Back in the early days, books were usually some form of “hardcover”, usually hide-bound, which made since, since books were themselves tremendously expensive. Even after the advent of printing, my impression is that books were mostly hardcover. When did paperback become the predominant mass-market form, and did early paperback binding differ from today’s?
The first publisher to produce modern paperback books was Penguin Publishing, in 1935. As Allen Lane, Penguin’s first publisher, remarked:
Here’s a website (which focuses mostly on the history of Penguin:
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/apm/publishing/culture/pback/pbcont.html
You also might want to read these essays, which looks at the history of paperback publishing, and what the articles call the three paperback revolutions:
Wow. That’s a fascinating site. It’s amazing the number of oscillations between periodical and book form over the years, and how a change in government/postal regulations could just wipe out an entire industry overnight.
Paperback books really took off immediately following WW II in the US as there had been a huge investment in the printing industry during the war (to produce all those training manuals for the GIs) and paperbacks could be sold extremely cheaply.
That’s a great site. I’ve bookmarked it. Too bad the last two chapters give error pages.
I don’t deliberately go out and look for them but I pick up pre-Pocket Book paperbacks whenever I stumble across them. None look like modern paperbacks. Most have a cover made of very thin paper, sometimes glossy, sometimes not. Type predominates over illustrations, although many detective yarns had simple woodblock illustrations of the detective on a case. Their size is usually about the size of a digest magazine, or 5" x 7". Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine or Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine are modern examples. Of course, these are gross generalities. There were thousands of publishers in every country. French and German publishers sometimes printed English-language books that would be brought into this country, in addition to their own editions.
Trying to summarize the state of paperback publishing since 1955, when that site leaves off, would take several pages. The biggest change came because of the gradual decline in distribution sites. Many of the sites - drugstores, newsstands, train stations - depended on impulse purchases from pedestrians. When the suburbs boomed, these lost that market and bookstores began to be destinations of their own. Bookstores never carried paperbacks before, but now they began to add them to their stock.
Paperbacks also became proportionally more expensive. Instead of a $.25 paperback vs. a 3.00 hardback, today's paperbacks are only 1/4 to 1/3 the price. So publishers stopped reprinting everything in paperback and reserved it only for bestsellers sure to move copies. They turned to "trade paperbacks" which are the paperbacks that are the size of hardback books. That's because they're printed off the same type the original book was in, and just had a cheaper cover attached to save money. They had more class in a bookstore so the booksellers like them, and give more royalties to authors so they liked them. (The original .25 cent paperback paid one cent in royalties. If you sold a million copies you got $10,000. Not bad for the 40s but you couldn’t get rich that way, even if your books were everywhere.) The problem is that trade paperbacks have become too expensive, running half the price of hardbacks.
The industry is spiraling into the ground, making the books too expensive so they lose sales which they respond to by concentrating more on fewer bestsellers and upping their price which drives down sales of everything else which…
E-books will not take off until a really good reader exists. The reader has to be cheap to buy and so does the books. Hasn’t happened yet. So right now, life is bad.
Paperbacks are fascinating, though. There are several good histories of them, although none is truly thorough or complete. And my friend Graham Holroyd now puts out PAPERBACK PRICES: The complete guide to collecting vintage paperbacks with over 40,000 listings which shows you books and publishers you never dreamed existed.
On preview, Tuckerfan is wrong, IMO. Paperback sales boomed during the war because they were cheap and because you could mail them when you were done directly to the troops overseas with a three cent stamp. Of course they sold well after the war - everything sold well because people finally had money. But they took off much earlier.
The “paperbarn” site linked to above argues otherwise–that author writes that paperback books took off pre-war (with the success of Penguin and Pocket Books) and by the time the war ended, traditional (hardcover) publishers had no choice but to chase after the money they could make from paperbacks if they planned to remain successful businesses.
When I worked for Waldenbooks, they claimed that prior to the war they were a rental library, until after the war when the mass introduction of paperbacks caused an explosion in the retail market. IIRC, the book Carnival Culture says pretty much the same thing. Mind you, I wouldn’t claim either of those sources to be absolutely authorative.
