The Golden Age of Paperbacks

     Surely the nineteen-fifties, when I was setting out with the ambition of reading everything, was the golden age of paperback books, when most of the world’s classics were available for pocket change.  The first books I acquired, toward the latter end of elementary school, were all in soft covers: Walt Kelly’s Pogo collections, The Pocket Trashery of Ogden Nashery, Subways are for Sleeping which appealed to my taste for eccentricity, as did Auntie Mame.  I loved Čapek’s War with the Newts long before I knew who the author was, and read On the Beach before seeing Stanley Kramer’s movie.  I was a devotee of Judith Merrill’s annual collections of well-written science fiction.  By sixth grade my shelf held Hendrik Willem van Loon’s History of Mankind, an exemplary book for children which offers distinctive style, amusing drawings, and (in memory at least) no condescension whatever.  Fledgling literary interests were emerging, and I read and reread my volume of Poe’s stories and poems, or a little collection of American short stories, or one of the Untermeyer poetry anthologies --  each of these sold for 25 or 35 cents.  I had been entranced by my parent’s purchase of the Life book of The World’s Great Religions and considered my Mentor copy of The Way of Life: Lao Tzu translated by R. B. Blakney a revelation.  (Its rhythms run still in my mind, doubtless to my benefit.)

    But when I became somewhat older and able to go to Chicago by myself, my middle-class parents, though frugal about nearly everything else, let me buy paperbacks freely in the interest of education.  I could indulge myself with reckless intemperance and my paperback library mushroomed.  When I would visit the Loop over sixty years ago, I had several regular routes.  One of them culminated in a visit to “the world’s largest bookstore,” Kroch’s and Brentano’s.  But I would not go there directly.  First I would stop by the Rose Discount Record store on South Wabash to pick up classical sides and then proceed a few blocks further south to Seymour’s Record store  where Seymour Schwartz sold jazz and blues from a decidedly unglamorous (and thereby hip) shop.  He had heaps of old 78s in the back for maybe 25 cents each.   I would then stop by a few favorite dusty old used bookshops and, I confess, toward the end, I would also patronize also the Iwan Ries tobacconist (conveniently on Wabash as well) to pick up a pack of smokes from some exotic and thus sophisticated country, transforming me instantly from a callow youth to a cosmopolite.  Though the tobacco was foolish, in the books lay the very foundations of my education.  Through my teen-age years I was never without a pile of paperbacks on the floor by the head of the WWII army surplus cot on which I slept. (The stack persists all these years later, though now, as I share my bed, it rests on the table by the parlor sofa.).

     Most had been purchased at the climactic stop on my urban excursion when I entered the precincts of Kroch's, also on Wabash.  It was there that I spent by far the largest sums I spent anywhere in those days (modest as they were).  With the exception of a few volumes in German, I never bought books on the main floor.  Passing the carefully curated record selection at the top of the stairs, mainly folk music and blues but offering the old Caedmon spoken word albums as well, I would head down to the basement where the paperbacks were kept, arranged in shelves by publisher. 

     What a glorious new-found-land it was in which every region offered substantial rewards. From every side authors beckoned: Dante, Camus, Ben Jonson, Lady Murasaki, among hundreds of other worthies, a magnificent company! To this day I recall in which corner I would find the austere Penguins without cover art featuring reliable translations from a variety of languages, the cheap little Mentors and often rather ugly Signets for the general run of classics, the Doubleday Anchor books with their marvelous designs by the likes of Edward Gorey and Leo Lionni, the larger format grey-jacketed Scribner’s books for Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the wondrous old reprints in hardy well-bound Dover editions (including many of Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East), the New Directions with their black and white covers and avant-garde edge, even the Catholic Image books for Aquinas and Cardinal Newman.

     The bookstore staff seemed mostly composed of young men, perhaps working a while between undergraduate and graduate school or else ABDs too educated to find any other employment. At any rate, they seemed very knowledgeable about the arts, and were rather intriguing to an adolescent shopper from the suburbs, still living with his parents.  They had opinions.  I recall when my brother bought a copy of Naked Lunch against the advice of the clerk, who told him, “Don’t waste your money. For ten minutes you’ll be shocked, but it’ll be nothing but boredom after that.”

     It was surely due to the influence of these young workers that Kroch’s had a decent selection of small press books, not just City Lights, but Piet Hein’s Grooks and Botteghe Oscura, and many more obscure titles.  For years it seems they were trying to move the plain black copies of Norman Mailer’s Deaths for the Ladies, which, though I was an enthusiastic admirer of the author, struck me as aggressively off-hand.

     I may have lived in an insular little haut bourgeois suburb, but here was an entrance to a far greater realm, providing access to people of all times and places.  What could be more exhilarating than to read one’s way through the world’s greatest texts for the first time? I was quite serious, making systematic surveys or movement and periods, noting marginal comments, sometimes in German once I started learning the language. My granddaughter hears such things and affectionately says, “You were such a nerd,” but to me it was the epitome of cool. I wanted to read everything, though, of course, I had my favorites.

     Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945-1960 was a revelation and a delight. I wrote to many of the small presses listed in the back to obtain books Kroch’s didn’t offer. During high school I ostentatiously carried the book around — I did the same with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene because I had read that he was “a poet’s poet” — and got my reward when some prankster put chewing gum in my anthology when I was away from my seat.  I became a missionary for Gary Snyder’s Cold Mountain Poems, translations of Han Shan, which I photocopied and gave to friends.  Apart from the Beats I tried to keep up with contemporary poetry, picking up paperbound volumes of Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, John Berryman, and John Ashbery. 

