A book is still the most popular Christmas present in the world. That great self-publicist and author Charles Dickens already knew a thing or two about culture, aspirations and taste when he published A Christmas Carol, issued by Chapman & Hall on 19 December 1843. It sold an unprecedented 6,000 copies on its first day and 181 years on, has never been out of print. His wholesome and seasonal morality tale, as well as vivid pen portraits of the era still grip us. Dickens also understood that gift-wrapped volumes are lasting, tangible and character-improving presents, and reward many in the retail chain, not least their creators. That is why so many new titles and book prizes are launched during the September-October approach to every festive season, and the majority of National Book Tokens are sold each December, though sometimes redeemed only years later, having no expiry date.

You might think that with nearly two centuries of retail therapy in the bank, the book industry is sanguine. Not a bit of it. For decades UK publishers have lived on edge. First came the end of the Net Book Agreement (NBA), essentially a cartel between the Publishers Association and purveyors of fine volumes, which set the prices at which their wares could be sold, exempting schools and libraries. Punishment was appropriately Dickensian: booksellers who off-loaded new stock at less than the cover price were blackballed by the industry. The NBA operated in the UK from 1900 and held until the 1990s, when abandoned by Dillons and Waterstones, then by publishers HarperCollins and Random House. It was finally ruled illegal in March 1997. 

The 1990s demise of the NBA, subsequent deregulation and advent of the cyber marketplace conspired to wipe out over 500 independent UK bookshops. Meanwhile, big names like Hatchards of Piccadilly (established in 1797), Heffers of Cambridge (1876), Blackwell’s of Oxford (1879), Foyles (1903), Dillons (1936) and Ottakar’s (1987-2006) were all subsumed into the leviathan of Waterstones (established in 1982). The final arrival, Borders, went online too late, expiring in 2011. Supermarkets also plunged into the business of retailing of bestselling paperback titles, playing to a throw-a-book-in-the-trolley Christmastide mindset, along with the tinsel, booze, chocolates and turkey. Meanwhile, buoyed by their multifaceted business model, W.H. Smith has soldiered on with vending volumes. Founded in 1792, they really expanded in the railway boom of the 1840s-50s, selling reading material from news-stands on station platforms. 

Almost a century later, it was Smiths who helped kickstart publisher Allen Lane’s innovative idea of selling quality writing between paper covers for 2/½d each, the cost of a pack of ten cigarettes. Pitch-perfect in concept, Lane’s brainwave in creating the Penguin paperback resulted in three million copies sold in 1935, their first year. Pelican imprints for non-fiction and Puffin for children immediately followed, enabling the fast-growing range of titles, penned by the famous and the obscure, to survive the harsh era of paper-rationing in 1939-45. The war might have threatened some publishers, but the new-fangled paperback was the making of others. Small enough to be stowed in a battledress pocket, they immediately caught on, were hugely enjoyed by service personnel, distributed free through forces book clubs, and contributed in no small way to the growth of post-war higher education at universities, teacher training colleges and polytechnics.

With the collapse of the NBA and bookseller mergers, the industry might have felt doomed, but proved resilient. It needed to, for along came the internet and Amazon. Founded by Jeff Bezos in Bellevue, Washington State, the company originally started as an online marketplace for books, launched for public sales in July 1995, sourcing its discounted offerings direct from wholesalers and publishers. In 1999 it went international, acquiring online sellers in the UK and Germany. By 2008 it had bought AbeBooks (originally, the Advanced Book Exchange), an online retailer of used, rare and out-of-print volumes, and in 2011 the Book Depository, which it closed twelve years later. Still keeping head above digital water are around twenty vast enterprises, including Ebay, active since 1995, and Alibris, founded in 1997 which remains privately owned.

