The Softcover Evolution
GEWEN, BARRY
THE SOFTCOVER EVOLUTION BY BARRY GEWEN The paperback book, as we know it, originally appeared in bookstores and on newsstands in New York City in June 1939, when the Pocket Books Company issued...
...In 1952 the industry was subjected to a Congressional investigation into what the committee chairman called "the kind of filthy sex books sold at the corner store which are affecting the youth of our country...
...Subsequently, it dwindled to a whisper, outdated by the course of events...
...Unfortunately, Davis seems to have sunk his teeth into a dead problem...
...Shakespeare made the list with Five Great Tragedies, as did—shades of things to come—Agatha Christie and one Dorothea Brande, author of a self-help volume entitled Wake Up and Live...
...Paperback houses eventually were shelling out millions of dollars for properties that were then massively hyped through ad campaigns, movie tie-ins and promotional tours...
...At 85 cents to $1.25 a volume, they were designed to sell as little as 27,000 copies and still make money...
...Davis does not indicate whether the Baron was familiar with U. S. publishing practices of the day, but if he was, the circle would be complete because softcover books had been appearing in America since colonial times...
...In 1968, Fawcett could still startle the industry by laying out $400,000 for The Godfather...
...Higher priced paperbacks had an insidious effect as well, however, touching off a bidding war that only now shows signs of abating...
...a 1948 Popular Library reissue, The Private Life of Helen of Troy, gained fame for its "nipple cover...
...These changes brought the industry new authority along with a new source of customers...
...Most American publishers, acquainted with the failures of previous paperback ventures, had concluded it was impossible to make a profit on a 25-cent book, and they had calculations to prove their point...
...Davis concludes by telling us that paperback publishing is in trouble, but I am not so sure...
...But it was a straitjack-et, locking the industry into de Graff s original high-volume-low-price philosophy...
...But I'm sure that there are at least 27,000 who think they want to read it...
...By the time Bantam paid $3.2 million in 1979 for Princess Daisy, the industry started drawing back from the precipice toward which it was galloping...
...Bookstores began stocking paperbacks and college professors started assigning them to their classes...
...Books were being sold in more places than ever before in American book history...
...The paperback, Davis explains, was hardly the brainchild of Pocket Books founder Robert Fair de Graff...
...Reorders poured in, soon reaching 15,000 a day, and Pocket Books was on its way to becoming a brand name, like Jell-o and Kleenex, that identifies an entire product...
...Four years later, Avon spent $1 million each for I'm OK— You're OK and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and in 1976 Ragtime pulled down nearly $2 million...
...Obviously, by the 1930s, paperback publishing was an industry just waiting to be born, and after Pocket Books blazed the trail in this country, other companies— Avon, Popular Library, Dell, Bantam—rushed in to take their share of the spoils...
...In part, it was killed by the new quality softcovers that convincingly demonstrated the paperback's better side, like Anchor and Vintage...
...Another factor that contributed to his success was his method of distribution...
...All of this is nonsense, as is his suggestion that mass-market paperbacks are now demonstrably inferior to those of the past...
...Although the "blockbuster" syndrome may have occurred anyway, it became inevitable once publishers found they could raise their newsstand prices...
...England's Penguin Books, whose success preceded Pocket Books', sold a remarkable 25 million volumes in the three years after its birth in 1935...
...But de Graff gambled on high volume to cut his costs, and he won, tapping amarket that had expanded as a result of rising population, literacy and leisure...
...What was new, apparently, was the economics of 20th-century life...
...The point of this history is to paint another portrait of the paperback, one that shows its better side...
...As Jason Epstein, the mastermind behind Anchor Books, explained about one of his selections for the list: "I don't know how many people want to read it...
...Only Dr...
...Everything was fair game: Bantam' s edition of Babbitt showed a woman in a tight skirt leering at the hero, and the copy read: "What did this man want...
...Lacking a genuine issue to discuss, Davis tries to resurrect an antique complaint in his final pages, grumbling that the publishers are catering to the lowest common denominator by trying to sell books as if they were toothpaste...
...The Paperback Revolution is far from over...
...Any excuse was found for an illustration of a half-naked girl...
...He got the idea from Europe...
...For the astonishingly low price of 25 cents, a reader could choose from recent best-sellers like James Hilton's Lost Horizon and Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, or from such classics as Emily Bronte's WutheringHeights and Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh...
...Even he admits that the great debate over paperbacks had come to a head by 1954...
...Breathtaking statistics of that kind would have been impossible before the modern softcover emerged...
