Book and Dagger review: shocking true story of heroic librarian spies

When we picture World War II spies, we imagine tuxedos and pistols, not catalog cards and microfilm cameras. Book and Dagger solves that problem by showing how badly we’ve underestimated scholars and librarians in the history of espionage.

Graham’s core claim is simple: humanities scholars, archivists, and librarians—people trained to notice patterns in books, maps, and data—built a new kind of intelligence work that helped win World War II and shaped what we now call open-source intelligence.

The book leans on declassified Office of Strategic Services (OSS) files, wartime diaries, personal letters, and institutional archives; reviewers from Foreign Affairs, Library Journal, and other outlets highlight how Graham weaves together these primary sources with official OSS records and biographies of key figures like Adele Kibre, Joseph Curtiss, and Sherman Kent.

Book and Dagger is best for readers who like narrative history, World War II espionage, and the hidden history of the humanities; not for readers wanting a battlefield chronicle or a tight, purely military campaign history, since Graham stays mostly in reading rooms, basements, and dusty OSS offices rather than on the front lines.

1. Introduction

Graham’s Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2024, c. 400 pages) tells the story of the academics and librarians recruited into the OSS, the wartime spy agency that preceded the CIA.

As a historian and professor of digital humanities at Stony Brook University, holding degrees from Princeton, Yale, and MIT, Graham is unusually well placed to write about archives, texts, and hidden networks of information.

From the opening pages, she frames World War II not only as a clash of armies, but as a clash of readers, researchers, and information-gatherers.

The book sits at the intersection of World War II history, intelligence studies, and book history, but it reads less like a dry monograph and more like a series of interlocking character portraits.

We follow three main “unlikely spies”—Adele Kibre, a brilliant microphotographer and medievalist; Joseph Curtiss, a Yale literature professor; and Sherman Kent, the prickly historian often called the “father of intelligence analysis.”

Alongside them move museum curators, art historians, refugee intellectuals, and librarians who treat paper as both a weapon and a lifeline.

Graham’s central thesis is that these humanities-trained knowledge workers used their skills with languages, archives, and pattern recognition to build the OSS’s Research and Analysis (R&A) branch, turning “trash and treasure”—novels, train schedules, freight lists, and newspapers—into strategic intelligence that guided bombing raids, invasions, and postwar planning.

Instead of glamorizing lone-wolf agents, Book and Dagger asks us to see the war through typing pools, card catalogs, and microfilm reels.

2. Background

World War II created a crisis of information for the United States, which entered the 1940s “utterly outmatched by every other country in terms of intelligence expertise,” as one reviewer bluntly notes.

Before 1942, American intelligence work was scattered across departments, with no central agency and no coherent system to process open-source information such as newspapers, maps, and trade journals.

In June 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the OSS, which at its peak employed roughly 13,000–24,000 people worldwide, more than 4,000 of them women, operating from North Africa to China.

According to Library Journal, General “Wild Bill” Donovan responded to America’s intelligence gap by recruiting “hundreds of librarians, archivists, and professors” into a new Research and Analysis branch that would mine printed sources for clues about Axis capabilities.

Historians like Kathy Peiss have shown that, during this period, the book world “became a terrain of battle,” as American librarians in Lisbon, Stockholm, and other neutral hubs scrambled to microfilm and ship home journals, technical reports, and even Nazi propaganda.

Graham’s story drops into this landscape and follows the people who turned that flood of paper into intelligence products.

Adele Kibre, for example, had been filming medieval manuscripts in European libraries before the war; in Stockholm she transformed that same microphotography skill into a pipeline of scientific and technical information for both British and American services.

Joseph Curtiss moved from Yale’s English department to a clandestine world where literary close reading became a tool for detecting enemy deception and recruiting double agents.

Sherman Kent, recruited in 1941 even before the U.S. formally entered the war, was tasked with building the R&A branch at the drab “E Street Complex,” a cluster of plywood buildings near Washington’s gasworks that housed, at one point, more than two thousand analysts.

By the time Kent was promoted to head the Europe–Africa division of R&A after the success of the North African invasion, these humanities scholars had helped turn an improvised agency into a functioning “chairborne division” whose work shaped everything from bombing priorities to postwar occupation maps.

3. Book and Dagger Summary

Big picture in one glance

What the book is really about

At its core, Book and Dagger argues that World War II was not only fought with tanks, bombers, and atomic bombs, but with books, archives, and information-obsessed people—professors, librarians, archivists, refugee scholars—who turned seemingly boring paper into life-or-death intelligence.

