From the paperback
We publish the third and final part of the essay on the birth and success of paperbacks in the United States. This last part tells how the paperback, born as a content intended for the low end of the market that was not reached by major publishing, at an extremely low price and with questionable literary quality in terms of themes and writing, manages to grow in tastes of the public and in the turnover of publishing houses to become one of the mainstream formats. Paperbacks are in fact responsible for the great expansion of the market and for the golden age of book publishing in the thirty years 1960-1990. The paperback phenomenon could be studied as one of the cases of disruptive innovation, a process that is often cited to explain the process of the new economy to which the ebook phenomenon also belongs. What has happened, however, is that paperbacks have not destroyed traditional publishers but have enriched them, creating many jobs. In any case, we leave you to the narration of Louis Menand in his article in “The New Yorker”, Pulp's big moment. How Emily Brontë met Mickey Spillane , reworked, translated and adapted for the Italian reader by Ilaria Amurri.
Read the first part | Read the second part
Big numbers
Although of dubious literary quality, paperbacks began to conquer an important space in the tastes and choices of readers, also conquering non-regular book readers. The phenomenon was undoubtedly enlarging the market. The many detractors of these productions had to give up in front of the numbers. Sales were good, readers were happy, and the phenomenon was beginning to have substantial effects on the entire industry. David Earle cites the example of God's Little Acre, a gothic novel by Erskin Caldwell about the white working class of the Southeastern United States. The book, riddled with sexual violence, with frequent incestuous overtones, was published by Viking Books in hardcover in 1933 and sold just over 8000 copies, enough to convince the Modern Library to reprint it. This time sales jumped to 66.000 copies and then to 150.000 with the Grosset & Dunlap reissue. Finally, the 1946 American Penguin edition sold 3 million copies in just 18 months.
With Caldwell, between 1945 and 1951, the book sold 25 million copies and its success inspired the southern-gothic pulp genre, with titles such as Swamp Hoyden, by Jack Woodford and John B. Thompson, and The Sin Shouter of Cabin Road, by John Faulkner. The latter had a rather demanding surname, in fact he was the brother of William Faulkner, whose works seemed to derive some benefit from the popularity of the novels of the same name. Between 1947 and 1951, Signet published six of his works, which sold nearly 3,3 million copies (in 1950, the widespread acclaim earned him the Nobel Prize, which gave a further boost to the sales of Signet's books). he).
One of the biggest hits of the 1956s and early 59s was Peyton Place (“The Sins of Peyton Place”), by Grace Metalious, a kind of southern-gothic transplanted to New Hempshire. The novel was first published in 1966 and spent 10 weeks at the top of the Times best seller list. It was made into a film and a television series and by XNUMX it had already sold XNUMX million copies, although it never inspired a wave of "New Hempshire gothic".
It was an unprecedented success and Pocket Books, having now consolidated its commercial position, began going out with no less than 100.000 copies at a time, while Signet started from 200.000 and Fawcett Publications, the publisher of the Gold Medal Books paperback series, from 300.000 . David Earle compared these numbers with those obtained by two books that had become very popular in hardcover: Fiesta and The Great Gatsby, which sold 5000 and 20.000 copies respectively in the first edition.
The public morals/paperbacks ratio
Traditional publishing had to find a way to get its hands on a large portion of the market without suffering image damage and, moreover, there was the risk of inadvertently breaking the law. In 1933, Joyce's Ulysses was declared non-obscene by federal judge John Woolsey, but by then the novel had already been around for 11 years, in a version now considered canonical, and Joyce had become one of the most famous writers in the world. However, despite Woolsey's decision, not all American judges were equally lenient. In 1946 Memoirs of Hecate County, a collection of interconnected short stories by "The New Yorker" reporter Edmund Wilson, was declared obscene by a New York court, and the Supreme Court refused to overturn the verdict.
There was also no shortage of political pressure. In 1952 Congressman Ezekiel Candler Gathings founded a committee against the dissemination of pornography, challenging "the scandalous books offered for sale on street corners, which compromise the integrity of young Americans." The cover art, in particular, was the subject of ruthless criticism: "lewd illustrations depicting voluptuous young women".
