Happy New Year! I’m wearing librarian glasses and the sort of dowdy clothes worn by Barbara Pym’s indexers and anthropologists. The glasses help me focus while I catalogue our dusty mass market paperbacks.
What I like about these old editions: the ads on the back page. In a 1970 edition of an Updike book, four anthologies are listed under the title, “Also of Interest”: Contemporary American Short Stories, Counterparts: Classic and Contemporary American Short Stories, The Naked I: Fiction for the Seventies, and The Best Short Stories of the Modern Age.
I noted the scarcity of women included in these anthologies because, for the first time ever, my New Year’s stats showed that in 2023 I read more male writers than women. I was astonished.
In The Naked I, no women are listed. The others do include women. In Contemporary American Fiction, the editors have an excellent line-up : Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Georgia McKinley, Mary McCarthy, Dorothy Canfield, Tillie Olsen, and Katherine Anne Porter. In Counterparts, which gives us a partial list, the editors include Flannery O’Connor and Katherine Anne Porter. And in The Best Short Stories of the Modern Age, Katherine Mansfield and Shirley Jackson impressed the editors.
And so this is a historic ad to celebrate the New Year. It reminds me, too, that books cost only $1.25 back then – less if bought used.
