This was the title of a book by Kenneth Davis I just finished, about how a few publishers in England and America began to see the potential for profit in making and marketing paperback versions of hardback originals, at a time when most publishers believed, with reason (it had been tried before, without success) it couldn’t be done.
The results of the publishers’ success had a bigger impact on whatwe read—and by extension, what we write—than I’d ever realized.
In the first place, this happened at a time when there were no bookstore chains and few independent stores outside major cities. Having paperbacks in drugstores and newsstands made it possible for many more people to buy books than ever before.
Before paperbacks, science fiction was almost entirely a thing of magazines, not books. Romance novels boomed into the juggernaut genre they are today after they became available in paperback. Mickey Spillane didn’t hit it big until he was released in paperback.
The first unexpergated American edition of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover was paperback. Other serious authors came out first in paperback or saw their sales jump upward when they were reissued in that form. And eventually the paperback original came along.
And just as VCRs and the Internet would later be used to provide sexual material to millions of Americans, so the paperback would make it possible to publish sexploitative, sleazy material in an affordable, accessible format.
The format didn’t simply make books cheaper, it made them—different.