If these challenges weren’t enough to sink the makers of traditional books and their vendors, electronic volumes arrived in the years after the Millennium. Popular due to the diminutive size and weight of the reading device (typically the market-leading Kindle), they are also eco-friendly, using fewer planetary resources than their physical competitors, and were by 2017 substituting for five million print books a year at a lower retail cost, post-free. Online initiatives such as Project Gutenberg, which make freely available digital out-of-copyright titles, have further expanded our virtual libraries. E-books and their audio cousins (fast-growing and currently accounting for six percent of all sales) work best for fiction and holiday reading. However, the electronic non-fiction landscape is often less satisfactorily served, afflicted (if supplied at all) with poor reproduction of maps, diagrams and illustrations. 

When in the early 2010s, e-books began to edge into the marketplace, traditional publishers held up their hands in horror. However, they were soon comforted by research data which indicated 40 per cent of readers never finished a downloaded volume, with a high proportion (sometimes claimed at 60 percent) never even accessed, indicating that electronic texts are often only sampled. Since then, with an estimated ten percent of all book sales, market penetration by the aggressive e-book express seems to have glided to a dignified, digital halt, or at least has paused in several cyber sidings. If these many assaults on publishing weren’t enough, like the plagues of Ancient Egypt, next came Covid, which nearly murdered the traditional tome by curbing for months our ability to buy, browse or borrow.

Fighting an outstanding rearguard action, works of print and paper, presented in soft and hard covers, have for the moment seen off these multiple threats. The reasons are various, but chiefly that book owners still treasure printed tomes as objects in themselves, desiring their smell, weight and appearance on a shelf, something the Folio Society first realised in 1947 with their attractive range of hardback reprints. With arresting covers, made of superior materials and promoted by innovative marketing, books generally are now seen as valuable cultural items, symbols of their possessor’s education and enquiring mind, rather in the way door-to-door salesmen once sold the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, and acknowledging the fact that, as author Anthony Powell titled his 1971 novel, Books do Furnish a Room.

Already, the seemingly shockproof industry has responded with sales figures beyond comparison. In the United States alone, including commercially- and self-published volumes, over 767 million units, including 190 million adult fiction books, were bought in 2022. Of these, paper covers remained the dominant format. The UK market is not dissimilar and dominated by the “big five” of Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan. In 2023 these and other physical publishers in the UK generated a record turnover of £4.2 billion, selling a total of 209 million printed books, of which 188,000 were new titles or new editions. I have done my best to scoop up more than my fair share and shepherd them onto my shelves.

The Italian academic, thinker and writer Umberto Eco (1932-2016), he of The Name of the Rose, who owned 50,000 volumes, summed up those of us who have an intense, lifelong love affair with these artefacts we can touch, tomes that we can smell, paper we can depend on. For him, building a library was like creating a collection of recorded music for every occasion. “It is foolish to think you have to read all the books you buy, just as it is foolish to criticise those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It is like saying you must use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you’ve ever bought, before buying new ones. There are some things in life we need to have plenty of, even if we use only a small portion.” For over a hundred years the Japanese language has possessed a delightfully precise term for this phenomenon of acquiring far more reading matter than we can possibly peruse and letting it pile up unread — Tsundoku (積ん読). The term amounts to a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card, enabling me to nod wisely and with a faraway philosophical glance, announce to friends and myself that “I’m practicing the tradition of tsundoku”. 

Despite occasional threats to paper tomes from burning and banning, mildew, loans not returned, theft and water damage, Umberto Eco went on to explain that “if we consider books as medication, we understand it is good to have many cures at home, rather than a few: when you want to feel better, you go to your ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That’s why you should always have a choice! Those who buy only one book, read it and then dispose of it, are applying the mentality that a book is a consumer product. Those of us who love books know they are anything but a commodity.” It is heartening in this digital age to find such an apt, deployable counter to America’s anti-clutter queen Marie Kondo and her despicable disciples, who reduce every domestic object to “handling each item to see if it sparks joy”. Politely, their minimalist malarkey will be the bane of future historians trying to understand their era, and can be construed as no more than personal issues with storage and clutter. Impolitely, they’re nuts.

