Nothing went wrong with the Story Paper or the Dime Novel. They both simply became superseded by other forms. For the Story Papers, the idea of marketing fiction as something perishable didn’t seem all that silly. Like all newspapers, Story Papers were fairly perishable.
Still, the idea of dating fiction is idiotic on the face of it. In order to have access to the newsstands and general stores at all, it was necessary to appear like something that was already sold there. Neither of these outlets sold books. Looking and acting like a newspaper was key to gaining shelf space. The slightly less perishable Dime Novels extended their shelf lives by post-dating their covers sometimes years in advance. This was a tactic the later comic books continued with up until recent times.
Drawing lines of descent between one form and another is a contrivance. There are two base forms of literature: a book and something that isn’t as substantial as a book. Books are the primary havens of fiction. Popular fiction, which dates back either to the Renaissance or the Romantic period (*1) got its start in books. Fiction became included in newspapers as part of the evolution of newspapers. Papers which featured fiction exclusively are also a part of the evolution of newspapers. The popularity of Story Papers led directly to the creation of the Dime Novel. Neither the Story Paper nor the Dime Novel were intended to substitute as books. Only the paperback is an actual substitute book.
The idea of a substitute book, a cheaper book, a book you can actually afford to have many of, is relatively new in its realization. And paperbacks aren’t a big a part of the story. They didn’t drive the evolution of books at all. The entire idea of taking steps out of the production process—skimping on materials—turned out to be something of a dead end. By the time the Paperback actually became viable, advances in manufacturing had already made regular hardbound books fairly affordable. What life the Paperback had it stole—either from bestselling books or from material more respectable publishers generally declined. That said, the Paperback does dovetail into the history of Pulp Magazines and Dime Novels rather directly. It wasn’t the big hardbound houses that made the Paperback segment grow. It was our pals from the pulp world. In a lot of ways, it’s entirely their baby.
Although putting a date on fiction is manifestly goofy, it was the publisher’s ticket to ride in the sales venues that they targeted. When magazines became the rage, fiction was often included as an element. But fiction—words for that matter—were afterthoughts to the conventional slick magazine. As originally conceived, the magazine was a delivery system for photographs and advertising using photographs. The Pulp Magazine, which normally had neither photographs nor advertising using photographs, isn’t so much a fake book as it is a fake magazine. For purposes of having a sales venue, the pulps hid themselves moth-like amongst their more butterfly slick cousins. Even by the late 1920s people were questioning their cause for being: a non-advertising supported periodical is an anomaly, almost counter to the point of a magazine.
And the wonderful world of retailing was changing. Like the Dime Novels before them, Pulp Magazines were intended for sale at newsstands, drug stores and street corner groceries. Newsstands went into decline in tandem with the decline of train travel (and all mass transportation) and the rise of car ownership. Starting in the late 1920s the street corner grocer came to be replaced by a new form of department store—a conurbation of the green grocer, fish monger, deli, bakery and dry goods store—the supermarket. (*2) Department stores were nothing new. Few of them carried Pulp Magazines or magazines of any kind.(*3) It seemed that these new supermarkets would also decline Pulps
Again, there is nothing hard and fast here. Some Pulps got into supermarkets and department stores, but most didn’t. Concurrent with the rise of supermarkets is the splash over of grocery goods into pharmacies. Eventually this leads to the re occurrence of the street corner grocer in the form of the convenience store. Then all of the gas stations started becoming mini retail outlets. As squeezed as the pulps may have seemed to have been, there were plenty of retail outlets besides the supermarket.
The reason I don’t limit my study to simply Pulp Magazines is because they are only one vehicle that these publishers use. The same writers, publishers and artists also concurrently put out digests, movie magazines, comic books, the stray tabloid and eventually the paperback. The paperback is specifically designed for the supermarket. It owes its evolution to a slightly earlier stage—to a time when the pulp publishers had basically given up on supermarkets.
As opposed to supermarkets, our pulp publisher pals decided to be everywhere else. Paperbacks first saw light of day as replacements for the drug store and general store stand alone Lending Library. ( See our Sunday, February 21, 2010 blog posting “A Brief History of the Commuter Private Lending Library Industry.”) Here two forms of paperback libraries were offered: (1) a prefab library of various encyclopedias, atlases and dictionaries with a bonus assortment of great books in abridged form and (2) sex novels for women or just sex novels. Both types of libraries also had considerable mail order appeal. Category two proved to be the more popular, but there was a problem with the early paperbacks—they self destructed, sometimes mid reading.
By the 1930s these were being replaced by digests, flimsy 5 x 5 (or thereabouts) pulp magazine type publications. Most were single novels, sometimes packaged as part of a series. Others claimed to be magazines. The stand alone novels came to dominate the field. Over time these digests made absolute leaps in terms of improved materials and printing methods. It was the perfect item for a retailers which did not handle magazines or simply had little shelf space.
