For nearly a century, literature found a marvelous niche in a coat, a purse, or the back pocket of blue jeans. Book flourished through the unique virtues of being small, cheap, and available anywhere there was rom for a rotating wire rack. Sadly, those racks have stopped spinning. Publishers say the mass market paperback is all but extinct.
The saga started with a lack of something decent to read at a Devon railway station, where Sir Allen Lane conceived of inexpensive books for people with time to fill. Launching Penguin Books in 1935, Lane brought literature to the masses through non-traditional outlets. Across the Atlantic, Robert de Graaf launched Pocket Books in New York, introducing 25-cent paperbacks wrapped in vibrant artwork. Books broke free from their dignified status in homes and libraries. Printed on fragile pulp and bound with cold glue, they were meant not for immortality, but for a quick escape from workaday life.
The sparks of this revolution were fanned by the flames of war. During World War II, the U.S. government and publishers shipped over 120 million compact “Armed Services Editions” to troops overseas, creating millions of lifelong readers who returned home expecting cheap, portable books.
The post-war era threw off Old World manners, and paperback covers responded in kind. They were gloriously, shamelessly absurd–vivid painted scenes of noir detective in trench coats, sinister shadows, and swooning damsels designed to snag the eye of a bored commuter. Yet behind those sensational covers, you were just as likely to find Faulkner of Hemingway as a hardboiled crime yarn. It was high art cloaked in a thrift-store coat.
For kids growing up those decades, these dog-eared volumes were a quiet, essential rite of passage. They stuffed them into school lockers or smuggles them under bedsheets with a dying flashlight. It was how a generation first collided with the wider world–Holden Caulfield’s terminal angst, Frank Herbert’s giant sand worms, and Stephen King’s terrifying monsters. You read and shared them until the glue gave way, the covers fell off, and the paper turned the color and texture of a dry autumn leaf.
The trouble was that the format’s greatest trick–that it was cheap and disposable–was precisely what brought about its undoing.
Wood pulp got expensive, and publishers realized that printing millions of copies only to have newsagents tear off the front covers for return credit and burn the rest was a terrible business model. Then came glowing screens that could store thousands of thrillers without weighing down a pocket, alongside a modern preference for hefty, $18 trade paperbacks built to look marvelous on a display shelf. The humble four-by-seven-inch rack book simply couldn’t compete.
Next time you’re in Bookends, the store run by the Friends of Pack Library, stop by and visit an old acquaintance. We still keep a section of mass market paperbacks. Buy a couple for old time’s sake–or show one to your kids and tell them about who you were when you kept a book in your back pocket.
Friends
Friends of Pack Library 