Below we offer Italian readers the second part of an important contribution that reconstructs the fortune of paperbacks, whose path closely recalls that of ebooks, which, today, are bringing about a revolution comparable to that carried out by paperbacks in the thirty years 1940 to 1970. This is the article Pulp's big moment. How Emily Brontë met Mickey Spillane by Louis Menand published by “The New Yorker”, reworked, translated and adapted by Ilaria Amurri. In this second part we talk about one of the major innovations behind the success of paperbacks, the cover art. Enjoy the reading!
Definitely read the first part.
Cardboard or paper?
The hardcover was a hallmark of the book's cultural superiority over other media.
In the immediate post-war period, publishing therefore found itself facing a dilemma: hardcover or cardboard? This very material dilemma was already inherent in the very word "paper" which formed the name "paperback" with "back", the irresistible publishing phenomenon that was shaking the placid waters of traditional book publishing. Didn't the cardboard cover demean the book by making it equal to periodical publications of questionable quality? In fact, many preferred the cardboard cover, convinced that the binding made the book a luxury item, an intellectual product intended for those in search of a form of entertainment that was culturally superior to the Hollywood offer and (after 1950) to the television one. The expression "reading a good book" in fact suggests that reading is much more than a simple hobby, since to deal with it you need to carve out some time and embrace a condition of happiness and moral growth that goes back to an ancient and illustrious tradition.
Such a marketing philosophy seemed to conceal the fear that cinema could prevail over books, but it was thanks to series such as Pocket Books that this risk was significantly reduced. According to De Graff, reading was a pastime that was perfectly suited to everyday life: one could read on the way to work, during the lunch break or while queuing at the bank (in the same way that today millions of people listen to music in headphones).
As for the cover, which certainly isn't enough to judge a book, it can make the difference when it comes to selling a book. Seeking to reach the masses in a new way, paperback publishing radically changed the external appearance of books, transforming pulp covers into quintessentially XNUMXs artistic expressions, which later became the protagonists of websites and books such as The Great American Paperback, by Richard Lupoff, and Over My Dead Body, by Lee Server.
The cover looks like a cinema
The new art form was intended to attract the customer's eye, but also to break down any economic inhibitions of those who were inclined to buy a book even though they hadn't planned on buying it. However, the exponential increase of ever more captivating covers pitted the different series against each other, forcing them to challenge the competition in a competition to the most vulgar. Whether the author was Mary Shelley or John D. MacDonald, scantily clad women and sexually aggressive imagery became almost de rigueur, and whether the novel in question was a detective story or a detective story, the cover would invariably depict a half-naked woman with a gun in her hand. .
In a certain sense, paperback reprints were therefore a different product than traditional ones, mainly due to the strong visual and emotional impact. For example, George Orwell's 1984, one of the most successful books of the 1949s, has been presented to the public in very different forms. The gray dress of the hardcover edition published by Harcourt Brace, dating back to XNUMX, blends harmoniously with the illustrations on a dark blue background that accompany the entire text. In keeping with the seriousness of the subject matter, the author's name and the words "a novel" are elegantly printed in script.
The 1950 Signet reprint, illustrated by Alan Harmon, shows a Winston Smith from the back. somewhat slim in point of view, he casts an intense gaze at Julia, buxom and well made up, who wears on her breast a crest of the Anti-Sex League, fastened to a blouse whose wide neckline dips down to her well-dressed waist. The artist then transformed O'Brien, Wilson's antagonist, into a kind of sadomasochistic swimming instructor: a menacing fellow, with a black helmet, bare shoulders and visible pecs, holding a sort of of stick. The headband reads “A shocking vision of life in 1984. Forbidden love… Fear… Betrayal” and on the foot: “Full edition”.
On the cover of the hardcover version this information was absent, in fact that of the blurb had been an idea of De Graff, whose purpose was to prevent readers from mistaking the paperbacks for abridged editions. Over time this custom became almost universal, suggesting that books had been published in their original, uncensored form.
… and the cover art becomes pulp
As David Earle explains in Re-covering Modernism, an intriguing study of the history of the pulp genre, cover art was able to capture the scandalous and subversive nature of modernist writing, giving books, even those that had been around for decades , a sort of transgressive charm. It would have been absurd to think of encountering examples of samizdat or clandestine literature in large American malls such as Sears, yet this was precisely the message that the new format was intended to convey.
For this reason, the covers of the pulps were frequently contested. Allen Lane hated them and tried in every way to distance himself from them, preferring a standard style for the entire Penguin line. Someone claims that Lane even set fire to a warehouse, in order to get rid of a quantity of books that he considered to be in bad taste. It was his contempt for cover art that caused the schism within Penguin Books in 1948, when American Penguin became the New American Library, Mickey Spillane's publishing house.
Sometimes it was the authors themselves who complained about the artistic covers. Young Holden was published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company in 1951 and sold fairly well, although the book was not among the year's bestsellers. In 1953, the novel was reprinted by Signet with illustrations by James Avati, better known as the "Rembrandt of the pulp". The cover depicted Holden Caulfield outside a kind of seedy strip club, in a place similar to Times Square, in which we glimpse a man who appears to be intent on picking up a prostitute. He promised the blurb: "This unusual book will shock you, amuse you and perhaps break your heart ... but you will never forget it!"
Salinger flew into a rage and later, when Bantam managed to secure the rights to the novel, he was keen to design a sober burgundy cover himself.
Nipple covers regardless
Cover art, in an attempt to make titles more appealing, often ended up creating bizarre anomalies. A classic case is that of the nipple covers (which allowed the heroines' nipples and breasts to be glimpsed under their clothes), attributed to a very prolific artist named Rudolph Belarski. In 1948 Popular Library reprinted a 1925 novel called The Private Life of Helen of Troy. Belarski claimed that the publishers had given him carte blanche, telling him that the scenes represented on the cover didn't necessarily have to take place within the narrative: “They always told me – don't worry, we'll take care of the story. You think about showing the boobs“.
Belarski lived up to expectations. Her Elena is a blonde who wears a Mycenaean-style petticoat, fixed harmoniously under her breasts, while an elegant blue tunic falls to the side of hers, baring one shoulder. It seems that the woman wears nothing under her dress, unless it's a thong in the style of the XII century BC. The fact is that her shapes are clearly visible and it's easy to guess what made Paris lose his head!
Although the book bills itself as an "unabridged edition", the truth is that there would have been nothing to censor. The novel makes no reference to the breasts, nor to other parts of the protagonist's body, if we exclude a single reference to the female "belly", while much of the narration is occupied by the dialogues, which produce an almost comical effect by attributing a modern language to the characters of Homer's epic. The author, John Erskine, taught English at Columbia University in New York (he was a professor of Lionel Trilling), where he created the course in Literature and Humanities (also creating the collection of Great Books of the Western World), and then become president of Juilliard, the famous art school in New York.
The publishers of the Popular Library knew to play it safe with nipple covers, because in 1941 Pocket Books had chosen an image of the same type for the reprint of Nanà, which sold particularly well with the US military. The novel, written by Émile Zola in 1880, was reprinted thirteen times during the war and sold 586.374 copies. In this case, however, the image on the cover was more relevant than ever to the story being told, since Nanà is a starlet who one evening appears on stage in a transparent dress, leaving all the men in Paris speechless.
Jaw dropping, that was just what the cover art was meant to achieve.