… what is on offer for devotees of military history at the tail-end of 2024?

Having gone to great lengths to justify the existence of your own library and book-buying habits, what is on offer for devotees of military history at the tail-end of 2024? As you might expect, the year has reflected the 80th anniversary of many key episodes of the Second World War. Here, I will not look at great campaign narratives, unit histories, centuries-long themes or biographies and memoirs, for we are in the rewarding era of what I call micro-histories, concerned with a lone campaign, even a single day, or specific aspect of the wider war. Explained well, they can provide a handy metaphor for the bigger picture. 

For example, last year brought us editions of Ben Wheatley’s ground-breaking study of an aspect of Kursk, The Panzers of Prokhorovka: The Myth of Hitler’s Greatest Armoured Defeat (Osprey); Arthur W. Gullachsen’s Bloody Verrières (Casemate), his multi-volume examination of part of the Normandy campaign; while we look forward to Katja Hoyer’s study of the city of Weimar and its Republic (Allen Lane) next year. As we have already witnessed this kind of fragmentation to our general benefit in the airing of super-detailed aspects of the American Civil War and First World War, such microscopic analysis is to be applauded. In the past, these titles might not have sold except to a hyper specialist market, but this year has seen mainstream publishers bravely wave their banners to champion new and old talent in this genre. 

Black has inspired many younger minds, and deserves far greater recognition than he currently enjoys

I will make one exception to my no-big-theme rule and highlight the prolific Professor Jeremy Black, well known to readers of The Critic. His array of tomes on every conceivable historical topic, from artillery, forts, maps, monarchy, railways, tank warfare and the Grand Tour, to the impacts of William Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond on their own eras, runs by my count to at least 185 titles. Even he was not sure when last I asked him. With such an output it might be supposed he spreads the marmalade thinly on his toast, but no. His multitudinous oeuvre and meticulous research respect the reader by sporting his academic credentials lightly, while remaining vibrant, ever-controversial, even stentorian. Black has inspired many younger minds, and deserves far greater recognition than he currently enjoys. For lovers of crime fiction and its impact, try his The Game Is Afoot: The Enduring World of Sherlock Holmes (2022) or his study of Agatha Christie, The Importance of Being Poirot (2021), and you’ll see what I mean.

However, to the point: what of the micro-history stable of 2024? In your search for suitable Christmas military books, here are twelve titles, one for each month but in no particular order, which incorporate air, land and sea operations, for your loved ones, friends or your good self to explore during the coming year, feet up, with a glass of something deliciously mellow or fine bona china cup of the old steaming, to hand. 