...Baron von Tauchnitz had started his company, a specialty house concentrating on English-language classics for the Continent, in 1837...
...Quality books, which might appeal to a more limited audience, were frozen out, as were larger volumes that could not be produced cheaply enough to make a profit...
...There was nothing new about the concept...
...The publishing experiment rapidly turned into a publishing phenomenon...
...Regular coverage of paperbacks was initiated by the Book Review in 1974, and in 1976 came a separate best-seller list...
...history except the Bible...
...For over a decade, the 25-cent price remained practically untouchable...
...In the Introduction to Two-Bit Culture, Davis announces: "To many people, the paperback book has always been little more than second-rate trash...
...Though Spock may be America's most influential writer, in total sales he does not come close to another Pocket Books author, Erie Stanley Gardner, the top-selling novelist ever...
...The populists, who still occasionally pop up in the news when some obscure school board bans Catcher in the Rye, showed themselves to be simply reactionary fulmina-tors...
...Writers like J.D...
...By 1950, sales were at the 200-million level...
...The elitists, concerned about the debasement of cultural standards, had a better argument intellectually, and numbered some very sophisticated people within their ranks...
...From the first, critics fretted about a " flood of trash"—for good reason...
...Today, the blatant pandering seems comical, yet it is easy to understand why at the time people were offended...
...An increasingly urban society provided de Graff with the opportunity to plug into a ready-made network of newspaper dealers, cigar stands and grocery stores unavailable to earlier publishers...
...The mass-market side of paperback publishing, with its huge sales and big money, has always attracted the most interest, and the most scorn...
...Once again other companies followed, producing "giants" of their own...
...Penguin's publisher, Allen Lane, lifted his format from a German line called Albatross, founded in 1932 to compete with yet another paperback firm, the venerable Tauchnitz Editions...
...A recent issue of Publishers Weekly reports that paperbacks now account for 40 per cent of all books in print, up from 30 per cent a mere four years ago, and that three-quarters of the nation's 15,000 publishers are producing softcovers...
...Their difficulty was that no one has ever devised a screening system that would permit a Henry Miller while prohibiting a Jacqueline Susann...
...THE SOFTCOVER EVOLUTION BY BARRY GEWEN The paperback book, as we know it, originally appeared in bookstores and on newsstands in New York City in June 1939, when the Pocket Books Company issued its first 10 titles...
...A different breakthrough of sorts was achieved in 1964 when the influential New York Times Book Review gave a paperback, Avon's reissue of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, front-page treatment...
...In addition, the would-be censors, an odd alliance of populists and elitists, could never produce a reasonable program for reining in the excesses...
...A noble undertaking, surely...
...He even comes up with the bizarre theory that the arrogance of Man-hattanites is responsible for the garbage filling the best-seller lists because the industry treats the Real People as less intelligent than they actually are...
...This one-time poor people's lawyer, who is said to have churned out his first Perry Mason mystery in three and a half days, began appearing in paper in 1940...
...The next significant step in the paperback's evolution was similarly based in economics...
...In 1950, New American Library burst traditional constraints by issuing Richard Wright's Native Son as a Signet Giant priced at 35 cents...
...The facts of this cultural revolution have been usefully collected inKenneth C.Davis' Two-Bit Culture: ThePaperback-ing of America (Houghton Mifflin, 362 pp., $19.95 cloth, $10.95 paper), and amazing facts they are...
...The marriage of paperback books to the magazine distribution system," Davis writes, "opened the way for the Paperback Revolution...
...Spock and some nonfiction works sold for more...
...By 1968, he had sold 165 million books and was still going strong at the rate of20,000 copies a day worldwide...
...Salinger, Allen Ginsberg and Joseph Heller made their reputations largely through soft-cover sales...
...Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care, issued by Pocket Books in 1946, went through 59 printings in its first 10 years and, to date, has sold over 30 million copies, more than any other book in U .S...
...The real question may be, what is the future of the hardcover book...
...The mass-market arm is no longer as wedded to the blockbuster as it was in the '70s, and the quality sector appears to be offering readers a wider selection than ever before...
...The turn toward high quality was assured in 1952 when Doubleday jumped into the paperback market with Anchor Books, a prestigious line aimed at college students...
...If Penguin and, to a lesser degree, Pocket Books tried to offer quality with quantity, their competitors in the '40s and early '50s outdid each other with vulgar covers and phony come-ons...
Vol. 67 • May 1984 • No. 9
