The paperback revolution like that of ebooks
1939-1945: The birth of pulp fiction
The United States alone accounts for a quarter of the entire world book market. Their market is 10 times the Italian one in a ratio of 1 to 6 of the population. It is in this country that the main innovations both in terms of contents and commercial models are tested and therefore implemented, before elsewhere. With technology tending to transform and revolutionize every economic and even social activity, the models tested and developed in the United States tend to expand to other countries and different markets with the speed with which a virus spreads. The idea that some realities can escape this contamination is illusory.
Therefore we think that the study, understanding and reworking of the trends that manifest themselves in this market are one of the most useful investments of time and resources of any person who has any relationship with this industry. Furthermore, instant access to information, sharing of experiences and the affirmation of English as a global language are all conditions that stimulate the diffusion of models successfully practiced in the USA, which become an operational model also in other areas of the planet also of different cultural traditions.
It is for this reason that we wanted to offer Italian readers this important contribution which reconstructs the fortunes of paperbacks, whose path closely recalls what ebooks do today, in a revolution comparable to that carried out by paperbacks from 1940 to 1970. Below we offer our readers the first part of the reworking and adaptation, edited by Ilaria Amurri, of the article Pulp's big moment. How Emily Brontë met Mickey Spillane by Louis published by “The New Yorker”. In this story of the birth and affirmation of mas-market paperbacks (that is, paperbacks for the mass market) we find surprising analogies with the revolution that new publishing is implementing in the contemporary book industry. I don't know, then as now it was only about a distributive and technological revolution, but also about content.
Enjoy the reading!
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1939 Robert De Graff's Pocket Books arrive at 25 cents.
Before World War II, when the only way to buy a book was to leave the house, there weren't enough bookstores. They were all concentrated in the big cities and many of them were in fact souvenir shops selling small volumes. Distribution was therefore very problematic for publishing houses, which usually sent books by post or relied on book clubs, forcing customers to select their readings in a completely random and instinctive way.
At the time, publishers focused more on promotion than on the books themselves. Each year they would select a few titles, advertise them and try to sell as many as possible, then start over the following year. The best-selling books were reprinted and reprinted, but the profits were modest, as only a few copies were printed at a time.
Then, on June 19, 1939, a man named Robert De Graff revolutionized the publishing world by creating Pocket Books, the first series of paperback books. Mass-market paperbacks were very popular, both in price and in content, and some say they changed American culture, as Paula Rabinowitz suggests in American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (published by Princeton University Press). The book references several studies (including contributions by pioneers such as Janice Radway and Lawrence Rainey, as well as scholars such as Evan Brier, Gregory Barnhisel and Loren Glass) that demonstrate how much XNUMXth-century literature has been influenced by the changes that publishing after the arrival of paperbacks.
Penguin is born
However, the introduction of the new format should not be attributed to De Graff, but to the Englishman Allan Lane, the founder of Penguin Books.
According to the legend, told by Kenneth Davis in Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America ("the culture of the dollar quarter"), an interesting excursus in the history of paperback editions, Lane had an epiphany while he was at the Devon station , England, where he spent the weekend with Agatha Christie and her husband. He wanted to buy something to read on the journey back to London, but he couldn't find anything suitable and that's how the idea of paperbacks came up with him. In the summer of 1935 he launched Penguin Books with ten titles, including Help, Poirot!, by Agatha Christie. Sales were good right from the start, also because the books were distributed in all Commonwealth countries, which at the time covered a large part of the planet and of the book market. On July 30, 1935, the milestone of one million books sold was surpassed to the astonishment of Lane himself.
Decisive innovations
In reality, the cardboard covers (not cardboard, to be clear) are almost as old as printing, in fact they were invented in the 1922th century and have been used in France for centuries, as in the case of Joyce's Ulysses, published for the first time in Paris in XNUMX. In the United States the paperback was experimented on a large scale at least twice during the XNUMXth century: first in the XNUMXs, with the series American Library of Useful Knowledge, then after the Civil War, when American publishers, free from international restrictions on copyright, they began to publish paperback editions of the most famous European novels.
