The Paperback: Books for "just plain folks"

From the March 1957 issue of American Artist magazine:Henry Pitz writes: [Paperback publishers] have felt the nudge of competition from the books of newer design...... and they are abandoning the old clichés and experimenting with fresh approaches.It is only fair to point out that in addition to dozens of mystery and suspense stories, adventure tales, westerns,and popular novels which may not be literature but have a legitimate place in our scheme...

Read More

The Paper-Bounds Go Legit

"America has discovered the paperback book. Like so many of America's appetites it is a sudden and voracious thing. Will it disappear tomorrow? No one knows, but the publishers have been searching the shelves for nourishing things to feed it; almost every morsel they have offered has been relished and there are no present signs of repletion."So begins Henry C. Pitz's article on "The Design of the Paperback Book" in the March 1957 issue of American...

Read More

Paper-Bounds: Crunching the Numbers

* Today's excerpt deals mostly with the statistical information related to sales figures and number of volumes published during the early 1950s. For our purposes these figures reveal a couple of interesting considerations: that the paper-bounds required a tremendous amount of cover artwork annually (a spectacular new market for illustrators of varying skill levels) and that the artwork was being seen by many millions of American readers (remember...

Read More

The Art of the Paper-Bounds: "... a mélange of sex and violence."

From Fortune magazine, September 1953:Jacket illustrations, by and large, are a mélange of sex and violence. A sort of jargon has arisen to distinguish plain sexy covers from "situation sex" (implied rather than overt) and from the few "down-sexed" or "un-sexed" covers. Some manage to squeeze both sex and sadism into the same picture. The demands of the machine have led the paper-bound publisher to rely on the sure-fire salability of sex and...

Read More

Paper-Bounds: "Give the people what they want"

From Fortune magazine, September 1953:Paper-bound publishers say their market is made up mostly of people who used to read only magazines, who are intimidated by the forbidding air of a bookstore, and who can afford perhaps a small fraction of the price of most new hard-cover books.They buy and read on the move, picking books off a rack or newsstand to read while commuting or traveling or during a frenzied day of changing diapers and making meals....

Read More

The Rise of the "Paper-Bounds"

A September 1953 article in Fortune magazine begins, "The old and gently bred book-publishing business has exploded into the U.S.'s newest mass-marketing phenomenon: the pocket-sized paper-bound. In more than a 100,000 newsstands, supermarkets, drug and variety stores the brightly jacketed paper-bounds are making a robustly successful bid for a place in U.S. buying habits."Interesting as a glance into an important moment in the history of the book...

Read More