Now, the mass market paperbacks I remember were never glamorous. Their paper was cheap and their bindings fragile. I suppose you could say that they were disposable and yet that very disposability was part of its appeal. These were books meant to be carried, loaned, lost, rediscovered, and reread until they quite literally fell apart. They could easily fit into your back pocket, coat pocket, backpack, or even inside an RPG box. These were the books I saw on spinner racks in libraries, drugstores, and supermarkets, offering strange worlds and exciting stories for the low, low price of $1.95. What a bargain!
More than that, though, the mass market paperback was an engine of cultural transmission. Entire genres flourished because they could circulate so widely and cheaply. The lurid covers, the cramped type, the promise of adventure or terror compressed into a few inches of shelf space all contributed to their success. They also shaped expectations and tastes. Through them, I learned how to browse, how to take chances, and, contrary to conventional wisdom, how to judge a book by its cover. The format also encouraged promiscuous reading. Today, I'd grab a sword-and-sorcery novel, tomorrow a horror anthology, and later a space opera with ideas far bigger than its physical dimensions.
Perhaps I exaggerate, but this saddens me. To lose the mass market paperback seems to me not simply to lose a format. It's also to lose a set of habits and experiences tied to it, like casual discovery, which played a huge role in the youthful development of my tastes. Trade paperbacks and hardcovers are finer physical artifacts and digital books, though I personally loathe them, are indeed convenient, but none of these quite replaces the humble paperback’s role as a quiet conspirator, introducing new authors and ideas into as many hands as possible.
---Jim Hodges
ReplyDeleteYour closing sentence was a reality check gut punch.
I alternatively smiled and felt sad as I read this. I feel exactly the same way you do. I love mass market paperbacks. I still have a bunch, my lancer Conans, Lord of the Rings, Earthsea trilogy (before it became a tetralogy or whatever), a bunch of Louie Lamour novels, James Harriets, and on and on. Nothing like a cup of coffee, a paperback, and the time to let them both soak in.
ReplyDeleteI feel this. It was a single mass market paperback that got me into D&D at 10 years old, and very tangibly altered the trajectory of my life.
ReplyDeleteE-book sales may be crowding out physical books, but the overall readership numbers regardless of format have still been dropping for decades. The world is drifting (perhaps racing, even) away from recreational reading and toward borderline illiteracy, and I don't really want to live to see the end of that trend.
ReplyDeleteMass market paperback books are the most technologically advanced form of publishing in all of history, and I cannot even conceive of something more advanced. All the electronic/computer stuff is ultimately a dead end that is popular today only because it is the newest gimmick. Our great-grandchildren, reading their stacks of brand new mass market paperback books, will hear our old fogey stories of reading stuff on screens, and laugh at how backward we were.
ReplyDeleteYou are much more optimistic than I.
DeleteGeoffrey, it's now possible to distribute the works of every author who ever lived to anyone with access to the internet. This is not a gimmick and this is not a phase.
DeleteIf, like me, you enjoy the experience of reading books made of paper you can hold in your hand, you will still be able to to do that for the rest of your life. Your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will also be able to do it, but it will become increasingly more expensive and your great-great grandchildren almost certainly won't ever touch a book made from paper.
You can swing a sword against the sea if you want to or you could, perhaps, take another look at how things might be improved.
Geoffrey has improved a few things I think. As far as his view on the future of paperbacks, I hope he's right and fear he's wrong.
DeleteThe demise of physical media in all forms (books, CD, DVD) is not just about the cost of production. There's also an aspect about control. Gathering and burning books that have become objectionable is a an effort; deleting the ebook from the Kindle server is a matter of a few keystrokes. I've received emails to provide official notifications, tax documents, annual reports, but they no longer attach a PDF, just a link to the server, which could easily just return "not found" or "access denied" and nobody can later produce evidence of what it said.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, it is just as hard to destroy all electronic copies of a book as it is to destroy all physical ones. Duplicating an electronic copy is also a matter of a few clicks, and breaking any new DRM format is a matter of time. Pirated copies of books and other media circulate widely.
DeleteAs a kid in the 70s and 80s I looked longingly at those racks of mass market paperbacks, as well as comic books, bizarre supermarket magazines, arcade games, and though I had access to the library, and though my parents weren't struggling, they didn't offer and I just didn't buy anything, and the only books I had were Christmas or birthday gifts from grandparents. I must have been rereading these because I didn't have anything else. I didn't start checking out books at the library, to actually read for pleasure, not just for book reports, and buying books and role-playing games until I was in college.
ReplyDeleteNow, I read almost exclusively on a kindle, almost any book I want is available online so I haven't been to a library in years, and my collection of sci-fi and fantasy and 19th century American literature books languish in corners and closets, unread by anyone - the loss is right here at home so what do I expect from the world. While at the same time I'm running AD&D 1e using reprint books and printed out documents, the laptop at the game table is for support only, the computer for prep only.
Those incredible covers! I still have the DAW Elric paperbacks with covers by Michael Whelan, the Ace Conan paperbacks with Frazetta covers, the Del Rey black Lovecraft books with covers by Whelan again, the Ballantine LOTR trilogy with covers by Tolkien himself, and on and on.
ReplyDeletePaperbacks were my gateway to this world and remain to this day my preferred format whenever I go back.
Paula: What's that?
ReplyDeleteBlank Reg: It's a book!
Paula: Well, what's that?
Blank Reg: It's a nonvolatile storage medium. It's very rare, you should have one.
It is actually interesting what the MMPB itself killed. There were all sorts of methods of cheap publishing before. Of course one being the pulps, which themselves killed the dime novels. But there were others the MMPB largely did away with - there were small cheap libraries - like the international adventure library, or numerous pocket-book libraries like the little leather library. I think the hayday of the paperback should probably be measured by how much non-fiction was printed in that format. Non-fiction was the first to generally exit the MMPB space, and it has been gone for quite some time.
ReplyDeleteBut for the MMPB it has been a long exit and I don't think it went down without a fight:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/73668-is-mass-market-dying-or-just-evolving-again.html
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there" - L.P. Hartley
ReplyDeleteThe loss of a medium is indeed phantom pain of an amputated extension of ourselves. However, as you note, not everyone has such an extension and therefore do not feel this at all. Rather, revel in the thrill of the new;
ReplyDelete"The artist is the only person who does not shrink from the challenge of adapting to the unique sensory environment created by a new technology. The artist exults in the novelties of perception afforded by innovation. The pain that the ordinary person feels in perceiving the confusion is charged with thrills for the artist in the discovery of new boundaries and territories for the human spirit. The artist glories in the invention of new identities, corporate and private, that for the political and educational establishments bring anarchy and despair"
Marshall McLuhan
there are two interesting things to me about paperbacks. One is how the industry completely left male readers (unless you count lonestar and the executioner, to each their own) and also how, unlike magazines, comics and others, they got BIGGER not smaller. 1960 paperbacks are generally tiny (145 pgs), but now, 1000 pages is common.
ReplyDelete