Vicky Baum (1888 - 1960) was a writer, musician, boxer and journalist who worked as a nurse during WW1. She emigrated to the United States after the War and became an American citizen in 1938.
Searching for poems by Vicki Baum led me to the book - "Best Sellers by Design Vicki Baum and the House of Ullstein" by Lynda J. King, written in 1988 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan, USA.
In that book, in a chapter entitled "Popular Literature in Germany", I discovered that:
the development of literature for a wide audience and for 'self-education' began in the mid eighteenth century (p. 20);
the first press serialisation of novels was in France - "La Presse, Paris" in 1836 (p. 25);
Germany had book vending machines in 1912;
during the First World War, the Reclam Company organised "Portable Field Libraries" - boxes of a hundred books of the Universal Library for troops during their rest periods (p. 35).
"There are shortcuts to happiness and dancing is one of them" - Vicki Baum.
Photo: Austrian Stormtroopers in WW1 courtesy of "La Grande Guerra" Facebook Page.
