I was perusing the “Books and Authors” database via my public library’s website when I noticed something. Books as recent as the mid-1980s do not have a genre listing in this database, but a book from 1990 does. Is this the way of the publication industry? Could it be true that they didn’t think about grouping novels into genres until 1990? What’s the SD on this?
I should add to please the Moderator I am looking for a factual answer; otherwise, I would have posted elsewhere. Feel free to move if you must, but please do not get your dander up.
Genres existed in the 1970s. But so did card catalogs. It’s possible that the original card catalog database didn’t list the genre, or the information didn’t get transferred when your library put their books on the computer.
Or some other explanation - maybe a librarian should drop in.
I think part of that is the niche-ification (Is that a word? It sounds perfectly cromulent to me.) of reading. Or movie-watching. Or gaming, I guess.
I like mystery stories.* But what kind? Do I like a nice cozy, where some nosy catlady figures out who dunnit? Do I like the hardboiled bad guy gone good? Do I want some dude on a houseboat that loves the women, but man, they are trouble? Or wait, do I want someone who has some supernatural skill that makes them able to see things we dumb old humans can’t?
I think it’s more that people started really stating their preferences, and those began to be categorized.
I’ve read all those types. Plus we didn’t get into romances, thrillers, horror… and so on, and so on and scooby dooby do!
*I used mysteries as an example. I read a lot. I didn’t even go into the different genres in SF.
Genres existed far earlier than 1990. When I first started collecting books in the 1970’s I remember bookstores dividing their offerings into “Romance”, “Mystery”, “Science Fiction”, “Biography”, “Literature”, etc. Libraries were more inclined to lump all the fiction books under just “fiction” but some sub-dividing wasn’t uncommon and your local librarian would help you locate more specific choices.
Back in the 60s, libraries had genres - they just didn’t use the word. But books had stickers on spines: a rocket ship, or a deerstalker hat & magnifying glass, as examples.
The cause of the OP’s observation might be that, while all books have genres, some genres are traditionally not labeled as such, and that remains true even today. You will not find a genre label on, say, Go Set a Watchman or The Casual Vacancy, nor would you have on many older books.
Detective fiction was recognized as a genre at least as far back as the 1920s and 30s—although “genre” may not be exactly the right word and it may not have been classified in the same way we think of genres today.
Good point. The pulps used to be divided up by genres and many of them are still around today: action thrillers, romances, westerns, mysteries, science fiction, horror. But it’s interesting to see there were some old genres that have disappeared - nobody’s writing aviation stories or sports stories anymore.
And if you consider magazine fiction, there were a lot more genres than there are now - you could get a magazine that was all airplane stories, all train stories, all sea stories, all gangster stories, all “planetary adventure” stories, all horror stories, all sports stories, all war stories, and even magazines that were all “Doc Savage” stories.
I remember the stamps on the spines of library books. All the kiddie/YA novels were filed alphabetically by author name–but the Rocket Ship stamp meant it was Science Fiction. (Beginning the late 50’s–because that’s as far back as I can remember.)
Kurt Vonnegut met Theodore Sturgeon in the late 50’s. Thus the invention of Kilgore Trout, the great writer neglected because his works could be found in the SF section of sleazy stores selling used paperbacks. Vonnegut didn’t write SF, nope, he was Mainstream!
Most libraries in the United States use the Library of Congress subject heading system in their catalogs. LC didn’t start assigning subject headings to fiction until 1991. That might explain why Jinx didn’t see any genre or subject terms on pre-1990 fiction in his library’s catalog.
As others in this thread have pointed out, many public libraries have long shelved some broad categories (such as mysteries and science fiction) separately from general fiction, or used stickers on the spine to differentiate genres. That’s something that’s done locally at the individual library’s discretion, and isn’t necessarily related to national cataloging standards.
The modern sense of “genre novel” is a novel outside of standard literary fiction, i.e. mystery, science fiction, western, romance or any of their innumerable sub-genres.
Going back I found that this sense is comparatively recent, probably from the late 1960s, when academics finally began to confront this writing seriously. The term had been used earlier than that always without explanation, meaning that the writers expected their readers to recognize the usage. The hits on Google Books are mostly snippits, but my take on them is that a genre novel was one of a particular place (e.g. Cape Cod) or historic time, but always merely a subcategory of the standard literary novel.
Genre fiction in the modern sense probably doesn’t start until genre-specific pulp magazines appeared in the 1920s. Earlier detective stories, scientific romances, and adventure yarns were often written by respectable novelists and considered interchangeable with their other output. My guess is that the flood of inferior detective novels in hardback cheapened their standing - hardly any respectable novelist wrote them except under a pseudonym after WWI - and the hackwork of lower-class hardboiled fiction almost exclusively in magazines finished the job. All the other genres followed much the same course, except f&sf, which was virtually non-existent in hardback until after WWII.