The key to these digests was their absolutely fabulous mark-up. Digests went for 25 cents, even back in the days of 10 cent magazines and comics. It wasn’t so much a high volume item as it was a high profit one. Moreover, digests could be bought in an assortment, prefab with their display. Nothing to sort or bother with here. The carton they ship in doubles as a display case. Just cut it open and set it up. If you want more, buy another carton or a filler packet. They are not dated. You can reorder the titles that sell well. Or you can just order the type of titles which sell well for you.
Did I mention that most of these digests are sleaze? There is a smattering of reprinting of genre books. And there’s a whole lot of just plain genre shoveling going on. Many of these digests are nothing more than shovel-ware from the pulps. In Hillman’s case, it was shovel-ware from his Lending Library titles. The digests become a very competitive field on their own. Competition in this market plus advances in printing are what creates the retail paperback. It’s very unclear where digests leave off and paperbacks start up—not only to historians, but also to some of the publishers. Digests were generally square and each publisher had its own configuration. Dell and Fawcett and others drove for a standardization when it came to digests printed for the supermarket market. But the whole trend started in non-standard retail venues: liquor stores, gas stations and the like.
The digests did fairly well because they best emulated the distribution found on a typical newsstand pulp rack. From the mid 1920s on, variety was the king. Pulps did best when there were only a few issues of many different titles present at the newsstand. Variety kept people coming back to the rack, increasing the likelihood of a sale. The lack of abundance in any title drove the perception of scarcity. With digests, you got all of this in one easy to use box.
The supermarket retail paperback first shows up during WWII and it’s something less than a hit. Despite concentrated effort on the part of pulp publishers, the format is stillborn several times over. Once the pulp publishers got a toe-hold in, the hardbound houses swept in with their bestseller shovel-ware. As the pulp publishers receded from the market, Canadian publisher Harlequin moved in with books repackaged from England. After a brief Golden Age in the 1950s, the retail paperback began a full scale death spiral to the bottom.
Then all the pulps died and/or either became digests or paperbacks. No. Not true. And I don’t care how many times I've read that. The pulps did not die. If anything, they were going through a resurgence. Allow me to mention sleaze again. Pulps had sleazed up in the 1930s. By the 1950s it was full metal jacket, balls to the walls bad mags time. Most pulps were now slicks, the so called “Sweats”. There were over 100 men’s adventure pulps alone and this number paled when compared to the bread and butter offerings of True Crime and Romance and Movie Star Gossip and other sensationalist fare. The sweats used the same configuration that the digests and pulps had: a few issues of a variety of titles. It kept people coming back to the drug stores.(*5)
Given that they were doing well enough without the supermarkets, one has to wonder what drove this constant and well documented obsession with getting a product into them. We can chalk it up to fear. The pulp publishers feared that supermarkets were the wave of the future: that specialty shops and book stores and magazine racks would go the way of the dinosaur, that sooner than we all knew it we would all be living in one big interconnected archeology, a mall world with no place for Elvis Faith Healing or Alien Sodomy. Press on they did.
It was a mistake. Unlike the other forms, the retail paperback was a failure from its outset and never lived up to expectations. Fawcett had a hit with it (Peyton Place), but all of the other houses lost money on it. At least in supermarkets. True to form, Martin Goodman was the first to get out of it. Even more telling, he stayed out of it. It has never been profitable as anything other than a shovel-ware format or a side line to other publishing activities.
Here’s what went wrong:
1. Supermarkets are set up to handle high volume items with a small mark-up. Move one on the part of aspiring paperback houses was to drop the price tag. Now you have a low volume item with a low mark-up. That does not net you more shelf space--that nets you less. And from the 1950s on the shelf space in supermarkets has shrunk year after year.
2. You cannot compete in a race to the bottom with original material. Most of the genre fiction was shunted to the side by Harlequin. Key to Harlequin’s initial success was that they were reprinting novels from England. Thanks to a confluence of this competition, your average supermarket or chain pharmacy book rack contains only shovel-ware bestsellers and romance titles. There is no room for anything else.
3. Supermarkets did not respect the lack of a ‘use by’ date. None of the chain stores do. Moreover, all of the chain stores want to sell a high volume of a select number of items. Even bestsellers get yanked. This is not a test or break-in market. This is for proven products only.
4. The chain supermarkets for which the retail paperback was invented FAILED. What did I just say? I’m on crack, am I? You say you shop at a chain supermarket. You do not. You shop at a super-regional, which may have a national parent company. The actual national supermarkets, such as A&P and National, all tanked. They lost out to the super-regional chains, whose basic strategy against the one-size-fits-all market was to make their stores much larger. (*6) This brings me to…
5. The super regional supermarkets have an entirely different strategy when it comes to impulse items. They don’t lack for shelf space. They’ve drained every swamp and built mondo condos. Food just gets people in the stores. Food is at a low mark up. Where they hope to make their money is on other items, ones with real mark ups. Thus supermarkets prone to carrying books and magazines are as prone to carry real hard back or trade paperbacks as they are retail paperbacks. Again, what retail paperbacks you find are likely to be of the romance or bestseller type. The trade paperback is becoming much more common.