1. Paris ’44: The Shame and the Glory by Patrick Bishop (Viking). Previously explored, notably by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre (Is Paris Burning, 1965); Michael Neiberg (The Blood of Free Men, 2012); and Michael Cobb (Eleven days in August, 2013), this account of the saving of the City of Light in August 1944 won much transatlantic acclaim on its release in July. Bishop, best known for Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys, and works on Afghanistan, understands pace, structure and character. Blessed with a superb cast, from Charles de Gaulle and Dietrich von Choltitz to Ernest Hemingway and J. D. Salinger, he narrates his emotive story with anecdotal flourish, a cinematic eye and at breathtaking pace. The result is a gripping Day of the Jackal meets Six Armies In Normandy.
2. Forgotten Armour: Tank Warfare in Burma by Jack Bowsher (Chiselbury). In this, his first book, Bowsher spotted a lacuna in our knowledge of armoured warfare and has expertly mined public records and private documents (diaries, letters, and interviews with veterans), to add to our understanding of ordinary tank soldiers doing extraordinary things in inhospitable terrain, but in this case, Burma. He shows how tank units first helped the Allied retreat into India, then, during 1944, particularly at Kohima and Imphal, were critical in stopping and destroying Japanese advances. Bowsher finally demonstrates how, during 1945, British armour learned to operate in large formations pursuing, encircling, and annihilating their opponents. He proves there are still forgotten campaigns, full of drama, that need to be researched, analysed and expertly recounted.
3. Hero City: Leningrad 1943-44 by Prit Buttar (Osprey). This concludes the prolific (fifteen books to date) author’s study of the iconic encirclement, begun with To Besiege a City: Leningrad 1941-42, released last year. Buttar, who specialises in analysis of the Russian front battles of both world wars, is a former British Army doctor, self-taught in German and Russian. He has a soldier’s eye for terrain, coupled with a sense of humanity and decency which helps him overcome the swamp of statistics that often threaten to overwhelm true understanding of the Eastern Front. This is a much-needed and successful reinterpretation of a battle whose first English account was Harrison Salisbury’s The 900 Days (1969), in which Vladimir Putin’s elder brother died, his father was severely wounded, and Dimitri Shostakovich rose to the challenge of composing and conducting under fire.
4. Fortress Britain 1940: Britain’s Unsung and Secret Defences on Land, Sea and in the Air by Andy Chatterton (Casemate). This is a subject the author has made his own, studying Britain’s military and civilian stay-behind organisations which evolved to meet a possible German invasion in 1940. I know of no one who has worked so hard as detective of long-lost bunkers, obscure references in Ministry files or tracking down those associated with Britain’s top secret Home Front guerrilla force. His earlier work, Britain’s Secret Defences (2022) was a runaway success and this deserves equal good fortune. For his second book Chatterton widens his net to look at why and where thousands of pillboxes and other structures were built and the hordes of saboteurs, runners, and wireless operators who might have manned them. From both titles, a different impression of Britain’s preparedness in 1940 emerges, far away from Dad’s Army.
5. Sword Beach: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Forgotten Victory by Stephen Fisher (Bantam). There is simply no other book that devotes such detail to the triumphs and tragedies of a single D-Day beach. Debut author Fisher’s gem of an account glows with scholarship and his narrative abilities sparkle from every page, not least from his credentials as advisor to the National Museum of the Royal Navy on their restoration of LCT 7074, an original Normandy tank invasion craft. Setting aside all previous on 6 June 1944 histories, by tunnelling deep into the archives, he provides striking new evidence in each chapter. For me, his most important insight is that it was the Royal Navy who first named each D-Day beach with the random letters, S, J, G, O and U. Only later did army staff officers “fill in the blanks,” giving them the famous codenames, Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha and Utah. We await his next volume on the November 1944 Walcheren landings with mounting enthusiasm.
6. Normandy: The Sailors’ Story: A Naval History of D-Day and the Battle for France by Nick Hewitt (Yale). Formerly head of collections and research at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, who has sensibly relocated to working at Scapa Flow on the serene Orkney Isles, Hewitt challenges our understanding of the Normandy invasion. We usually consider D-Day in terms of men rushing up beaches and Germans defending from bunkers. Hewitt’s thesis is that it was maritime force which got the invaders there in the first place, and places warships, merchant vessels and their crews at the centre stage of his account. The Sailors’ Story amounts to a beautifully written and long overdue reassessment of this, the greatest of amphibious operations.
