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PAPERBACK NOVELS
http://www.qbstuff.com/Pulps.html
Paperbacks, as they are referred to today, have a long and interesting history. Early on, they were referred to as penny dreadfuls, yellowbacks, dime novels, and cheap libraries. Book historians trace the paperback to the beginning of the 16th century. Thomas L. Bonn's Undercover: An Illustrated History of American Mass Market Paperbacks, states: "Historians of the book industry have identified the classics of Greek and Roman literature issued at the start of the sixteenth century by Venetian publisher and printer Aldus Manutius—the Aldine classics—as the earliest ancestors of today's paperbacks. Intended for students and scholars, they were small volumes (roughly 5 3/4" x 8"), well designed and inexpensive. Four hundred fifty years later their handsome anchor and dolphin printer's mark inspired the logo of one of the first American trade paperback series, Anchor Books" (Bonn 26-27). The Aldine Press is credited with inventing a script that is now known as italics.
Softcover editions of the works of British and American authors first appeared in 1841. Baron Christian B. von Tauchnitz published them from his offices in Leipzig, Germany. These books were the pocket size of 4 1/2" x 6 1/2." The Tauchnitz editions had the field mostly to themselves until 1931 when Albatross Books began to give them some competition. Three years later (1934) Albatross acquired the Tauchnitz imprint and approximately five thousand titles. One of the original partners in Albatross Books, Kurt Enoch, later managed the American Penguin branch and eventually co-founded the New American Library. In 1935, a man by the name of Allen Lane began publishing Penguin [End Page 119] paperbacks in England. This flock of "Penguins" was vilified by the English book trade. Their big break came when the English Woolworth chain agreed to carry them at a price of sixpence (about twelve cents.) The British reading public accepted them wholeheartedly and their future was assured. For more than 25 years, Lane pointedly refrained from using elaborate artwork on his covers. This eventually changed as Lane began to use some illustrations if he thought the title suggested it.
Other people were trying to get started in paperback publishing, such as Little Blue Books out of Kansas and the Boni Brothers, Charles and Albert. Bonn tells us:
Reminiscent of the publications of the London and Boston Useful Knowledge libraries of the early 1800s were the much-loved "Little Blue Books" series of Kansas publisher Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. Aimed at spreading culture to the masses, his 'University in Print" began publication in 1919. The soft cover booklets were generally sold at five cents a copy, though prices ranged between three cents and twenty-five cents. The Blue Books measured 3 1/2" x 5". Estimates credit the company with selling over 500 million booklets, mostly through the mails, before it ceased publication in 1964.
(Bonn 32)
Regarding the Boni Brothers, Bonn states, "If the Kansas-plain Little Blue Books were antidesigned, Boni paperback volumes introduced in 1929 were quite the opposite. Roughly quarto size, the handsomely made softcover titles had sewn bindings wrapped with soft covers designed by some of the leading illustrators of the day." Bonn states that Rockwell Kent "designed and illustrated the early volumes in the Charles Boni Paper Books series. Aimed at the retail trade was a second series, Boni Books, started in 1930 and priced at fifty cents." Both paperback series went down with the markets after the crash of 1929, and in 1931 the Bonis stopped offering their reprints (Bonn 32-33).
Most of these companies struggled or ceased to exist during the 1930's depression. One such company was Modern Age Books, which had a short life from 1937 to 1942. It did some things that other companies would emulate later in the 1940s and 1950s in the area of production, promotion, and marketing. One cause of the company's failure was its relatively uninspired [End Page 120] editorial selection, and very significantly, the design of its physical format. Their titles tended to be too literary for the average reader; the books themselves were too large (usually 5½" x 7½") and heavily bulked — a 300 page book could be an inch thick. The paperback in the late 1930s was competing on newsstand racks with more and more colorful magazines like Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post, and the very daring pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories and Spicy Detective.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/steinbeck_review/v003/3.1hoffstedt.html
http://www.godaddy-o.co.uk/pulps_1.html
When Pocket Books introduced the paperback to American consumers in 1939, book publishing changed forever. Paperbacks did more than make books affordable to a mass audience; they made books available to readers who did not live near book stores, they helped popularize genre fiction, they turned otherwise obscure writers into best-selling authors, and they ensured a lasting existence for hardback books that went into paperback.
Although there had been many earlier attempts to publish books with paper covers, the modern paperback book can be traced to Tauchnitz Books, a German publisher who began issuing paperbound books in 1841. Tauchnitz published English language editions of American and English books, primarily in non-English speaking European countries, assuming that there were enough American and British expatriates as well as Europeans fluent in English to establish a market for inexpensive English language books on the continent. Tauchnitz attempted to publish only the best literature and voluntarily paid royalties to its English and American writers at a time when most European publishers did not, so it was both flattering and financially rewarding to be chosen for publication by Tauchnitz. Perhaps what is most striking about Tauchnitz books is their complete lack of color or decoration; in contrast with American paperbacks, Tauchnitz book covers carried no illustration, only bearing the title and author in black letters against an off-white background.
For 90 years Tauchnitz had the European paperback market to itself. Its primary competitor, Albatross, emerged in 1931. Albatross was founded by German and English publishers; the name Albatross was chosen because that word is the same in nearly every major European language and therefore the company name would need no translation. Albatross brought one major innovation to the paperback market; it color-coded its books, so that one could determine the book's subject matter merely by glancing at the cover: blue books were love stories, red books were crime novels, and so forth. In 1934 Albatross bought out Tauchnitz and the two houses continued to publish until the outbreak of World War II. Meanwhile, an English paperback publisher, Penguin, largely adopted Albatross's book's appearance for its own publications, using a Penguin as its company logo and color-coding its books as well. All Penguin paperbacks were either orange or green in the 1990s.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g1epc/is_tov/ai_2419100931/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jl-incrowd/sets/72157600086975455/
http://www.leonardshoup.com/?page=shop/browse&category_id=63
Fawcett was also an independent newsstand distributor, and in 1949 the company negotiated a contract with New American Library to distribute their Mentor and Signet titles. This contract prohibited Fawcett from becoming a competitor by publishing their own paperback reprints. However, Roscoe Fawcett wanted to establish a line of Fawcett paperbacks, and he felt original paperbacks would not be a violation of the contract. In order to test a loophole in the contract, Fawcett published two anthologies -- The Best of True Magazine and What Today's Woman Should Know About Marriage and Sex -- reprinting material from Fawcett magazines not previously published in books. When these books successfully sailed through the contract loophole, Fawcett announced Gold Medal Books, their line of paperback originals. It was a revolutionary turning point in paperback publishing. Fawcett's editor-in-chief was Ralph Daigh, who had been hired by Captain Billy in 1928, and the art director for Gold Medal was Al Allard, who also had been with Fawcett since 1928.
Gold Medal's first editor was Jim Bishop, a former Collier's editor later known for his series of best-selling non-fiction titles -- The Day Lincoln Was Shot, The Day Christ Died and The Day Kennedy Was Shot. When Bishop left after a year, he was replaced by William Charles Lengel (1888-1965), a veteran magazine editor, agent, short story author and novelist (Forever and Ever, Candles in the Wind). In February 1951, former Hollywood story editor Richard Carroll signed on as an editor with Gold Medal. Carroll was once described as "the Maxwell Perkins of Gold Medal."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawcett_Publications
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