QUALITY PAPERBACKS
McCann, William
Quality Paperbacks By WILLIAM McCANN IN THE deluge of paperbacks pouring from the presses of fifty publishers it is a wearisome task for discriminating readers to find the titles they want....
...1.25) The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead, edited by Anseim Strauss (Phoenix...
...786 pp...
...274 pp...
...502 pp...
...144 pp...
...296 pp...
...95 cents) The Human Prospect, by Lewis Mumford (Beacon...
...35 cents) The Literature of the United States, by Marcus Cunliffe (Penguin...
...381 pp...
...Beacon Press issued Leslie Fiedler's An End to Innocence, an exciting book of essays, in hard covers at $3.50 and in paper at $1.25...
...The Human Use of Human Beings, cybernetics and society, by Norbert Wiener (Anchor...
...Both books were paperbacks (The New American Library...
...1.50) The Portable Mark Twain, edited by Bernard DeVoto (Viking...
...1.25...
...95 cents) The Explorers of North America (1492-1806), by John Bartlett Breb-ner (Anchor...
...270 pp...
...192 pp...
...308 pp...
...1.25) Selected Essays from Indivu>ual-ism Reconsidered, by David Riesman (Anchor...
...95 cents) Essays on Freedom and Power, by Lord Acton (Meridian...
...405 pp...
...320 pp...
...350 pp...
...95 cents) To the Finland Station, by Edmund Wilson (Anchor...
...11.25) The Uses of the Past, by Herbert J. Muller (Mentor...
...1.25) The Philosophy of Modern Art, by Herbert Read (Meridian...
...348 pp...
...350 pp...
...199 pp...
...Westerns, mysteries, and historical novels do not disappear from their paperback lists (these no doubt will continue to be the mainstay of the business) but publishers no longer sneer, or weep, at the suggestion that a book with serious intellectual pretensions will sell profitably...
...In 1939 Pocket Books, which is still going strong, published its first book, James Hilton's Lost Horizon, at 25 cents, and probably can claim to have launched the modern American paperback era...
...For some reason they didn't then catch on...
...359 pp...
...This is the sort of seduction that pleases paperback publishers and upon which the beguiled purchaser reflects later with little remorse...
...402 pp...
...95 cents) Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy, edited by Joseph L. Blau (American Heritage Series...
...192 pp...
...95 cents) Language, by Edward Sapir (Harvest...
...1.46) The Sacred Fount, by Henry James, with an introduction by Leon Edel (Grove...
...1.25) Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (Beacon...
...A small but important number of originals have appeared...
...282 pp...
...362 pp...
...175) The Lonely Crowd, by David Riesman (Anchor...
...Immense, garish displays of many-colored books induce retinal, if not mental, fatigue in even the most stalwart book hunter...
...1.45) The Acquisitive Society, by R. H. Tawney (Harvest...
...The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, by Julien Benda (Beacon...
...To them it is exhilarating to see in paperbacks Basil Willey's The Seventeenth Century Background (Anchor, 95 cents), Lionel Trilling's Matthew Arnold (Meridian, $1.35), Brooks Adams' The Law of Civilization and Decay (Vintage, $1.25) and Herbert Read's English Prose Style (Beacon, $1.25...
...95 cents) The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, edited by Cassirer, Kristeller and Randall (Phoenix...
...1.35) The Holmes Reader, edited by Julius J. Marke (Docket Books...
...1.25) A Collection of Essays, by George Orwell (Anchor...
...Other publishers evidently viewed the Anchor venture at first with considerable scepticism...
...297 pp...
...1-25) The Waste Land and Other Poems, by T. S. Eliot (Harvest...
...180 pp...
...95 cents) Eight Essays, by Edmund Wilson (Anchor...
...199 pp...
...A good example is Wylie Sypher's Four Stages of Renaissance Style (Anchor,$1.25...
...But what Hilton Kramer described recently in The Progressive as "the proliferation of serious paperback books" dates from the spring of 1953 and has become one of the most re-markable publishing phenomena of our time...
...444 pp...
...333 pp...
...Modern Japan, A Brief History, by Arthur Tiedemann (Anvil...
...244 pp...
...95 cents) The Great Pierpont Morgan, by Frederick Lewis Allen (Bantam...
...Selected Essays of Orestes Brown-son, edited by Russell Kirk (Gateway...
...253 pp...
...1.25) Company Manners, by Louis Kron-enberger (Mentor...
...Of the more than 5,000 paperbacks listed in a selective catalog of currently available titles, perhaps not more than a few hundred would interest an upper middle-brow reader...
...1.25) Peirce and Pragmatism, by W. B. Gallie (Penguin...
...192 pp...
...Penguin Books, an old timer in the paperback field, and Anvil (D...
...The titles which follow were taken from a long and rapidly growing list of quality paperbacks now available or forthcoming shortly: The Future of American Politics, by Samuel Lubell (Anchor...
...The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, by Ernst Cassirer (Beacon...
...Its size, its cheapness, its availability are creating a new kind of book...
...have published valuable originals, particularly in the field of history...
...192 pp...
...75 cents) Science and the Moral Life, by Max C. Otto (Mentor...
...But more Americans than ever are reading now, it seems, and though publishers are not likely to disregard the interior decorating possibilities of their product, they have become happily aware of the new day...
...35 cents) Raoul Duty, text by Alfred Werner (Pocket Library of Great Art...
...50 cents) The Age of Analysis, 20th century philosophers, by Morton White (Mentor...
...302 pp...
...1.45) The Vocabulary of Politics, by T. D. Weldon (Penguin...
...1.50) The American Political Tradition, by Richard Hofstadter (Vintage...
...These paperback books will never replace hard covers," Alfred Hitchcock has said jokingly, "they're just good for reading...
