fighter pilot in the China-Burma-India theater reported that his British counterparts found the program "smashing," helpfully translating that as "super-dooper." The Armed Services Editions had, he wrote, "put good literature on a democratic (small d) level that it has never enjoyed before."

Some of the selections were idiosyncratic. In 1945, Council picked out an older novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald that had never achieved popular success. It sold just 120 copies the previous year, and another 33 in 1945 before going out of print. The 155,000 copies of The Great Gatsby that they shipped out to the troops dwarfed all its previous print runs combined. Buoyed by that exposure, it would go on to become one of the great publishing successes of the 20th century.

More often, though, participation came at a substantial short-term cost for the publishing industry. No book generated more passion among its readers than A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a gritty coming-of-age novel. On a Pacific island, a lucky soldier given a new copy "howled with joy," but knew he'd have to sleep on top of it if he hoped to hang onto it long enough to finish it. A 20-year-old Marine "went through hell" in two years of combat, but wrote from his stateside hospital bed that the book had made him feel human again. It might, he conceded, be "unusual for a supposedly battle-hardened marine to do such an effeminate thing as weep over a piece of fiction," but he was now making his way through the book for the third time. In France, the colonel commanding an anti-aircraft battalion being shelled by German artillery found one of his soldiers reading the book between explosions. "He started to read us a portion ... and we laughed like hell between bursts. It sure was funny." The tough West Pointer later found a copy of his own, and was tempted to pull it out and read it while wounded and pinned down by enemy fire. "It was that interesting," he recalled, in a letter to the publisher.