The birth of lesbian pulp fiction
An emblematic case was that of Women's Barracks, by Tereska Torres, an autobiographical novel that recalled the times of the war, when the author had served in London in the Free French resistance movement. Among the protagonists of the book there was also a lesbian and two others had brief homosexual experiences, but a few references were enough for the paperback, published with Golden Medal Books, to become one of the cornerstone texts of the lesbian pulp fiction genre, contrary to the author's intentions. The cover depicts a dressing room in which a group of girls are intent on changing, while a haughty woman in uniform watches them from a corner. In fact, however, the most sensual passage in the book is limited to the following: “It was moving, funny and exciting! Claude went further, exploring the child's body. Then, in order not to frighten her little girl, he stopped his hand and whispered - Ursula, dear child, my little one, you're really pretty! – Her hand flowed again ”.
Before the committee lashed out at Fawcett Publications for publishing Women's Barracks, the novel had already sold a million copies, and thanks to Gathings' free publicity, it sold another million, reaching a total of about 4 million within a few year.
In 1953 the committee issued a report that: “Paperback books, which began as cheap reprints of old novels, have degenerated into a medium for the dissemination of artistic appeals to sensuality, immorality, obscenity, perversion and to depravity". The report concluded by stating that: “Because of today's tendency to exalt passion above all principle and to identify lust with love, those who read these books may conclude that all married persons are adulteresses and that all young are completely free from sexual inhibitions.”
However, the law had very few defenses. It was true that the pulps often described a certain type of sexual behavior, but they didn't explicitly do so and the language they used wasn't strictly obscene. The books in question weren't pornographic magazines, only that they gave the impression of being so because of the somewhat risqué covers. Nonetheless, the committee condemned Women's Barracks as a vehicle for issues such as homosexuality and other forms of "perversion". As Kenneth Davis explains, although Congress ignored Gathings' demands, anti-pulp groups continued to proliferate across the country, having a markedly negative effect on the paperback industry, which by the way already had its problems. .
The paperback business model does not have sufficient margins The new business model proved to be unreliable, starting with the question of prices. Even selling hundreds of thousands of copies, the profit remained insufficient, because the books cost only twenty-five cents each. The royalties that De Graff paid to the authors corresponded to 4%, i.e. a penny for each copy (and the same was true for the Armed Service Editions). Added to this were the discounts applied by the retailer (which could reach up to 50%), not counting the costs of production and distribution, which lowered the profit margin to half a cent per book.
Publishers tried to cover expenses as quickly as they could, but they had to make extremely large numbers to even the books. The books were reprinted in large quantities because the publishing houses could not make any profit under 1950 copies. The result of the strategy was that the market stagnated: in 214, 46 million paperbacks were produced in the United States, which generated a profit of 1953 million dollars, but millions of books remained unsold (in 175 there were about XNUMX million) and wholesalers had to send them back to publishers, who were forced to put them aside or sell them off.
As if that weren't enough, newspapers began offering discounts on subscriptions, significantly reducing the number of people who frequented the newsstands. The American News Company, the leading newspaper distribution company, lost an antitrust lawsuit and was forced out of business. The publishing houses, on the other hand, while continuing to publish paperback series, gradually stopped saturating the market with the pulp genre.
Jason Epstein and the quality paperback
John Epstein founded Anchor Books, the Doubleday series which aimed to produce only "quality paperback". The initiative met with considerable success also considering the cultural maturation of the public who bought the pulp paperbacks.
Simultaneously, a new player, Jason Epstein, also a Columbia graduate, took the field. Later, in his autobiographical book Book Business, Epstein wrote, "Publishing was like an extension of my college experience." After graduating from Columbia in 1949, he began working as a literary agent at Doubleday, the publishing house that had also taken on the young Robert De Graff and was run by a group of advertisers who depended heavily on the profits of the company's Book Clubs. , especially the Literary Guild.