Unlike their predecessors, Lane and De Graff changed not only the format of the books, but also the methods of distribution. In 1939, the year De Graff introduced paperbacks, 180 million books were printed in the United States. The problem was that there were just 2800 bookshops, but De Graff realized that there were also 7000 newsagents, 18.000 tobacconists, 58.000 pharmacies and 62.000 restaurants, not counting the train and bus stations, all places that were particularly suited to selling of paperbacks.
The new books were therefore designed to be displayed in any type of shop, on simple shelves, where customers could browse at their convenience while at the pharmacy or waiting to take the train, in the absence of easily accessible bookshops.
The diversification of the points of sale was not that complicated after all. Instead of relying on wholesalers, the main suppliers of bookstores, De Graff decided to collaborate with newsagents, who always displayed new books alongside the latest issues of newspapers and magazines.
A paperback cost 25 cents, that is a quarter of a dollar, and it seems that the figure occurred to De Graff while paying the toll at a toll booth: no one could have resisted such a convenience! Penguin, on the other hand, sold them for sixpence, because according to Lane they should cost no more than a pack of cigarettes, allowing customers to get interesting and captivating books at a good price.
Don't you see any analogy here with Amazon's price fix that ebooks must cost between 2,99 and 9,99? I do.
De Graff tested his idea at the subway newsstands and other small shops in New York and was confirmed that he was on the right track when in a single day a tobacconist managed to sell one hundred and ten copies. After eight weeks, 325.000 copies had already been sold by mid-August, when distribution was extended to the entire Northeastern United States: a new market was emerging. In the same period, the first American office of Penguin was inaugurated, which was followed by several exponents of the competition: Avon (1941), Popular Library (1942), Dell (1943), Bantam (1945) and after the war many others arrived, including New American Library (NAL), in 1948, which published the paperback series Signet and Mentor, fiction and non-fiction respectively.
War and Postwar: The Paperback Explosion
The era of paperbacks had officially begun. The universe of books went through a phase of strong expansion and even the war proved to be an opportunity to express the potential of the new format. Encouraged by the success of the paperbacks, Pocket and Penguin collaborated in the production of the Armed Services Editions series of classics, proposing disposable books, covered in paper and with the text arranged in two columns, small enough to fit easily into the pocket of a 'uniform. The volumes were distributed free of charge to 16 million men and women who served in the military during the war, not counting those that the two publishing houses provided separately to the US Army. Paula Rabinowitz explains how Armed Services Editions published 1180 titles, distributing as many as 123.535.305 books, which cost the government just over six cents a copy.
The soldiers sent overseas, in addition to being avid readers, got too used to the convenience of paperbacks and once back home they couldn't do without them. Result: In 1947, two years after the end of the war, 95 million paperbacks were sold in the United States. In essence, the new model can be said to have revolutionized publishing to the same extent that 45 rpm vinyl records (the "singles", introduced in 1949) and radios (on the market since 1954) changed the the recording industry, just like comedy has been transformed by television and journalism by the Internet. Simply put, books could finally reach millions at affordable prices.
Reading as a pastime
In general, people's attitudes towards literature also changed. De Graff was a high school dropout (as was Lane, who left school at just sixteen) and was not even an avid reader. “Pocket Books' paperbacks are specially designed to keep up with the times and with the needs of New Yorkers,” he said. According to him, reading shouldn't be understood as a pastime not comparable to classical, sophisticated and elitist music, but should rather approach an ice cream-based snack, in a nutshell, everyone should like it. Everyone likes stories and in this sense paperbacks had the advantage of satisfying the general public at a time when television had not yet taken over.
Paula Rabinowitz believes that the mass-market paperback was revolutionary in several respects as a vehicle for cultural growth and de-provincialization. Yet traditional publishing originally viewed paperbacks as low-grade commercial products, comparable to the pulp magazines and comic strips they were displayed alongside. Critics ignored them or limited themselves to denouncing their low cultural level and almost absent political commitment, not to mention the numerous religious and civil organizations that publicly demonstrated, demanding regulation or even repression.
Can't you find an analogy here with the attitude of major publishing towards the phenomenon of self-publishing and new publishing?
