Why Mass Market Paperbacks?

The tagline of my store is “Mass-Market Paperbacks from Across Space and Time.” The overwhelming majority of the books I sell are mass-market paperbacks. I don’t pick up other formats of books unless I think I can sell them very quickly for a very good price because all my storage boxes are mass-market sized; I don’t have a good place even to keep trade paperbacks or hardcovers, nor to display them when I am tabling. Why did I constrain myself, why not let my bookstore have every kind of book? And how can I claim that a publishing trend centered in the United States, that lasted less than 75 years, produced books “from across space and time”?

Reading for Everyone

The urbanist YouTube channel NotJustBikes has a video called I am not a “Cyclist” (and most Dutch people aren’t either), the title of which refers to the distinction between using a bicycle regularly and being a bicycle enthusiast. Most Dutch people use bicycles every day, but they are not bicycle enthusiasts, in the same way that most Americans, sadly, drive every day, but relatively few are car enthusiasts. So it was, in the middle of the 20th century, that almost everyone in America read books, even if most of them didn’t identify as “book lovers”.

This distinction permeates everything about the two major formats of softcovers in the United States, the trade and the mass-market paperbacks. It is even in the name: trade paperbacks were for sale in the trade of publishing and bookselling: they were sold at bookstores, to people who were looking for books to buy.

Mass-market paperbacks, on the other hand, were designed to be sold at places that did not primarily sell books, stores that sold other things: general stores, drugstores, grocery stores, even bus stations. A spinner rack was a kind of book vending machine, designed to catch your attention and get you to buy something impulsively. There is something vaguely utopian about the idea that you can sell books the same way you can sell candy bars.

As with candy bars, the packaging the book came in—its soft cover—was an important form of advertising for the product. Trade paperbacks were published by the same company that published the hardcover, and they usually reused the art from the dust jacket. This art was traditionally rather austere, staid, respectable, intellectual. It tended to convey the feeling of the book through its typography and design, and imagery was usually limited to abstract or impressionistic shapes. It suggested to “book lovers” that the book had a pedigree, would be worth reading— “improving”, as Jeeves would call it. A trade paperback would say to its prospective customer, “I am an intellectual pursuit worthy of you, an intellectual.” Trade paperbacks were expensive, but they could afford to be: they targeted an educated, affluent audience.

Mass-market paperbacks could not afford to market themselves only to these ivory tower eggheads: the display cases would never empty, the spinner racks would remain unspun. They had to market themselves to regular people, and the covers had to convey ideas and attitudes that appealed to regular people. They were colorful, they were sensationalistic, and their covers depicted concretions instead of abstractions: real things, places, and people—especially people—from the book. Thus the mass-market paperback is associated particularly with two images, the rocket ship and the naked woman (both of which still have currency today). The mass-market said to its prospective customer, “I have what you want.” They were cheap enough that the gamble that the cover actually represented anything inside the book (usually a 50/50 shot) was worth the punt.

The amazing thing is that this worked. Mass-market paperbacks sold like crazy. Mass-market publishers soon ran out of published material to reprint and began hiring writers to create original content that would go straight to paperback. This outraged the traditional publishing industry but it made the paperback publishers, and not a few writers, rich. It turned out it wasn’t just book lovers—everyone wanted to read.

And I mean everyone. In addition to commercial fiction, mass-market publishers put out works from the Western canon, works from ancient civilizations, works in translation, fiction in all genres, non-fiction on every subject. Mass-market paperbacks could take risks traditional publishers wouldn’t dream of, and they published work by and for queer people, by and for people of color, by and for political radicals, with a reach that the small specialty presses available to those communities could only dream of. Copies of these books still exist. Many are in my store.

The End of an Era

As the Internet has recently discovered, the star has fallen for mass-market paperbacks. After a decades-long decline, they are finally being phased out of the publishing world entirely. Several reasons are given, for instance that the cost of production is not meaningfully less than a trade paperback while the profit margin is much smaller, but to me the the obvious reason is that only book lovers read books anymore.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a book lover. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a book lover too. I have no contention with book lovers. But they are, and have always been, a small fraction of the population. The people who would have been reading mass-market paperbacks 60 years ago, the people who kept the format alive, are reading their phones now. The naked women and the rocket ships moved onto Twitter, and the people followed them there.

But the Internet is about to become, in a word, unusable. AI slop will destroy whatever tenuous value social media claims still to have, and young people are becoming more and more interested in offline ways of pursuing their interests. If this movement ever takes hold, the same logic that led to the mass-markets’ ascendancy will play out again. People will still want cheap books, books that fit in your pocket or your purse, books with pretty pictures on the cover and real, human-written words inside. The offline resurgence may not make a generation of book lovers, but it will make a generation of people who read books. And I am planning to be there.