One could argue that magazines were the first paperback books. Printed on inexpensive paper that did not need to hold up over time because the contents were timely and disposable, their covers, if they had them at all, were made from the same stock as the insides or from slightly thicker cardstock. Magazines had been around for a couple of centuries, but a real step toward paperback books arrived in the late nineteenth century with the rise of pulp. The name came from the poor quality of the paper, and these periodicals published action, adventure, romance, horror, detective stories, and all manner of sensational fiction.
The literary and high minded dismissed them as being about as valuable as the paper they were printed on. Readers, however, loved them. Many publishing houses produced nothing but pulp fiction, selling it in dime stores and train stations. The books were instantly recognizable for their bright, suggestive covers, which, like magazines, were thin and inexpensive to produce compared to the hard, cloth coverings used for more respectable and costly books.
Allen Lane was head of the British publisher The Bodley Head, and by 1935 the Great Depression was taking a serious toll on the book world. With far less money to spend, people were not buying many books. At the time, books were ornate and expensive. What we would now call hardbound or hardback books were considered an investment as much as a source of information and entertainment.
After visiting Agatha Christie at her country home, Lane found himself in a train station with nothing to read on the way back to London. The only things for sale were trashy magazines and pulp fiction, the kind of salacious adventure, sleaze, romance, and crime novels printed on low quality paper and bound with simple paperboard covers. It occurred to him that the pulp fiction model could be applied to more reputable literature. He believed he could sell decent, respectable books at bargain prices, roughly the cost of half a pack of cigarettes.
Lane struggled to convince his colleagues that the idea would work, so he created a separate division to produce high quality softcover books. He financed it himself and used the name suggested by his secretary, Penguin. He secured the rights to reprint ten classic novels, including works by Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway, and soon received an order from the Woolworth’s chain for more than sixty thousand copies.
The modern paperback was born, and other publishers quickly created their own divisions to compete. At first, the books were simply reprints of successful hardbound titles. Penguin then launched Pelican, an imprint devoted to original paperbacks, followed by Puffin Picture Books for children. The United States entered the market in 1938 with the arrival of Pocket Books.
In 1943, the Council on Books in Wartime, an organization of librarians, set out to get books into the hands of American troops fighting overseas in World War II. They wanted inexpensive but appealing titles that matched the tastes of the average soldier. Working with the U.S. Army librarian, they designed a line of cheaply made paperbacks that could fit in the breast or pants pocket of a standard issue uniform. These became the Armed Services Editions. They cost seven cents each to produce. The first title was The Education of Hyman Kaplan by Leonard Q. Ross. The program eventually published thirteen hundred titles, including The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a book that had been a commercial failure until this reprint revived interest in it.
When the war ended, soldiers returned home with a newfound affection for paperback books, and that affection helped cement the paperback as a permanent part of American reading culture.
Be the first to comment