Reprints, including Wuthering Heights (which was a huge success with Pocket Books) and Shakespeare's tragedies (which De Graff was selling below cost), were not in themselves a problem. The point is that the diffusion of great classics and critically acclaimed bestsellers, in an economic version, would have made culture more democratic, responding to a need that Americans had already expressed since the days of the Library of Useful Knowledge.
Beyond the classics, pulp fiction
In addition to the classics, new books always appeared on the shelves, with original titles and flashy covers: Hitch-Hike Hussy, by John B. Thompson and Jack Woordford (Beacon), I Wake Up Screaming, by Steve Fisher (Popular Library), Scandals at a Nudist Colony, by William Vaneer (Croydon Books), The Daughter of Fu Manchu, by Sax Rohmer (Avon) (subtitled: “She who hatched a wicked conspiracy in the name of power and Love").
There was also no shortage of mysteries, such as the Perry Mason series by Erle Stanley Gardner (another great success of Pocket Books), which incessantly reproposed the adventures of a cynical and ruthless detective. Crime stories by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett were published, as well as Exit for a Dame, by Richard Ellington (Pocket), Benny Muscles In, by Peter Rabe (Gold Medal Books), Report for a Corpse, by Henry Kane (Dell) , and Leave Her to Hell, by Fletcher Flora (Avon). In particular, I, the Jury (“I will kill you”), by Mickey Spillane, published in 1948 with Signet, sold millions of copies, captivating all of America with the adventures of detective Mike Hammer.
Publishers didn't try to pass off this kind of story as high-level literature, but offered light books, very similar to comics for adults, in a word "pulp fiction". As Paula Rabinowitz rightly observes, in the paperback world it was hard to separate Emily Brontë from Mikey Spillane and indeed the same year I'll Kill You came out Signet reprinted the works of James Joyce, William Faulkner Thomas Wolfe and Arthur Koestler. Publishers made no effort to distinguish the classics from the trash—instead, they commissioned the covers of books like Brave New World and Young Holden from the same artists who did those of Strangler's Serenade and The Case of the Careless Kitten.
Avon books, the publisher most determined to keep the cultural level low, used a portrait of Shakespeare as a logo for its paperback series, going so far as to declare on the outer band that "for millions of readers this brand is synonymous with high literary quality", as in the case of The Amboy Dukes, by Irving Shulman. The book, which according to its subtitle was "a novel about rebellious Brooklyn youth," featured a boy and girl passionately embracing on the grass on the cover, and was one of the pulps that caused the greatest sensation. In any case, Shakespeare had no chance to object.
The "civil weight" of pulp literature and its consequences
As a good English teacher, Paula Rabinowitz is very annoyed by inconsistency and imprecision, nevertheless it is very difficult to understand the chaos that reigned in the post-war field of paperbacks. It was easy to find Native Son (“Fear”), Invisible man (“The invisible man”) and The Street on the same shelves that housed Kiss Me, Deadly (“Deadly kiss”), although this trend is not sufficient to confirm the thesis of Rabinowitz according to which:
Using a standard format and creating typically pulp-style covers, the New American Library gave space not only to Spillane, but also to black and communist authors, introducing the question of human rights in the post-war period. NAL appears to have contributed to the fight against racial segregation (crowned by the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling), helping the broad category of white proletarians make sense of the protests involving public transportation in Montgomery and proposing readings that they described episodes of intimacy between people of different races.
In fact, it is highly unlikely that this was NAL's true intent. not to mention sexual relations between whites and blacks, which Spillane certainly did not intend to encourage (the same indifference was reserved, moreover, for the topic of homosexuality).
However, Rabinowitz is not entirely wrong in stating that paperbacks had a certain weight in the socio-political liberalization that swept the United States in the XNUMXs, but in the sense that they hindered it. Sales of the toughest pulps, peppered with racial stereotypes and sexist vulgarities, far exceeded those of other more or less famous authors. What is certain is that paperbacks have left an indelible mark on XNUMXth century literature, as they have represented a factor of considerable disturbance within the sector, undermining traditional publishing and therefore the entire legislation relating to the press .
Can't the same be said of ebooks? Sure you can!
