A ruined bookstore provides a place for reading after an air raid

Date

1940

Description

Creator of the image: AP Images
Date of the image creation: 8 October 1940
Medium: Photograph
Person depicted: A British boy

This photograph was taken in London in 1940 during the Blitz. The scene shows a boy sitting on rubble out the front of a bombed-out bookstore, surrounded by scattered books and collapsed shelves. He seems engrossed in his reading and oblivious to the destruction around him. We know little about the original photograph except that shortly after it was taken during the war, Associated Press Images connected the image to the following caption:

‘A boy sits amid the ruins of a London bookshop following an air raid on October 8, 1940, reading a book titled “The History of London”’.

Then in a secondary caption also written during the war, they wrote:

‘Reading history and seeing it, too an amusing sidelight of the latest chapter in London’s history is this lad who, according to the British caption, sits mid the ruins of a London bookshop following an air raid on October 8, 1940 in London, reading the History of London.’

Nazi Germany bombed the United Kingdom for about eight months, destroying or damaging more than a million structures and killing around 40,000 civilians, about half of which lived in London. Germany’s lack of heavy bombers combined with their poor intelligence of British industry to mean that the bombing ultimately failed to derail the British war-machine, which kept its weapon industries operating and expanding across the eight-month campaign.

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