The United States entered the war with no modern intelligence service—Roosevelt told William “Wild Bill” Donovan in 1941, “We have no intelligence service” and asked him to build one from nothing for a global war.

Donovan’s radical move was to raid the universities and the Library of Congress: instead of experienced spies, he hired humanists—historians, philologists, librarians, economists, anthropologists—and used them to create a new OSS branch called Research and Analysis (R&A) that turned everything from railway schedules to gossip columns into intelligence estimates.

Graham tells this larger story through three main figures:

• Joseph Curtiss – a mild Yale English professor turned undercover agent, whose cover as a book buyer masks espionage work in Europe and the Middle East.
• Adele Kibre – a brilliant, under-employed classicist and microphotographer who becomes a lynchpin of Allied intelligence in neutral Stockholm, filming stolen Axis mail and scientific literature.
• Sherman Kent – a Yale historian who builds the analytic heart of American intelligence in Washington and later becomes known as the “father of intelligence analysis.”

Around them, Graham weaves stories about Nazi book-burning, Jewish librarians smuggling texts in the Vilna Ghetto, OSS training camps, sabotage missions, deception operations around D-Day, and the postwar birth of the CIA.

Key events, dates, arguments, themes & lessons

1933–1939 – Nazis attack books and people

• May 10, 1933: staged student book burnings across Germany; they mostly fail physically (books don’t burn well) but succeed as terrifying political theater against “un-German” literature.
• Over the course of the Holocaust, Nazi policies lead to the destruction of an estimated 100 million books, targeting Jewish and other “undesirable” collections; the regime understands that erasing a people means erasing their texts as well.
• In Vilna, the Jewish “Paper Brigade” secretly smuggles thousands of volumes and tens of thousands of documents from Nazi hands into bunkers and underground schools—using some books as literal manuals for resistance (for example, on making Molotov cocktails).

Argument/theme: Books are both targets and weapons; bibliocide and genocide are intertwined.

1939–1941 – U.S. unprepared, “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail”

• U.S. intelligence had been effectively dismantled in 1929 when Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed an early code-breaking office with the quip “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”
• By the time of Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), the U.S. has fragments of intelligence (through project Magic, which decrypts Japanese diplomatic traffic) but no analytic system to interpret what it means. Decision-makers receive raw messages without expert explanation and miss the coming blow.

Argument/theme: Raw data is useless without interpretation. It’s not enough to break codes; someone has to understand them.

1941–1942 – Donovan builds the OSS and R&A

• In 1941, Roosevelt summons Donovan and asks him to design a new intelligence service “cut to fit a global war,” explicitly acknowledging the U.S. lack of an intelligence apparatus.
• The initial agency is called the Coordinator of Information (COI), then becomes the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in June 1942.
• Donovan’s first major innovation is creating Research and Analysis (R&A), staffed not with traditional spies but with academics and librarians: historians, economists, philologists, geographers, psychologists and refugee scholars.
• R&A starts with a handful of people working in the Annex of the Library of Congress and grows to more than 900 members spread across the U.S. and Europe, earning the nickname “Chairborne Division.”

Argument/theme: Donovan realizes that experts in “messy” human data (texts, languages, social patterns) can innovate in espionage in ways traditional military and diplomatic professionals cannot.

1942 – Campus recruitment & training: Curtiss, Kibre, and Coon

• August 1942: Yale English professor Joseph Curtiss is quietly approached by his department head, Wallace Notestein, and instructed to go to the Yale Club in New York wearing a blue suit and a purple tie—his first initiation into cloak-and-dagger ritual.
• At the Yale Club he meets OSS officer Donald Downes, who explains the plan: Curtiss will travel abroad as a legitimate book-buyer for the Yale Library while secretly gathering intelligence. Curtiss accepts.
• Around the same era, Adele Kibre, a classicist with a PhD from the University of Chicago, is scraping together a living photographing medieval manuscripts in European archives and doing microfilm work.
• She impresses microfilm entrepreneur Eugene Power with her ability to get access to hard-to-reach Vatican documents by charming a cardinal (leaning cheekily on her “Hollywood” backstory).
• When Power joins the OSS/COI and Donovan needs someone to handle an intercepted-mail operation in Stockholm, he immediately thinks of Kibre—“not a man, but a woman”—as the perfect agent.
• Graham also introduces Carleton Coon, a Harvard anthropologist whose racial theories and fantasies of being a “Lawrence of Morocco” represent the darker, ethically compromised side of academia.

Theme/lesson: Recruitment is messy and moral: some scholars are motivated by duty, some by adventure, some by vanity, and some bring dangerous ideologies with them.