...95 cents) To the Happy Few, selected letters of stendhal, (Grove...
...95 cents) Scepticism and Animal Faith, by George Santayana (Dover...
...1.45) The Portable Dorothy Parker, with an introduction by W. S. Maugham (Viking...
...75 cents) Social Darwinism in American Thought, by Richard Hofstadter (Beacon...
...366 pp...
...135 pp...
...246 pp...
...Novelist Lillian Smith says "the paper cover book is...
...265 pp...
...1.15) Number, The Language of Science, by Tobias Dantzig (Anchor...
...400 PP...
...Publishers have not restricted their output to reprints solely...
...95 cents) The United States in 1800, by Henry Adams (Great Seal...
...142 pp...
...Not long ago on a crowded urban bus I saw a carefully groomed young lady reading William Bradford Huie's The Revolt of Mamie Stover...
...431 pp...
...Here is a revolution indeed, and "as yet a revolution without a guillotine," as one paperback publisher cautiously describes it...
...250 pp...
...1.45) Poetry and the Age, by Randall Jarrell (Vintage...
...65 cents) Atomic Power, by the editors of Scientific American (Simon and Schuster...
...Even so, the number of good paperbacks is grati-fyingly high and steadily increasing...
...252 pp...
...a kind of catalyst to the minds of men everywhere...
...On the other side of the aisle sat a young man reading Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses...
...95 cents) The Reporter Reader, edited by Max Ascoli (Doubleday...
...244 pp...
...191 pp...
...SO cents) The Waning of the Middle Ages, by J. Huizinga (Anchor...
...Shaw on Music, Shaw's music criticism selected by Eric Bentley (Anchor...
...Anchor Books (Doubleday), which has sold 2,000,000 copies of its 76 titles, began the quality reprint splurge three years ago when it published at prices of less than a dollar such books as D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, Constance Rourke's American Humor, and Ernst Cassirer's An Essay On Man...
...50 cents) The Physics and Chemistry of Life, by the editors of Scientific American (Simon and Schuster...
...188 pp...
...95 cents) Freedom and Responsibility in the American Way of Life, by Carl Becker (Vintage...
...95 cents) The Liberal Imagination, by Lionel Trilling (Anchor...
...Quality paperbacks of course are by no means a brand new idea...
...Happy about this and bedazzled by attractive covers and formats, the book buyer finds himself purchasing, say, Van Wyck Brooks' The Ordeal of Mark Twain (Meridian) for $1.25 though he declined to pay 75 cents for the book in a good, used hardcover edition...
...50 cents) Ethics in a Business Society, by Marquis Cbilds and Douglass Cater (Mentor...
...Especially grateful for quality paperbacks are scholars and intellectuals, who may now obtain at relatively low cost new copies of books which have long been out of print or hard to locate...
...240 pp...
...314 pp...
...85 cents) The Vintage Mencken, edited by Alistair Cooke (Vintage...
...1.45) The Armed Vision, by Stanley Edgar Hyman (Vintage...
...95 cents) Samuel Johnson, Selected Lives or the English Poets, edited by Warren L. Fleischauer (Gateway...
...50 cents) Are Men Equal?, An Inquiry Into the Meaning of American Democracy, by Henry A. Myers (Great Seal...
...248 pp...
...And more recently, in the mid-1930'i, Modern Age, for one, published a number of worthwhile titles at low prices...
...1.35) The Painter's Eye, by Maurice Grosser (Mentor...
...The success of quality reprints, selling from 95 cents to $1.95, has obviously startled publishers as much as it has pleased a great many book buyers...
...219 pp...
...There were inexpensive, soft-covered reprints of good books in this country in the Nineteenth Century...
...226 pp...
...Van Nostrand Co...
...35 cents) The Autobiography of Alice B. To&las, by Gertrude Stein (Modern Library...
...309 pp...
...But as its success became apparent they have one by one—Knopf (Vintage Books), Harcourt, Brace (Harvest Books), Beacon Press, Simon and Schuster, Grove Press (Evergreen Books), Modern Library, Noonday (Meridian), Henry Regnery (Gateway), and Viking (Portables and Compass Books)—entered the paperback market...
...85 cents) The Family of Man (photographs), with an introduction by Carl Sandburg (Maco...
...192 pp...
...50 cents) Modern Man in Search of a Soul, by C. G. Jung (Harvest...
...314 pp...
...319 pp...
...1.45) The Mind of the South, by W. J. Cash (Anchor...
...287 pp...
...a new quality (and a very old one) of communication is developing...
...242 pp...
...All the same, they may occasionally have some bad moments when a wife who needs a new dress discovers that William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (Meridian), for which her husband paid $5 to a second-hand book dealer, is now selling for $1.25...
...247 pp...
...Penguin, for instance, has just published an excellent two-volume history of the United States by Russel B. Nye and J. E. Morpurgo...
...544 pp...
...384 pp...
...383 pp...
...238 pp...
...95 cents...
...384 pp...
...1.15) Growth and Structure of the English Language, by Otto Jespersen (Anchor...
...Some of the university presses—Cornell (Great Seal Books) and Chicago (Phoenix)—have followed suit...
...345 pp...
...A few publishers have brought out new books simultaneously in paperbacks and hard covers...
...This is good news indeed...
...At the newsstand where we were accustomed to find our dail paper, comic books, and The Sporting News we may now see prominently displayed Jacques Maritain's Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (Meridian, $1.35) and Henri Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Anchor, 85 cents...
...95 cents) History as the Story of Liberty, by Benedetto Croce (Meridian...
...88 pp...
...1.25) Man and the State, by Jacques Maritain (Phoenix...
Vol. 20 • March 1956 • No. 3
