Ah, if only I hadn’t donated 600 books to the library the last time I moved! I would still have a mish-mash of cheap and slightly less cheap classics, along with slightly posher Penguins. Now my shelves are filled with elegant Penguins, Everyman’s Library Classics, Oxfords, and maverick Dovers. I have the books of a snob. And yet these are not my roots. I grew up on mass-market paperbacks.

But where are the Signets, the Washington Squares, Bantams, Dover Thrift Editions, Avons, and Fawcett? I no longer see many mass market books in bookstores: most stores sell trade paperbacks.

And yet mass market paperbacks used to be respected even in academe. My English, Drama History, and Comp lit Professors breezily assigned inexpensive paperbacks: they understood that we were on a budget, and  that in lieu of footnotes we were perfectly capable of taking notes in class. Of course we also had Riverside editions, Modern Library College Editions, Nortons, and Penguins. But I did appreciate the fact that textbooks were affordable. 

But let me go back to my mass-market paperback roots.

The first adult classic I bought was  Jane Eyre, published by Washington Square, for 50 cents. I wrote my name proudly on the flyleaf, because writing my name made me feel part of the book.  And I loved the cover, which has an illustration of  Jane on the side of the book, which is appropriate, since this quietly intelligent woman does not seek to be at the center of things. And yet she is central to so many people: that is the surprise of the book.

I did not share this favorite novel with my friends.  It never occurred to me, though it was my favorite book. We seldom discussed reading, except Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which we fanatically traded around in school.  But in those days Jane Eyre was particularly my own book.   

I was so attached to my Washington Square paperback that years later, when Jane Eyre was assigned for an English  class, I asked the professor if I could read my own edition .  “Yes, yes,” she said absent-mindedly. From then on I relied on common sense in these matters. Sometimes I bought the assigned text , sometimes if I had a copy I read my own.

Washington Square Press is still around, and it is now a part of Atria Publishing. It has taken a different direction. Atria gives the following brief history.

Since its founding in 1959, the Washington Square Press name has been synonymous with the finest in classic and contemporary fiction. As part of the Atria Publishing Group, WSP is the paperback home of some of the world’s most talented contemporary storytellers, including Fredrik Backman, Reyna Grande, Philippa Gregory, Thomas Keneally, Jess Kidd, Taylor Jenkins Reid and Jennifer Weiner, joining such WSP backlist luminaries as Pearl Buck, Carlos Castaneda, Graham Greene, Jim Harrison, bell hooks, Wally Lamb, Kate Morton, Walter Mosley, and Jodi Picoult.

Another inexpensive brand is Signet classics.  Signet had an enormous influence on my reading, because the books were so accessible, for sale at every bookstore when I was growing up.  At 15, I read the Signet paperback of Anna Karenina, translated by David Magarshack. The reading conditions, however, were not ideal: my father and I were staying at a poet’s house – Dad and the poet worked at the same factory – and my cot was literally under a workbench , as the poet loved to point out.  Every day after school I took the bus to this dreary suburb and retired to my “space” in the basement, reading uncomfortably, longing for the davenport in my mother’s  middle-class house.  I didn’t fall in love with Anna Karenina till I was 20, no doubt because I was able to read it on a couch.

I have read so many Signets over the years that I don’t know where to start: Vanity Fair, Middlemarch, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, Tess of the D’urbervilles, Chekhov’s Major Plays, Dostoevksy’s Notes from the Underground, etc., Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. 

I loved everything by Hardy, and when I first read Tess, it seemed very modern. I read it before Roe v Wade was passed, when we were still fighting for abortion rights (as we are again), and a friend got pregnant as a teen and was shipped off to relatives in another state. None of us ever saw her again. I can only imagine the trauma of living in a redneck state, separated from her friend and the culture of our hometown, and having a baby to give away. Would my friend have liked Tess? Or would it have made her bitter? God only knows. 

The Signets are still available, with slightly more modern covers. Mentor Books was Signet’s n0nfiction and poetry sibling. My husband still has his Mentor Dante, translated by John Ciardi.

Here is a brief history of Signet and Mentor Books from the website.

On February 25, 1948, Signet and Mentor Books appeared for the first time in some eighty thousand stores and newsstands throughout the United States and Canada, and soon thereafter, elsewhere around the world, under the slogan “Good Reading for the Millions.”

The Mentor titles included classics such as The Iliad and Moby Dick, whereas the Signet imprint published “new talent”—William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and George Orwell, among many others.

Over time, these two publishing lines combined to form the Signet Classics imprint, which today publishes nearly 400 titles, from Greek mythology to an entire library of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as classics of the 20th century.

Bantams are an old stand-by, and this publisher used to have a solid classics list. However, the books themselves are not quite as attractive or durable as Signets. I had the above edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and I do like this cover, though I did not at the time. I also like the cover of Sister Carrie, though I could never again read that poorly-written novel.

These days Penguin Random House owns Bantam, and the brand is no longer associated with classics. Here is the bio of Bantam Books:

Since our creation in 1945 by Walter B. Pitkin, Jr., Sidney B. Kramer, and Ian and Betty Ballantine, Bantam Books has represented a spirit of adventure in storytelling matched by a bold cultural and intellectual reach. Our current fiction list has a particular focus on suspense titles, publishing some of the most talented names in mystery and thriller, including bestselling authors William Landay, Susan Elia MacNeal, Laurie R. King, and Rita Mae Brown, as well as a host of emerging stars. On the nonfiction side, Bantam is known for excellence in science, military history, and sports. We have proudly published bestselling writers such as Stephen Hawking, Daniel Coyle, Adam Makos, and James Hornfischer.

There are, or were, many more of these mass market editions: Avon, Dover Thrift Editions, and Fawcett, to name a few. But I do sense that they’ve evolved over the years from classics into other genres.

More on this later perhaps.