1942 – Spy school: Area B and the unmaking of professors

• Curtiss is sent to Area B, an OSS training camp on a 100-acre forested estate in what is now Catoctin Mountain Park, Maryland.
• Trainees lose their real names and identities, wear fatigues, and are evaluated both as students and as potential liabilities.
• They undergo “stress interviews” and mock interrogations under bright lights and shouted abuse, learning to maintain a simple cover story and to distrust any apparent kindness following torture—because that “friendly” debrief is often where people reveal their true identities.
• Recruits are taught brutally pragmatic close-combat by William Ewart Fairbairn, a Shanghai police veteran whose guiding principle is to end a fight as quickly and unfairly as possible—“kick to the fork” becomes his signature advice.

Lesson: Academic skills are valuable, but in war they must be paired with an ability to navigate violence and coercion—otherwise scholars and agents alike will die or break.

1942–1943 – Sherman Kent builds analytical intelligence & North Africa planning

• Yale historian Sherman Kent joins Donovan’s COI already in 1941, tasked with organizing war information flows; by late 1942 he is head of R&A’s North Africa division.
• Kent and his colleagues design methods for turning “the mass of incoming material” into intelligence estimates, ranging from political forecasts to detailed information about beaches, rail lines, and industrial plants.
• He fights a parallel war: one front is the research grind needed to prepare for the planned Allied invasion of North Africa in late 1942, and the other is constant battles with skeptical military officers who distrust “long-haired professors” and their paper-based analysis.

Theme: The book repeatedly shows the culture clash between instinct-driven military men and evidence-driven analysts—and how lives depend on bridging that gap.

1942–1944 – Adele Kibre and the Stockholm microfilm pipeline

• Kibre is deployed to Stockholm, officially to handle microfilm work but in reality to run an intelligence hub that:
• Photographs intercepted German mail supplied by the Norwegian resistance.
• Systematically collects and films European scientific journals, technical reports, and trade publications—including material related to ball-bearing production and atomic research—and sends them to British SOE and the OSS.
• Uses Stockholm’s libraries, bookshops, and newspaper subscriptions as both cover and raw material.
• Her work helps planners understand German industrial vulnerabilities (such as dependence on ball bearings) and track nuclear research; Graham describes her as possibly the Allies’ “greatest agent” for what she accomplishes from behind a camera and piles of paper.

Lesson: Intelligence breakthroughs often come not from cinematic heroics but from relentless, unglamorous information labor—reading, photographing, indexing.

1943–1944 – Trash, codes, and the new open-source intelligence

A central chapter theme (signaled by the title “Breaking Codes and Reading Trash”) is that the real revolution of R&A and its allied operations was in what counted as a source:

• R&A analysts and field agents learn to see “trash” as treasure: phone books, railway schedules, business directories, gossip columns, vacation snapshots (“Aunt Min” photos showing key infrastructure in the background), enemy newspapers, and black-market rumors all become data.
• These scraps, cross-checked and plotted on maps or card indexes, help estimate production capacities, troop deployments, and transportation bottlenecks that eventually inform Allied bombing priorities and invasion planning.

Argument/theme: Graham insists that pattern-finding in open sources—what we’d now call OSINT—is one of the great American innovations of WWII intelligence, built not by soldiers but by “library rats.”

1943–1945 – Deception, propaganda, and the war of stories

Throughout later chapters (especially “The Dirtiest Work That Can Possibly Be Imagined,” “The Longest Day,” and “Lies and Damned Lies”), the book shows how librarians and scholars also contribute to deception operations and propaganda:

• British and American services design elaborate deception stories to mislead Germany about invasion plans (for example, the D-Day deception plans that convinced German command that the main attack would come at Pas-de-Calais, not Normandy). Graham frames these as narrative constructions crafted with literary care.
• OSS Morale Operations and counterespionage sections use scholars’ understanding of culture and rhetoric to craft rumors and forged documents that enemy civilians will want to repeat, nudging public opinion and confusing authorities.
• Curtiss eventually ends up in X-2 (counterespionage), working on double-agent networks and deception campaigns rather than the fairly simple book-buying cover he imagined at the start.

Lesson: Stories themselves—credible fictions delivered at the right time—are powerful weapons; Graham shows how humanists trained in narrative and rhetoric become architects of these weapons.

