Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II by Elyse Graham
Mention the word “spy” and most people picture an action hero, not a professor combing through dusty archives. Yet that is exactly who extracted the intelligence necessary for the Allies to win World War II: librarians and academics sent behind enemy lines. Book and Dagger brings readers into the Office of Strategic Services, whose charge it was to rebuild the American intelligence community. To do so, the agency recruited scholars and trained them as secret agents, relying on their unique knowledge to gather and decode information. Unassuming as these spies were, their operations were exceedingly dangerous, and they were trained accordingly (one professor even learned to fashion a newspaper into a weapon!). In the end, their contributions led to an Allied victory. This is a page-turner of a book, highly readable and surprisingly gripping. And it’s hard not to agree with Graham’s premise — that the study of the humanities is vital to a thriving nation. “The war may have been fought on battlefields,” Graham asserts, “but it was won in libraries.”
Reviewed by Mary Kinser, collection development librarian, Whatcom County Library System
(Originally published in Bellingham Alive January 2025 issue.)