By Rivky Mondal

Photo by John Zich

On May 13, historian Andrew Pettegree, Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews, delivered this year’s Paleography and the Book Visiting Scholar Lecture. Titled “Was War Good for the Book Trade?” the lecture explored the paradoxical relationship between violent conflict and the circulation of books, asking how war has simultaneously devastated and buttressed reading cultures across centuries.

The Paleography and the Book Visiting Scholar Program was established by former University President Hanna Holborn Gray, who was in attendance for the event and remains a major patron of book history research at the University. Introducing Pettegree, Adrian Johns, Allan Grant Maclear Distinguished Service Professor of History, described him as “the foremost historian in English today writing about the book in early modern Europe.” Johns noted that the field’s questions can be “minute, detailed, and exquisitely empirical,” while also illuminating contemporary anxieties about information, culture, and social change.

Pettegree drew from his recent book, The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict, and Conflict Shaped Reading, to examine how warfare repeatedly altered the movement and meaning of books. He described how bombing campaigns in cities like Leipzig devastated Europe’s publishing infrastructure, while Nazi Germany systematically censored Jewish authors, looted libraries across occupied territories, and pulped millions of volumes. Yet war also accelerated innovation. Wartime shortages encouraged smaller print runs and faster sales, while publishers developed portable paperback formats for soldiers and civilians alike. Pettegree highlighted the emergence of Britain’s Penguin Books and the American Armed Services Editions—pocket-sized books distributed to troops during World War II that changed reading habits for generations after.

Pettegree also explored reading’s relationships to survival, public morale, and political identity. Prisoners of war created lending libraries inside camps, while soldiers carried books as emotional links to home. Governments invested heavily in publishing as a tool for controlling the tides of information and propaganda. Building on his research in The Library: A Fragile History, Pettegree showed how libraries took on unexpected civic roles during wartime, serving as salvage depots, war bond centers, and educational hubs. The talk concluded with Pettegree connecting these histories to the ongoing war in Ukraine, where libraries and archives have again become targets of cultural erasure. Displaced families leave behind entire private collections and Russian-language books are destroyed as political acts.

Following the lecture, Pettegree discussed his scholarly and intellectual trajectory in a conversation moderated by Eric Slauter, Deputy Dean of the Humanities and founding director of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture. Pettegree touched on moving from his early studies of sixteenth-century Protestant communities in London to creating the Universal Short Title Catalogue, an international database documenting 1.7 million editions printed before 1701 across more than 10,000 libraries, archives, and museums. Pettegree recalled traveling through provincial French libraries with his young family while researching whether print culture was fundamentally tied to Protestantism. He also reflected on writing for broader public audiences, describing the desire to “write about the past as if it were the past” rather than debate the specifics with other academic historians. Engaging general readers, Pettegree noted, has brought him some of the most rewarding exchanges—including the spirited corrections they continue to send him.

Watch the full lecture here.