Refugees, rescue, and moral complexity

The book repeatedly reminds us that many of the OSS “book people” are refugees from Nazi Europe whose families and colleagues are being persecuted or killed:

• Graham highlights rescue operations inspired by figures like Varian Fry, who helped artists and intellectuals escape Vichy France, and connects them to later OSS and R&A recruitment of refugee scholars.
• Some refugees return to Europe as interrogators or field agents, only to confront trauma memories during harsh training exercises; Graham gives the example of a trainee whose exposure to a mock interrogation triggers a breakdown and forces his withdrawal from service.
• Meanwhile, figures like Carleton Coon show how the same academic world also produced people whose racial theories were comfortably adjacent to Nazi thinking, and whose intelligence work would later shape ethically troubling Cold War policies.

Theme: World War II intelligence is morally mixed: the same institutional pipeline brings in both heroic refugees resisting fascism and scientists whose theories help rationalize racism and violence.

1945 and after – Victory, forgetting, and the birth of the CIA

The final chapters and conclusion follow what happens when the war ends:

• Many R&A analysts and OSS librarians are scattered back into universities, foundations, or civil service; others move straight into the new Central Intelligence Agency, created in 1947, carrying with them habits and doctrines from war-time analysis. Sherman Kent becomes one of the CIA’s key thinkers on analytic tradecraft and chairs the National Intelligence Council.
• Adele Kibre continues information work for U.S. intelligence before drifting into relative obscurity, her contributions largely unrecognized in public histories.
• Joseph Curtiss returns to Yale, where his OSS service remains mostly hidden; he nearly loses his academic position because no one quite understands what he was really doing during the war. (Graham uses this to show how poorly the “bookish spies” fit conventional hero narratives.)
• Kent, after years in Washington, finds he can no longer go back emotionally to ordinary undergraduate teaching; instead he writes books on the historian’s craft and on strategic intelligence, solidifying the idea of intelligence analysis as a profession.

Argument/theme: Postwar America chooses to remember the war as the story of physicists and the atomic bomb, downplaying the psychological, informational, and cultural tactics that were decisive but harder to tell without revealing methods to future adversaries.

The book’s main arguments and lessons (pulled together)

Information is a battlefield.

• Hitler’s regime understood that books could sustain a people and tried to destroy them; the Allies realized (slowly) that books and “trash” could reveal the enemy’s weaknesses.

Humanities expertise is war expertise.

• Historians, philologists, librarians, anthropologists, geographers, and economists were uniquely good at hunting down scattered clues, dealing with ambiguity, and telling coherent stories from messy evidence. That made them crucial to everything from estimating tonnage of ball-bearing plants to crafting deception stories.

Outsiders innovate—but only when they’re truly different.

• The OSS doesn’t win an edge just by hiring outsiders, but by bringing in people whose methods and values genuinely differ from the military’s—people used to reading obscure sources, asking slow questions, and challenging assumptions.

Stories are weapons.

• From Nazi propaganda to Allied disinformation to the Hollywood spy movies that shaped agents’ self-images, narratives guide decisions, courage, fear, and miscalculation. Graham insists that the war is, on one level, a war between stories—about who belongs, who is dangerous, what is possible.

Memory is political.

• After 1945, the U.S. mythologizes the Manhattan Project and sidelines the “library rats.” Graham argues this was partly deliberate misdirection—if enemies focus on nuclear secrets, they’re less likely to copy Allied information operations—and partly a symptom of a culture that undervalues the humanities.

The present rhymes with the past.

• In the closing pages, Graham explicitly connects her history to the 21st century: fascism rising again, libraries under attack, universities and humanities departments questioned or defunded. She frames the book as both commemoration and warning: forgetting what librarians and scholars did in WWII makes it easier to repeat old mistakes.

How it feels to read it

Even boiled down like this, you can probably sense the emotional arc Graham builds:

• Wonder at the sheer oddity of recruitment scenes—a purple tie at the Yale Club, a phone call in the classics reading room, a visitor on the day of the Harvard–Yale Game.
• Disgust and horror at Nazi book destruction, “skull science” anthropology, and training scenes that deliberately mimic Gestapo methods.
• Admiration for people like Adele Kibre and the Paper Brigade, whose resistance work looks, at first glance, like nothing more than stubborn library work.
• Unease as postwar institutions fold these techniques into the permanent architecture of U.S. power, raising all the usual questions about spying on allies, propping up dictators, and weaponizing culture.

Underneath it all is Graham’s quiet but insistent claim:

The war may have been fought on the battlefields, but it was won in libraries—by people who knew how to read, file, and think under pressure.

If you hold onto that line, you’re holding the heart of Book and Dagger.

4. Critical Analysis

For me as a reader, the most impressive part of Book and Dagger is how patiently Graham reconstructs the nuts and bolts of intelligence work without losing the thread of human drama.

