paperbacks

The Paperback Revolution, from what I can gather, refers to at least two projects. I came across one of them in the April 2010 issue of Artforum. Ten pictures of paperbacks are spread over four glossy pages. The display is edited (or curated) by novelist and critic Mark von Schlegell, and this website suggests that the photos correspond to an actual display of books, probably somewhere in Germany. The books span the years 1935 to the present, though in his introductory remarks von Schlegell dates the paperback revolution back to 1932. This small-R revolution “isn’t threatened by new technologies,” fits “all other modes of content distribution” and reflects “the real-world minimum value of a book.” New technologies represent no threat to it’s future, though something else does: the counterrevolution of the publishing conglomerates and their long-armed distribution mechanisms. This counterrevolution not only threatens the book trade but democracy itself. Von Schlegell asks, in this regard, a pertinent question—“Has venture capitalism killed off the open society?”

Perhaps it has (though, we should note, not only because of the economics of the book industry). Reading has long been linked to democracy, and the paperback represents the apogee of this sort of reading. Its cheap packaging of all sorts of texts promises (promised) open access to all kinds of knowledge and creativity. The photos in The Paperback Revolution make this clear, as pulp fiction intermingles with literary criticism and classic satire. To name a few names, books by Erich Auerbach, Rachel Carson, Chester Himes and Henry Fielding are among the ten paperbacks displayed. A website—the first one that comes up if you google “Paperback Revolution—says it well: “Between 1935 and 1960, the paperback revolution created a new industry overnight, permanently changed our understanding of ‘the book,’ helped to democratize reading by increasing readership and eroding the lines between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature, and created its own, unique genres and forms of expression.”

This webpage is where we find the other Paperback Revolution. It has an elegantly animated timeline of paperback history from 1935 to 1960. Thus we learn that Penguin was founded, in the UK, in 1935 and came to the US four years later. That same year Pocket Books was founded. During the forties and fifties sales of genre fiction and high literature burgeoned. Paperback presses were founded, they consolidated, splintered and folded. In 1960, dollar sales of paperbacks surpassed those of hardbacks. This is where the revolution ends, as the paperback had become an institution itself.

I’m clicking around the site right now. Its links section is well edited. It has a virtual paperback gallery, seemingly proving von Schlegell’s point that digital technology is no threat. I don’t have much else to say about this right now. (The site did inspire me to confirm something I once read in a biography of Borges: the first Argentine paperbacks were published in 1933.)

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