I am a great fan of Sinclair Lewis. “I am Carol Kennicott,” I said in a class during a discussion of Main Street.  No longer, but when I was young I shuddered over the description of Gopher Prairie. Carol Kennicott, a librarian in Minneapolis, follows her handsome doctor husband to his hometown, Gopher Prairie, where he practices medicine.  She despairs over the ugliness of the town, and the mediocrity of its residents. She tries to bring culture to Gopher Prairie. The name of the town tells how that works out.

And I am Babbitt, the middle-aged businessman (in my case, it would be “businesswoman”) who lives in Zenith City, a tedious midwestern city which is Gopher Prairie on a larger scale.  In these archetypal midwestern towns and cities, the natives love their hometown, but it is an adjustment for the outsiders.  Even Babbitt, an enthusiastic denizen of Zenith City, rebels for a short time.

Right now I am frantic, because I cannot find my copy of Lewis’s Arrowsmith, which won the Pulitzer in 1926:  the politically-minded Lewis rejected the prize. Anyway, a few months ago I bought a new Signet edition as a homage to mass market paperbacks

Mass-market paperbacks may not be around for long. Reader Link, one of the largest distributors of paperbacks, has decided to discontinue publishing mass-market books, because they claim they don’t sell. It’s a shame. The mass market paperbacks have been around since the 1930s, and are less expensive than trade paperbacks. They are also more portable: you can sling them in a handbag or the pocket of your winter coat.

At the universities, professors often assigned inexpensive mass market editions of classics published by Signet, Bantam, and other companies.  In an American Studies class, we read the Signet edition of Main Street, which, by the way, had an excellent introduction. And most pop fiction is, or used to be, published in mass market paperbacks.  What will happen to the cozy mysteries with cats on the cover?  Not to mention the mass market editions of Dune and George R. R. Martin?

SINCLAIR LEWIS & AN OLD-FASHIONED LIBRARY CHECK-OUT CARD

In my search for Arrowsmith, I found a canceled library book edition of another book by Sinclair Lewis.  And inside the front cover, there is the old-fashioned check-out apparatus. I was excited.

The times were so simple then:  no electronics, no electronic security gates, just paper and card catalogues. It was all based on trust and paper.

Here are some evocative photos of the card system on the endpage of this old library book. Now that there are so many library cuts, and the self-checkout breaks down so often, it might be a good time to go back to paper!