She doesn’t just assert that librarians and scholars mattered; she shows it through case studies.

In one memorable passage, she describes an OSS office as “ancient corridors” and “tiny boxlike offices, crammed with filing-cabinets and clacking typewriters,” making you feel the physical claustrophobia of turning raw paper into usable analysis.

Elsewhere, she explains how R&A analysts sifted through Kibre’s microfilmed journals and Curtiss’s field reports, building massive card indexes and maps that helped planners estimate German railway capacity, ball-bearing output, and the likely strength of enemy divisions in North Africa and Italy.

The argument is supported not only by these stories but by the range of documentation she consults.

Graham regularly cites OSS R&A reports—now preserved in the U.S. National Archives—as well as letters, diaries, and postwar memoirs by her main characters, and she situates their contributions within the broader scholarship on intelligence history and the humanities.

In that sense, the book’s claims line up with other historians’ findings that librarians and scholars were essential to open-source collection and postwar cultural restitution, particularly in operations that seized or bought vast quantities of printed material from collapsing Nazi territories.

Stylistically, Graham writes with what one reviewer called “verve and pace,” and even when she is explaining something as technical as ball-bearing production or rail tonnage, the prose remains clear.

5. Strengths and Weaknesses

Emotionally, I found Book and Dagger strongest when it zooms in tightly on its three central figures and lets their choices, failures, and compromises carry the weight of the argument.

On the positive side, the book does three things exceptionally well.

First, it rescues people like Adele Kibre from the margins of footnotes and shows how a single librarian in Stockholm, working with a modest budget and a microfilm camera, could funnel scientific journals to Los Alamos and influence the atomic project’s awareness of German research.

Second, it traces how Sherman Kent’s experience running R&A led him to write Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy in 1949, a book that helped define modern intelligence analysis and is still cited today in CIA training materials.

Third, it shows the odd afterlives of these scholars: Curtiss almost losing tenure because Yale didn’t know he had been a spy at all, and Kent abandoning the classroom because talking to bored students felt trivial after briefing generals and presidents.

From a reader’s perspective, these stories were genuinely moving; it’s hard not to feel a quiet thrill when you see a shy, bookish person unexpectedly become crucial to a continent-sized war effort.

The prose often carries a dry, humane humor—Kent is the man who could “throw a knife better than a Sicilian” and described one regime as “gathering piss with a rake,” lines that make him vivid in a way official reports never could.

However, some of the criticism I’ve seen—and frankly, occasionally shared—comes from places where the narrative feels a bit overstuffed, jumping quickly from one city and cast of characters to another without always signposting the transitions.

At times, I wanted more explicit tables or diagrams that showed, for example, how a specific microfilmed journal traveled from Kibre’s camera in Stockholm through London to R&A in Washington and then into an actual operational decision.

Those are not fatal flaws, but they do mean that readers who prefer very linear military histories might sometimes feel, as one reviewer put it, “alternately enlightening and head-scratching.”

6. Reception

Since its 2024 release, Book and Dagger has been greeted mostly warmly: Kirkus Reviews calls it a “lively book” for “bibliophiles with a taste for cloak-and-dagger work,” while Publishers Weekly describes it as an “entertaining survey” of how love of books helped defeat Nazi Germany, and the aggregation site Book Marks records an overall “Positive” rating across seven major reviews.

At the same time, more critical voices—like the Washington Independent Review of Books and The Cipher Brief—have argued that Graham occasionally loses her grip on a very broad canvas, praising the fresh angle while questioning some interpretive leaps and giving the book an analytic “3.5 out of 4 trench coats” rather than an unqualified rave.

7. Comparison with Similar Works

If you’ve read Kathy Peiss’s Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe, you’ll recognize some of the same terrain—microfilm “hunters,” the Library of Congress’s wartime operations—but Graham narrows her focus more tightly onto a few individuals and the intellectual culture of humanities departments, rather than writing an institutional history.

Compared with broader OSS histories or books on Bletchley Park and codebreakers, Book and Dagger feels closer to the spirit of your own long-form essays on Probinism about Saving Private Ryan or Life Is Beautiful: it lingers on moral ambiguity, the brutality of total war, and the question of what it means—emotionally and ethically—for civilians and scholars to find themselves wielding lethal knowledge.

8. Conclusion

Taken together, Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II is best suited for readers who enjoy narrative non-fiction that blends World War II espionage, intellectual history, and the romance of archives, rather than for those who want a minute-by-minute chronicle of battles.

I would particularly recommend it to students, librarians, historians, and curious general readers who have ever wondered whether their love of books could possibly matter in a crisis this large.