Eptsein was a true book lover. He lived in Greenwich Village and frequented the Eighth Street Bookshop, the legendary independent bookstore in midtown Manhattan, where he wished he could buy piles of well-bound books, yet he couldn't afford them on his $45 weekly wage. Epstein therefore decided to develop an economic version of the texts he had read at Columbia and proposed to the owners of the library, Ted and Eli Wilentz, to reprint paperback versions of the classics and of books that presented a certain cultural depth, until in 1953 he managed to launch with Doubleday its first series of paperbacks, Anchor Books.
Early titles included The Liberal Imagination, by Lionel Trilling, Studies in Classic American Literature, by David Herbert Lawrence, as well as works by Conrad, Gide and Stendhal. The price of the books ranged from $0,65 to $1,25 and was calculated so that 20.000 copies would break even. The clientele consisted mainly of university students or slightly wealthier and more educated readers than the average. The artful, but never cheesy covers were often done by Edward Gorey, who to Epstein's delight turned out to be a blockbuster.
The new product became known as "the quality paperback," to distinguish it from the previous rubbish, but it was still a paperback, however culturally elevated (Epstein himself was disappointed with the end result, and when Eight Street began selling paperbacks judged its display as "an affront to the peaceful dignity of the shop").
By 1954, Anchor had sold 600.000 books a year, never turning into pulp and following an economically viable business model. That year, Knopf also released its first line of quality paperbacks, Vintage Books, which was soon followed by Beacon Press and Meridian Books.
Publishing embraces the quality paperback
The idea was taken up by two wealthy publishers, who were only marginally interested in profit, namely Barney Rossett, the owner of Grove Press, and James Laughlin, the founder of New Directions Publishing, who were inspired by popular literature, creating anthologies in which collected works of modern writers. Mentor published "New World Writing", which included works by WH Auden, Jorges Luis Borges and Heinrich Böll, while Grove created the literary magazine "Evergreen Review", which was an excellent showcase for the literary avant-garde from all over the world.
Rossett and Laughlin published in paperback authors such as Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Hermann Hesse, Eugène Ionesco, the poets of the Beat Generation, the poets Black Mountain and then Tennessee Williams and Nathanael West, giving the opportunity to learn about modernism European and American to students and professors, but also to those waiting to catch the train.
Grove also published a popular series of pornographic books, which somehow seemed to be in keeping with the modernist vocation of the publishing house, since the comparison between modernist and obscene publications was now considered old-fashioned. Before paperbacks, many believed that Joyce and Lawrence were scandalous writers, and of course it was this willingness to break taboos that made them true innovators.
The contribution of the pulp to literature
Paula Rabinowitz, who as we have seen has studied this phenomenon in depth, is perfectly right (when she embraces the vision expressed by Earle in Re-covering Modernism) in affirming that, thanks to the pulp, the public has accepted the idea that literature could arouse shock or embarrassment or even scandal in the people who were reading it.
Finally books could talk about sex, but not only that, they could also afford to be vulgar, disconcerting, transgressive and even go against public morals. It even got to the point where these characteristics of fiction became indispensable and irreplaceable in the eyes of readers, who were now looking for something in reading that went beyond a profound or edifying experience.
The surrender of censorship to modernity
As Loren Glass recalls in Counterculture Colophon, Barney Rossett was at the forefront of the fight against censorship, even if in 1957 he remained out of the lawsuit brought against the paperback collection Howl and Other Poems (published by City Light Books), by Allen Ginsberg, which was declared non-obscene by a San Francisco judge. A few years later, however, the owner of the Grove was embroiled in the controversies which led to the condemnation of Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence in 1959 and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller in 1964, although both novels had already entered the market becoming real bestsellers. In any case, these books were still appreciated by those who could afford to buy them, which is why the judges often turned a blind eye.
The publishing houses, which gradually gained the approval of the law, finally succeeded in fulfilling what had become the dominant wishes of the public, offering books that offered truthful descriptions of sexuality, written by critically acclaimed and internationally awarded authors. Thus, first in bookstores, then in middle-class homes, titles such as Norman Mailer's An American Dream, John Updike's Couples, Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge, Portnoy's Complaint ( "Portnoy's Lament") by Philip Roth and Fear of Flying ("Fear of flying") by Erica Jong: mass literature had now conquered the world.
Thanks Pulp Fiction!
