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Popular Library was a New York paperback book company established in 1942 by Leo Margulies and Ned Pines, who at the time was a major pulp magazine publisher. The company's logo of a pine tree was a tribute to Pines, and another Popular Library signature visual was a reduced black-and-white copy of the front cover on the title page.

A native of Malden, Massachusetts, Pines became the president of Pines Publications in 1928 and continued to lead the company until 1961. He was the president of Popular Library from 1942 to 1966 and its chairman from 1966 to 1968. Retiring in 1971, he continued to work as a consultant.

MORE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Library

Art by Earle Bergey

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Art by Robert Bonfits

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A SHORT HISTORY OF PAPERBACKS

Along with many other products of our culture, paperbacks have become a very active area for collecting. This article gives a short history of this quite interesting artifact, and a very brief overview of what collectors in the category generally look for. The web is chockful of informative articles and sites on the subject, mostly by enthusiastic amateurs (in the best sense of that word), and we have included links to some of these spread throughout this piece.

Nineteenth Century Ancestors

Many references on paperbacks will tell you that the first mass-market paperback ever issued was The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck, in 1938. Actually, of course, paperbacks have been around a lot longer than that - as early, in fact, as the 17th Century in France and Germany. In the English-speaking world James Fenimore Cooper was writing frontier stories published in paperback-like format as far back as 1823, soon to be followed by a host of imitators. These were precursors of the tabloid "story papers", like Brother Jonathan Weekly, in the 1840s. The introduction of the steam rotary press enabled these to be produced cheaply in large numbers, and the emerging railroad network provided a convenient means of distribution. Probably the first true mass-market paperback, though, was the so-called "Dime Novel", which sprang into being in the 1860s.

MORE: http://www.ioba.org/newsletter/archive/v5/histpb.htm

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Gold Medal Books is an American publishing imprint known for their hardboiled detective novels, lesbian pulp fiction and other mainstays of genre fiction. Reputable writers such as Donald Westlake, Elmore Leonard, Kurt Vonnegut, Jim Thompson, William Goldman, John D. MacDonald, Louis L'Amour, David Goodis, Richard Matheson and Charles Williams have written for Gold Medal, sometimes under a pseudonym.

Launched by Fawcett Publications in 1950, the imprint is known for introducing paperback originals (instead of reprints), a publishing innovation at the time. 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 publishing their own paperback reprints.

Roscoe Kent 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.

MORE: http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Gold_Medal_Books

Gold Medal Books was launched by Fawcett in the 1959s....Beginning their numbering system at 101, Gold Medal got underway with Alan Hynd's We Are the Public Enemies, the anthology Man Story and The Persian Cat by John Flagg. Writing about the demise of pulp magazines in The Dime Detectives, Ron Goulart observed, "Fawcett dealt another blow to the pulps when, in 1950, it introduced its Gold Medal line. What Gold Medal specialized in was original novels. Some were merely sleazy, but others were in a tough, hard-boiled style that seemed somehow more knowing and more contemporary than that of the surviving pulps. Early Gold Medal authors included John D. MacDonald, Charles Williams, and Richard S. Prather."

Other 1950 Gold Medal originals included the Western Stretch Dawson by William R. Burnett, the first lesbian pulp novel Women's Barracks by Tereska Torres (later to be followed by Marijane Meaker's Spring Fire and Ann Bannon's Beebo Brinker Chronicles) and mystery-adventure novels -- Nude in Mink by Sax Rohmer and I'll Find You by Richard Himmel. After Donald E. Keyhoe's article "Flying Saucers Are Real" in True (January 1950) created a sold-out sensation, with True going back to press for another print run, Keyhoe expanded the article into a top-selling paperback, The Flying Saucers Are Real, published by Fawcett that same year.

Fawcett editor Ralph Daigh commented, "In the past six months we have produced 9,020,645 books, and people seem to like them very well." However, hardcover publishers resented Roscoe Fawcett's innovation, as evidenced by Doubleday's LeBaron R. Barker, who claimed that paperback originals could "undermine the whole structure of publishing."

With an increase from 35 titles in 1950 to 66 titles in 1951, Gold Medal's obvious success in issuing paperback originals revolutionized the industry. While MacDonald, Williams, Prather, Louis L'Amour, Richard Matheson, Bruno Fischer, and MacKinlay Kantor were joining Gold Medal's roster of writers, other paperback publishers were soon asking agents for original manuscripts. Literary agent Donald MacCampbell stated that one publisher "threatened to boycott my agency if it continued to negotiate contracts with original 25-cent firms."

MORE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Medal_Books

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FALCON BOOKS

To the of digest-sized paperbacks featuring sexy pin-up cover art. But a closer look reveals a treasure trove of crime and private eye fiction from key 1950s writers who would become legends in the genre. There’s some great stuff here and more than just a few surprises as well.
Falcons are digest-size paperbacks, bound with staples. Books in the series change format slightly becoming a bit shorter – about a half inch shorter than the standard digest size. There seems to be no logic or order to this sizing. Falcon Books were published by the same outfit that published similar sexy digest series, Exotic Books, Ecstasy Books, and Rainbow Books, but none of those had the accent on mystery and crime that the Falcons did.

MORE: http://www.blazingadventuresmagazine.com/BlazingArticles.htm

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VINTAGE PAPERBACK ARTISTS

James AVATI
James Avati was born in 1912 and started by designing store window displays. In the 1930's he went to magazine illustrations until 1948, when he stated doing covers for the New American Library. He brought a dark, brooding realstic style to paperbacks which was soon imitated by many others. His finest period was from 1949 through 1955, when he did many covers for Signet Books. He would never be considered a GGA artist but had an enormous influence, moving cover art from the brash, bright and almost cartoonish styles of artists like Rudolph Belarski, to a darker, more sober style on many of the 'sleaze' digests.
Rudolph BELARSKI
Rudolph Belarksi was born in 1900 and put himself through the Pratt Art Institute at age 21 and was invited back to teach 3 years after graduation. His first covers were for the pulp magazines such as Western Roundup, Wings, Thrilling Detective and many others published by Ned Pines. Pines founded Popular Library in 1942 and Belarski produced his first paperback cover in 1948. A number of his pulps were recycled as paperback covers and eventually did some 50 Popular Library covers. In 1957 he joined the staff of the Famous Artist School in Westport, Connecticut.
Earle K BERGEY
Earle K Bergey began his career producing pulp magazine covers in the 1920s for Radio Magazines and early risque magazines. In the 1940s he worked on pulps such as Thrilling Wonder Stories, Captain Future, Popular Love and others. In the late 1940s he joined Rudolph Belarski at Popular Library and did 16 covers there. After that he went to Pocket Books.
Gerald GREGG
Gerald Gregg started out free-lancing for Western Printing & Lithographing Co. and in 1935 was given a permanent position. In 1943 he was assigned to do the covers for the new Dell paperback line and produced 176 covers for them. He worked with an airbrush which made his work for Dell unique and striking. During his stay at Western he also drew comic strips and the back covers of their Little Golden Books.

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