For all of the money that was spent on its development, the retail paperback has been something of a dead end. I mention this due to the recent drop out of Dorchester from the retail paperback market, Many pulp historians (myself included) are fond of saying that the paperback succeeded the pulp as the escapist fiction vehicle of choice. Its rise is somehow tied to the pulp’s decline.
There’s a bit of a problem with this analogy. Depending on how you define them, pulps were fairly much done in by the end of WWII. As you will find out in our website offering Real Nazi Sex UFO Man-Eater Cults, this really isn’t the case at all. The pulps kept rolling, fairly much undaunted by the rise of paperbacks, through 1990 or so. That is not to say that the paperback did not gain ground during this period, but rather that the rise of one vehicle and the fall of another are not really linked. If anything, both pulps and paperbacks lost ground to the supermarket tabloids and lesser People magazine clones.
I suppose we should mention television and the internet and video games or other distractions here. I mention it only because others do. It is my fairly well honed contention that no medium other than radio has had that much of an impact on printed word pulp fiction. Radio killed all magazines. 1/4th of all magazines shut down and 1/3rd of all newspapers shuttered with the rise of radio. No other medium has had anywhere near that impact.
The internet may, since it is still largely a reading medium. My opinion is that it is extending the reading audience. More people are reading for fun at work today than ever before. It’s the only type of quiet goofing off allowed. Largely this is a new audience. That’s not to say that it isn’t stripping away newspaper readers (it is) but rather that it is bringing in folks who might not ordinarily read for fun at all. All praise the new literacy!
The paperback, by contrast, never brought a single new reader in. A for the supermarket creation, it was designed to follow the reading public to where publishers thought they were shopping. In all of its history, only one mondo seller was ever launched in paperback: Peyton Place. The success of this book alone created the industry for paperback originals. It was to paperbacks what Superman was to comic books. Unfortunately, it was also the high water mark for the form. It’s been tapering off ever since.
Prior to Peyton Place, the paperback shelf was a haven for old books which had been made into movies, movie adaptations (the only genre the paperback originated), dictionary-like things, last year’s best sellers, cheap versions of the classics and smut. Smut, it should be said, is the paperback’s oldest genre—and one that usually wasn’t peddled in the supermarket until Peyton Place hit.
Peyton Place itself was part of a genre of paperbacks known as the Novel Brick. Novel Bricks really got their start with Gone With the Wind, which was a paperback double threat: both a former best seller and a book upon which a movie was based. All Novel Bricks which followed were long form romances. That was the only new and original thing that could be found in your paperback aisle for the longest time. Once Peyton Place hit, it brought in some smut and shovel-wared genre fiction. If it wasn’t for Peyton Place, Anne Rice and Harold Robbins would have had to learn how to write for publishers not prone to printing the word ‘spurt’ quite so much.
That pretty much was your golden age of paperbacks in a nutshell. Anne Rice and Harold Robbins are probably of the last generation to earn almost all of their bread and butter in the format. I would include Danielle Steel and Barbara Cartland, but they really are part of the tradition which pre-dated Peyton Place. The Novel Bricks, best sellers and movie tie ins are permanent residents of the supermarket shelves. The genre fiction and near sleaze sort of come and go. Mostly go.
The Novel Bricks were further cemented into their place by the rise of Harlequin, which moved in the first time the genre fiction and near sleaze started to lose its hold on the imagination of women who shop in supermarkets. Much of this is also covered on our website in the Real Nazi UFOs feature, found in the Modern Thrills section. Harlequins were cheap space fillers—or at least cheap. Just a bunch of romance crap and reprints has been what your paperback island has been for most of its existence. And now even the island’s existence in your supermarket may also become has been.
It’s a wonder the form still exists at all.
It’s beginning to sound like I am not much of a fan of the old paperback. That would be wrong. I love all forms of pulp fiction and do not discriminate against pulp vehicles. For a very brief time there, paperbacks brought justice to the world of author’s rates. They are responsible for the spread of mature themes into some genres of escapist literature. More importantly, they kept the lights on for many an author whose work may have not stayed in print or have ever been printed. That said, their golden age is long over and 99.99% of what is and has been in the paperback format is girls smut.
Weirdly, it may be the E-reader that finally does the meat and potatoes of the paperback in. The only advantage the retail paperback has is a somewhat discrete size. With E-readers like the Kindle, the smut becomes even more discrete. A girl can actually up her style points by being seen with a Kindle in her purse as opposed to something green and lavender with a bare chested Vabia on it. (I understand that, like most of the heroes in Novel Bricks, Mr. Vabia the cover model is dickless.) The first impression goes from “You trashy little slut reader” to “She must be reading the latest economic forecast.” I know that this is tough luck for male models everywhere, but if it leads to increased discrete trashy romance consumption, then I am all for it. (And may some day contribute. The title of my planned Novel Brick is Viagra Triangle. No taking it.) With the passing of Dorchester and the overall decline in the format, many people feel that the market for genre fiction itself may also be eroding. In our next installment I will show how that’s probably not the case as well as explain what exactly went wrong with the retail paperback to begin with.
Next:
Well, what I said in the last paragraph, actually. I will be doing shorter entries more frequently for a time, due to the holidays. I also hope to revamp parts of the website this weekend. Further down the road, I will be reviewing a new Comic Magazine and a neo pulp or two, ripping Vanity Fair a new one over its obsession with DEAD WOMEN and I may present yet another mock worthy pulp from my archives.
Thank you all for stopping by!
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