6. Bookstores did not go away. If anything, they have increased in importance. A bookstore is like any junk store: nothing sells all that well and what does sell needs to have something of a mark-up to justify its shelving. There’s only so much mark-up you can put into a tretail paperback before it is obscene. Trade paperbacks couch the mark-up much better than the retail ones do. Moreover, unless you are dealing with a name writer, the book is going to be sold by its genre. Nothing helps sell a genre package better than a cover. Retail paperbacks simply don’t have the space that the pulps did when it come to this. Trade paperbacks allow for the same type of packaging pulps once did. In a way, the trade paperback is a full circle return to the pulp presentation.
7. The cost disparity between a retail paperback and a hardbound book of the same length has only occasionally justified the retail paperback’s existence. You would be hard pressed to find too many hardbound books in most chain bookstores. Most are just giant paperbacks of various sorts. What you are printing on has only rarely been a deciding cost factor. It may become even less so if e-readers gain any sort of popularity. In any case, the retail paperback was designed to thwart a problem of the 1940s which does not usually exist today. Today paperbound has become an industry standard for books of all kinds. Which leads me to the final problem…
8. Paperbacks exist perpetually on the aftermarket. We have next to no examples of Story Papers. What Dime Novels we have come from weird hoards or are from the later periods. Pulp Magazines, Sweats and Comic Books will decompose and die if left to their own devices. Less than 1% of all of the digests printed have survived. By contrast, no paperback has ever died at its own hands or of age alone. They exist in large bags which are brought to shops for resale of the same. The entire paperback era coincides with the conversion of Consumer Lending Libraries into Used Book Shops. Just as every new car ever made must compete with every car still on the road, every new paperback must compete against most of the paperbacks ever published. There’s only so much bottom to bottom fish on.
I would be foolish to predict the future of publishing any further. The retail paperback is, however, quite dead. Whatever entry market potential it may have had for the starting writer has been more than subsumed by the trade paperback and the short run hardbounds. We have yet to see any real drop off in the number of genre related offerings. In my view, we are not likely to. For something that never quite worked out, the retail paperback had an exceptional run. Unfortunately, it turns out Peyton Place was more the exception than the rule. If Peyton Place had bombed, I doubt that paperbacks would have ever had any life at all. There’s only so much good money you can throw after bad. In the case of Dorchester, it seems they ran out of any kind of money, Being in retail paperbacks just did not help.
***
Notes (Because I haven't ranted enough, it seems):
(*1) A debate as to the start of Pulp fiction has been raging for years. We really don’t have much evidence of Renaissance fly fiction, other than it is alluded to in actual books of the time. By the time the novel emerges in the Romantic period, many pulp fiction vices are somewhat old hat. The form of the novel itself—a long short story—starts in the romantic period as does the first flourishes of an industry out to create reading material for purely entertainment purposes
(*2) Large and even very large markets have always existed in the United States. The difference between a large general store and a supermarket is that one type does not generally also pose as the post office. As opposed to being large markets, supermarkets were chains of stores owned by public trust corporations. They rolled out McDonald’s style, building the same exact stores all over the country. They started in urban areas, places where General Stores had never been.
(*3) Weirdly, nearly every single woman’s magazine was started by a grocer or a department store chain. The department stores were all for magazines, as long as they owned them. A department store might also relax its policies if it was the advertiser in a specific magazine. Some department stores, such as Woolworth’s handled their own ‘house brand’ pulp magazines.
(*4) I would like to thank you for reading my notes. I am convinced that most people don't. You are a very, very special person indeed. Now it follows that note 4 should come after note 3 and then be followed by note 5. That part I have down. What or where Note 4 was supposed to be is now beyond me. My Bears just got utterly whacked by the New England Patriots, so I am still somewhat in shock. Note 4 had something to do with supermarkets, which I think I handled well enough in the text. Note 5 will be much better. I promise.
(*5) Pulps and scandal magazines were the drawing card for many a drug store, liquor shop or quickie market. Our pals the pulp publishers were deliberately going for topics that would have been taboo in movies, on television or the radio. Having a wide variety of these magazines helped bring in a lot of foot traffic. The entire era started to wind down after the rise of adult bookstores. Smut became much more full scale and the other items, such as tabloids and movie mags, became accepted by the supermarkets.
(*6) Wal-Mart has been the exception, not the norm. Wal-Mart is a giant general store which is dabbling in groceries. It is currently the single largest grocer in the United States. Only time will tell if this entity takes us all over.
Merry X-Mas to you all! I should be back with a few more posts before Santa shows.
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