Bill Mauldin's Up Front, Charter Books Paperback with a David Halberstam Introduction, c. 1975–1982

The Piece

A paperback copy of Up Front, and the cover is doing exactly what a 1970s paperback cover was built to do. Red ground, the title reversed out of a blue band, two rows of white stars running above and below it, and the author's name across the top. It is patriotic bunting used as graphic design, and it works from across a room.

Set into the middle is one of Mauldin's own drawings, reproduced in black and white: three helmeted soldiers crowded into a foxhole with a machine gun set on the parapet above them, cigarette packs scattered in the dirt, everything drawn in the heavy scratchy line he used for mud and stubble.

The back is the same red, carrying a block of praise for the book and a passage from the novelist James Jones on what the war actually did to men — not the danger so much as the grinding, dirty monotony of it.

Inside, the paper has toned to a warm cream. The title page reads BILL MAULDIN'S UP FRONT in the same starred banner, over the Charter colophon.

History & Provenance

The book is a landmark and the man behind it was twenty-three years old.

Bill Mauldin was a sergeant in the 45th Infantry Division who drew cartoons for Stars and Stripes through the Italian campaign and into France. His subjects were Willie and Joe: two unshaven, filthy, permanently exhausted infantrymen who were funny in the specific way that only people having a terrible time are funny. Soldiers recognised themselves in them immediately. Not every officer was delighted — General Patton objected that the cartoons undermined discipline and appearance, and Eisenhower declined to suppress them. Mauldin won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1945, and won a second one fourteen years later.

Up Front gathers the drawings alongside Mauldin's own prose, written while the war was still on, and it became one of the defining American books of the conflict.

Now the dating, which this copy makes unusually easy. The copyright page carries three layers: drawings copyright 1944 by United Feature Syndicate, text copyright 1945 by Henry Holt and Company, and copyright 1968 by W. W. Norton & Company for the reissue this paperback follows. The imprint is Charter Books, a division of Charter Communications Inc., described on the page as a Grosset & Dunlap company, at 360 Park Avenue South. The cover carries a $1.95 price and a new introduction by David Halberstam.

Two facts bracket it. The back cover quotes James Jones from WWII, which Grosset & Dunlap published in 1975 — so this printing cannot predate that. And Grosset & Dunlap was sold on to G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1982, after which the imprint line printed here no longer described the company — so it is unlikely to postdate that. The result is a window of roughly 1975 to 1982, established from the book's own pages rather than from guesswork.

One thing we will state plainly: this is a mass-market paperback printing, not a first edition. The first edition is the 1945 Henry Holt hardcover. What you are buying here is the text, the drawings, and a very good period cover — not scarcity.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is the rare gift that costs almost nothing and lands properly. For anyone who served, or whose father or grandfather did, Willie and Joe are instantly recognisable, and the book says something a card cannot: that somebody understood the war as it was actually lived rather than as it is usually retold. It suits a veteran, a military historian, a cartoonist, or anybody who reads about the twentieth century.

It also earns a spot on display. Red, white and blue with a heavy starred banner is strong graphic design, and a paperback this size stands easily on a shelf edge, leans against a lamp, or sits face-out in a bookcase where the cover does the work. Vintage paperback covers are among the cheapest ways to put real colour and period typography into a room.

And unlike most decorative books, this one is genuinely worth reading. Mauldin wrote it in his early twenties, in the middle of it, and the prose is as unsparing as the drawings.

A note on care: this is mid-century mass-market paper, which is acidic and will keep browning. Keep it out of direct sunlight, which will fade the red cover fast and yellow the edges faster. Shelve it upright rather than under a stack, since pressure sets new creases in a soft cover. Do not attempt to clean the cover with any liquid; the printing is on coated stock and will lift. If you want to slow the toning, an archival polypropylene sleeve costs very little.