That’s true. I used to work for Borders , which has owned and operated Waldenbooks for a few years.* according to company lore, Waldenbooks began as a for-profit lending library in Connecticut during the Depression. As people became more able to buy books, it became a bookstore doing a large business in paperbacks and magazines. BTW, AFAIK, most Waldenbooks are being transitioned to “Borders Express” branded stores. Or at least that was the plan when I left the company in 2004. Waldenbooks is a, or maybe the leading purveyor of romance novels, which account for more than 50% of all fiction books sold.
*The short version. Borders was an independent chain based in Michigan. They were bought by Kmart, in the 80s, I think. In the late 80s/early 90s Kmart decided to sell off its specialty retail chains. Borders bought itself back, going public, and took Waldenbooks too, which was also owned by Kmart up till then (I’m not sure when Kmart aquired Walden). Both companies are now subsidiaries of the parent chain, Borders Group Inc, which also owns the British chain Books, etc.
When something “takes off” is always a matter of opinion. You can make cases based on any number of criteria. There’s no question that paperbacks boomed after the war. But if I were writing the history - and I’ve studied the subject fairly extensively - I’d say that paperbacks were an immediate hit and just kept getting bigger.
Here’s a quote from UnderCover: An Illustrated History of American Mass Market Paperbacks, by Thomas L. Bonn.
I’m sure WWII put a hold onto what otherwise would have been an explosion. But Pocket Books and its imitators were widely successful before and throughout the war. They got bigger after. But the way you phrased it implies a different history and I’m uncomfortable with that.
I haven’t read Carnival Culture, but what it may be referring to is that the industry actually went through a slump in 1946 which it moved out of by sleazing the covers, and giving paperbacks an image of sin and salaciousness that appealed to the returning and no-longer-naive GIs. “Sex, sadism and the smoking gun” constituted “the 3 S’s” of cover art, said the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials quoted in Geoffrey O’Brien’s Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks. It worked then and it works now.
I’m also not sure about the huge investment in the printing industry. I’ve never seen that stated. And I wonder whether it’s true. My understanding is that there was never a shortage of printers. Paper, yes. The paper shortages held back the entire industry during the war, and that obviously changed at war’s end. But there wasn’t a lack of printers. And the vast majority of publishers that got into the business after the war were small presses who didn’t need much in the way of printers. They might have been helped by cheap rates if a large number of print shops were competing for business, true. But I’d have to see cites on that.
Close. KMart bought Waldenbooks in the early to mid-80s (along with a dozen or so other companies). By the early 1990s, however, malls were dying and KMart began building stand alone bookstores called “Bassett Books,” however, since the folks who ran Waldens had pushed out everyone who wasn’t a semi-literate corn headed flail, they didn’t do so well. One of the execs had the bright idea of buying Border’s (which served as a successful model copied by a number of highly successful independant book sellers) and turning their Bassett Books stores over to Border’s, who promptly made them profitable. Then when KMart was losing money faster than a professional hooker can go through johns, KMart merged Borders and Walden together and spun the new company off. (I worked at Walden’s main DC from 1990-96, so I was there for much of this.)
Exapno Mapcase, it’s not that there was a shortage of printers, but up until the war, many of them did not have high speed presses. During the war, they all switched (for the most part) to high speed presses. Like many industries during the war, the bulk of their production was for the war effort, and consumer goods took a backseat to military needs. Books for the general public were strictly controlled in terms of the amount of paper that they contained so that the military could have all the paper it needed. Because of government mandated price controls during the war, publishers were forced to become very creative in how they produced books.
Interesting Tuckerfan. I arrived at HQ in Ann Arbor in 1998. Just missed ya. 
I’ll trump you one though, and point out that Borders began with a proprietary inventory software that they licensed to other independent bookstores, and I believe also provided distribution. Although a concerted effort was made to buy all the stores that were licensees, as recently as 1999, Borders was still serving some “client stores.” So there were certain successful independents that not only “copied” the Borders model, they rented it too!