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 BestShort 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.
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.
The assigned edition! A bit bleak for a Penguin.
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.
Whatever happened to mass market paperbacks? Do you ever wonder?
Over the years I’ve gone from a cheap Signet mass market paperback edition of Pride and Prejudice to a more attractive Penguin trade paperback to an oversized Folio Society illustrated hardback–and the latter was unnecessary.
In the mid-20th century, anybody could acquire an inexpensive library of classics. At bookstores you could opt for rival brands: a Penguin, a Signet, a Bantam, a Dell, a Washington Square classic, or a Pocket Book. We carried around copies of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (the David Magarshack translation), Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Orwell’s Animal Farm, D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, Trollope’s Phineas Finn (a BBC tie-in), George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Dickens’ Hard Times. Books were the cheapest entertainment. No wonder we were all so well-read.
But the accessibility of cheap mass market paperbacks has declined, according to Publishers Weekly. Publishers originally considered mass market paperbacks the “gateway” editions to entice readers, and these small books began to dominate the market after World War II. The publication of this format has declined, partly because publishers are cutting out the midlist writers, partly because of e-books. Walmart is the biggest seller of mass market paperbacks these days. Genre books like romances and mysteries are often published as trade paperbacks. PW says, “According to NPD BookScan, which tracks roughly 80% of print sales, mass market titles accounted for 13% of total print units sold in 2013; that figure dropped to 9% last year.”
In college we moved away from mass market paperbacks. The more scholarly the books, the more expensive. And we developed expensive tastes.
Imagine a town of backpacking undergraduates burdened with hardcover chemistry tomes and anthropology textbooks. As a freshman I lugged The Complete Pelican Shakespeare to a class where a chain-smoking professor squinted at the small print in columns and made dry allusions to poets I had not yet read. At home I “cheated ” with comfortably compact Pelican paperbacks, because I had an aversion to reading text in columns. But the hardback accompanied me to class, in case the professor suddenly called on me, which he never did. Perhaps I imagined he would ask me to recite a footnote!
Professors of other literature classes often assigned inexpensive Penguins, which until the ’90s (?) were still mass market paperbacks. They also assigned Signets, Modern Library paperbacks, and others I don’t remember. And so we pored over Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Chekhov’s plays, Tolstoy’s The Cossacks, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, and Machiavelli’s The Prince.
Mind you, my classics (Greek and Latin books) were hardbacks. But in my other literature classes, we read paperbacks. I became hooked on trade paperbacks with footnotes.
Most of my books are trade paperbacks. I have to say, mass market paperbacks don’t hold up well over the years. The paper gets very brittle. They’re for one-time reads. Of course many trade paperbacks are printed on cheap paper, too.
I wonder if people read as many classics now that so few mass market paperbacks are available. In my world, everybody’s a reader, but that may not be the same in THE world.
