Paula Rabinowitz opens her informative book about Pulp Fiction and paperbacks with the story of how quality paperbacks came to be. One day in 1935, the publisher Allen Lane was standing at the railway station and realized that he had nothing to read for his journey. The newsstand only offered “popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks”. Lane’s idea to produce high-quality, pocket-sized books at an affordable price led to the creation of Penguin, which in turn led to American equivalents: New American Library (NAL) and Signet Paperbacks. Unlike Penguin’s sober designs, the Signet covers were brassy and unrestrained, with lots of cleavage. Other American publishers like DELL and Pocket Books followed suit.
Rabinowitz takes a semi-chronological approach to the history of paperbacks. She focuses on certain writers–Richard Wright, Isak Dinesen, Borges, etc.–and certain publishing movements those books triggered in the reading public.
My favorite chapters are on Lesbian Pulp and Science Fiction. If you have an interest in paperbacks, American Pulp offers plenty of stories about its development. Rabinowitz includes plenty of facts about the American publishing industry and its eventual decline. How many paperbacks do you own? GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Preface ix
1 Pulp: Biography of an American Object 1
2 Pulp as Interface 40
3 Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday: True Crime and 12 Million Black Voices 82
4 Isak Dinesen Gets Drafted: Pulp, the Armed Services Editions, and GI Reading 109
5 Pulping Ann Petry: The Case of Country Place 131
6 Señor Borges Wins! Ellery Queen’s Garden 159
7 Slips of the Tongue: Uncovering Lesbian Pulp 184
8 Sci-Unfi: Bombs, Ovens, Delinquents, and More 209
9 Demotic Ulysses: Policing Paperbacks in the Courts and Congress 244
CODA The Afterlife of Pulp 281
Acknowledgments 301
Notes 307
Index 377
I own more paperbacks than my local library!
Bob, I too own more paperbacks than my local library!
Same here!
Ditto. And it isn’t close.
Preachin’ to the choir, Cap’n!
I read this about a decade ago and it was fascinating, especially the chapters on lesbian fiction and those weird sideways paperbacks printed for G.I.s in WW II that you can still find on ebay. I probably own about 100 mass market paperbacks. Most of them from my junior high and high school years although I still pick up a few horror and science fiction anthologies a year.
I worked one of my first jobs in a bookstore during the period when trade paperbacks began taking off. At the time most of them were nonfiction titles. Almost all of our fiction, including all the genres, were mass markets with only the new mainstream fiction stuff (most of it the bestsellers) in hardcover. I remember reading a New York Times article at the time about how trade paperbacks were all the rage because they had become a status symbol with yuppies much as CDs would just a few years later.
Now that we’re all living in the bizarro universe, the younger YA, fantasy and romance crowd buys multiple successive trade editions of their favorite books (sprayed edges!) before the publishers finally release the soylent green hardcover edition that they then obligingly snatch up.
I miss paperback racks in drug stores when every visit was like Christmas morning.
Spinner racks. I haven’t thought about them for quite a while. I’m old.
Jerry, I have a friend who bought a spinner rack when a drug store was closing. He filled it with paperbacks and it’s the envy of all his paperback collectors…including me!
Bill Crider used to talk about spinner racks a lot, and James Reasoner mentions them on his blog too.
Jeff, the drug store near my Junior High School had a spinner rack. ACE Doubles, Carter Browns, Mike Shaynes, etc. I miss those wonderful spinner racks full of great paperbacks!
Byron, I miss the spinner racks in drug stores, too! And I miss drug stores. Over a dozen drug stores have closed in our area in the past year. What a mess!
I got rid of a lot of stuff but probably still have a couple of thousand paperbacks.
Jeff, I just gave four boxes of books to the owner of The Book Corner in Niagara Falls, NY. As we were unloading my Rogue, I happened to mention Canada. “I’ve lost 30% of my business because the Canadian customers told me they won’t come to the U.S. while Trump is President.” Today’s WALL STREET JOURNAL has the headline: CANADIAN VISITS TO THE US DROP 900,000 LAST MONTH. Terrible!
As Bill would have said, you had me at Lesbian Pulp.
Ah, the good old days!
In Germany some chains of big stores (compare them to Macys)also had spinner racks and somehow the books they couln’t sell went into a kind of garbage heap, sold at ricicilousl low Prices, especially SF and Fantasy, great!
In Germany the paperback business started with RoRoRo: Rohwohlts Rotations Romane, cheaply produced – and sold, but no SF etc.
And then came Heyne Books where a Science Fiction Fan was editor and selected many good American and British authors and translators for them.
PS:
We also had pulp “books” before that in a very standard format – 64 pages, so if a novel was too long they had to shorten it, maybe even leave off the (un)happy ending!
I was lucky there:
In the late 50s and beginning of the 60s a friend of my mother worked at a bookstore so often after school I went into the store, moved the SF spinning rack and read a book for free – or at least half of the book and returned the next dax for the rest.
And on my business trips in the early 70s in every city I went to I would have a look at all stores which sold books to find some cheap leftovers.
Wolf, what you describe were the Glory Days for paperbacks. Today, so many bookstores have closed. Drug stores only stock a few best selling paperbacks. I’m forced to order most of my paperbacks online.
I have a lot fewer paperbacks now than I did ten years ago, having culled 80 percent of them (maybe more) before we moved in 2019. 60 years ago, you could buy a variety of paperbacks everywhere (and I did). The small town, Smithers, next to our bedroom community had a drugstore/lunch counter that had a spider rack, the larger town down the road, Montgomery, had spinners in two drugstores, the GC Murphy’s, and Eddie Kelly’s confection shop/soda counter. All were a short lunch-break walk from my high school. The small city of Charleston had two newsstands, two bookstores, and a Kresge’s with a spinner. All gone now.
Fred, your description matches the paperback situation in Niagara Falls, NY–where I grew up–with plentiful sources of paperbacks. As you say, all gone now…
Several thousand mmpbs, probably as many trade paperbacks (including a smattering of digest-sized children’s books from my earlier youth, mostly from Scholastic and Dell Yearling and some from competing lines) and about as many hardcovers (including no lack of remainders, ex-libs, and inexpensive second-hands as well as some near-mint first-hand purchases as well as some with eyetracks…and a smattering of textbooks. And the magazines. Not as many of the newspapers and magazines I’ve worked on as I used to. Not so small disasters haven’t helped, but the majority are still with us.
Todd, sounds like you have an impressive collection!