7. Cassino ’44: The Brutal Battle for Rome by James Holland (Bantam). This concludes a sextet examination of the WWII Mediterranean theatre, which began with Fortress Malta (2003), Together We Stand: North Africa 1942-1943 (2005), Italy’s Sorrow (2008), Sicily ’43 (2020), and The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 (2023) by writing-dynamo Holland. Throughout, his hallmark is balancing human drama with the science of war, via fresh scholarship deployed with new voices from each belligerent army and civilians. Sharing his unrivalled observations of coalition campaigning, he has also quite clearly walked the ground, which surprisingly few historians bother to do. Always, for those wanting more, the depth of Holland’s research exudes from his online presence in accessible interviews, streaming documentaries and battlefield tours. 
8. The Hill: The Brutal Fight for Hill 107 in the Battle of Crete by Robert Kershaw (Osprey). Veteran historian and former army colonel Kershaw, with sixteen books under his belt, understands how his many armchair readers need that taste of combat which they will thankfully never experience. Leaning on his own service in the Parachute Regiment and past works on sky warriors, D-Day and Arnhem, through forensic analysis of the struggle for a single pimple overlooking Maleme airfield, The Hill examines the 1941 battle for Crete which the Allies should have won. He looks at both sides of the assault, escorting his audience onto German gliders and Junkers troop carriers, while describing the effect of bayonet and bullet on the rival antagonists. In a battle where young men, barely out of their teens were brutally stabbed, drowned, shot and clubbed to death, his focus on one locale is a clever microcosm of the whole campaign.
9. The Invisible Campaign: Bomber Command Gardening Operations 1940-1945 by Jane Guildford Lowes (Morton’s Books). Like Bowsher, Chatterton and Fisher, Lowes’ account has identified an important, but under-reported, aspect of World War Two, in her case aerial mining by RAF Bomber Command, and brought it to life. Developing her knowledge of Halifax aircrewmen displayed earlier in Above Us, The Stars (2020), she identifies how minelaying operations against Axis merchant vessels, Kriegsmarine ships and U-boats were vital to the Allied war effort. Full of objective analysis that takes us far away from the usual city-bombing debates, she writes sympathetically of the stresses on young aircrew, skillfully deploying Air Ministry and Admiralty archives, squadron records, veteran accounts, and logbooks. 
10. Arnhem: Black Tuesday by Al Murray (Bantam). There are two brave aspects to this work. One is the writing style of the author, better known to some as his alter ego, that highly successful British version of Dame Edna Everage, The Pub Landlord. The second is content. For Murray, Tuesday 19 September 1944 was the awful day when some aspects of Operation Market Garden went well, but many more didn’t, arguably altering the course of World War II in the West. His informal style, deployed earlier in Watching War Films With My Dad (2013) and Command: How the Allies Learned to Win the Second World War (2022), which alternatively shakes and grips, allows Murray to forcefully immerse his readers, pointing out, through the eyes of its British participants, when and how tactical opportunities at Arnhem were missed. He does this by focusing on the events of his Black Tuesday as they occurred, without offering any foresight of what will happen next. With his background of a good degree in Modern History from Oxford and his manic pub landlord both vying for attention, Murray argues his case with flair and panache, making his book an excellent feast even for the non-historian.
11. Churchill’s D-Day: The Inside Story by Allen Packwood and Richard Dannatt (Hodder & Stoughton). In the 150th year of Churchill’s birth, it is good to remember the man who made D-Day possible, yet did his best to shy away from implementing it. The wartime premier foresaw the need for an amphibious landing in France long before anyone else, but was haunted by the human cost of Gallipoli, which he had overseen in 1915. This timely collaboration between Dannatt, former Chief of the General Staff and head of the British Army, and Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, brings huge expertise to understanding the planning and execution of Operation Overlord via documents and letters from the Churchill Archives.
12. Churchill’s Spaniards: Continuing the Fight in the British Army 1939-46 by Sean Scullion (Helion). The author’s subjects are the 1,200 young men who fled Franco’s Spain and via circuitous routes ended up in the UK, then volunteering to continue the fight against fascism wearing British battledress. Many more fled to France, joining the Maquis, and their history is better known, but these details are entirely new. Bi-lingual Scullion, an officer in the Royal Engineers, who was brought up in Spain during the last days of Franco, recounts how his hardy Spaniards, operating under obligatory noms de guerre, served in theatres as far apart as Tobruk, Salerno, Normandy, Arnhem, the Ardennes, and Far East, and in every branch of the army, but especially the Commandos and SAS. Their stories comprise tales of extraordinary resilience, determination and courage and were completely unknown until crafted via interviews, memoirs and diaries into this splendid volume.