     In fat Mentor editions I worked my way through the turgid Russians – Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, though I preferred Gogol’s Evenings Near the Village of Dikanka published by political refugee Frederick Ungar whose company was strong in German translations (I had Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and Goethe’s Werther from them) but also included such odd works as Gladkov’s socialist realist novel with the dramatically uncompromising title of Cement.  Kleist’s stories fascinated me with their precise exacting weirdness in a Signet book.  I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses from Collier translated by Sir John Harington, the Elizabethan inventor of the water closet, and it never occurred to me to wonder how such a book could possibly be issued in a popular edition.  My Washington Square Press copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Songs, and Poems is dated 1960, cost thirty-five cents, and is yet today in serviceable condition.  I very nearly wore out my Muse’s Library edition of Thomas Wyatt’s poems while the Everyman’s paperback of Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century added Surrey, Ralegh, and Davies.  I had, of course, Howl and Kaddish (as well as Ferlinghetti, Corso, and Jack Hirschman’s Artaud Anthology) from City Lights, while among my New Directions volumes from my high school days were a half shelf of Henry Miller, Pound’s Selected Poems, Williams’ Paterson and Pictures from Breughel, and novels by Louis Fernand Céline.  And, of course, I had Evergreens from Grove Press  as well.  I just reread Melville’s The Confidence Man (their first title), Lorca, Beckett, Aphra Behn and Crashaw as well as essays by D. T. Suzuki.  When I set out from home for university, I brought my Modern Library College edition paperback of Plato as a talisman.

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     If the golden age I am celebrating has passed, the change may be due less to changes in the publishing industry than to a decay in the public’s taste.  In my youth not only the professoriate but people in general (especially, but not exclusively, those with some bit of education), recognized the value of the liberal arts.  To many it was obvious that to glimpse the world through Plato’s eyes, even briefly, must surely broaden and enrich even a banker’s view of the present day.  Nor was this belief entirely a class attitude.  The Little Blue Books (an essay on the Blue Book phenomenon will soon be posted to this site) indicate that the American autodidact, exemplified by figures from Benjamin Franklin through Jack London and Malcom X, was a sociological fact in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties when workingmen might read Shelley’s poems or Will Durant on Aristotle in little booklets costing a nickel or a dime.  Meanwhile in the United Kingdom Penguin began selling quality books for two and a half (old) pence, advertised as “the price of ten cigarettes.”

     During World War II when the American government printed over a hundred million Armed Services Edition books to distribute to troops, a project headed by former Pocket Books executive Philip Van Doren Stern, the titles included bestsellers like Anthony Adverse and the Hornblower novels, but Shelley, Poe, Conrad, Maugham, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald as well.  By the nineteen-fifties there were plenty of trashy exploitation titles like those from Gold Medal on the racks in bus stations and drugstores, the descendants of the pulp magazine of the ‘thirties, but they were often accompanied by a few classier titles.  (Sometimes a French classic, Zola, say, or D. H. Lawrence, received a cover as though it were a potboiler, resulting, perhaps, in a mix of disappointed and delighted purchasers.) 

     What has become of these books, at once so good and so cheap?  Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of the first Pocket Books in the, now sells for over thirty times its ‘fifties price, and inflation accounts for only a third of the increase.  Wilder’s The Bridge at San Luis Rey, which had been a good seller in its Pocket Book form is presently available in editions costing between thirty and sixty times that price.  The price growth reflects the fact that these books are today bought almost entirely by students to whom they are a classroom assignment.  The casual purchaser has all but vanished; very little remains of what had been a cherished common cultural patrimony.  The allusions of filmmakers, poets, and composers alike are lost to those unfamiliar with the artists’ predecessors.     

     I fancy that there was then a lesser gap between low and high art, that the two could rub shoulders in the marketplace, but the mass base for the classics, such as it ever was, has largely evanesced as even most university students, even the cleverer ones, choose to focus solely on vocational training rather than the general intellectual practice – absorbing information, analyzing it, and generating new ideas – that provided the center of the old curriculum in which literature was essential and central.  The change has affected more than just reading.  A glance over a symphony audience will show a sea of white hair, and the classical percentage of recorded music sales has been declining for decades (as has the share of jazz).  Even theater attracts elders for the most part.  What was once a shared body of cultural information has become a territory visited primarily by specialist academics. 

     The younger generations has not, however, abandoned art by any means.  They listen to hours of mostly digitalized music, watch great amounts of television and a good number of movies and never feel as though confining themselves to popular forms is any constriction at all.  Critics will discuss a new pop album or Netflix series, on NPR and PBS, mind you, as though the potential of art had any scope in such productions, virtually none of which have proven other than forgettable.  The decline of the paperback, which played an important role in the democratization of learning, inevitably accompanies the abandonment of the liberal arts.

     When he founded Penguin in 1935 Sir Allen Lane declared that he “believed in the existence of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it.”  His intuition proved true (and profitable) both in the United Kingdom and the United States, but decades, now, of devotion to iPhones and iPads, to Roku and Hulu, Spotify and Apple Music, has eroded that market to insignificance.  People today can be educated through the graduate level while never acquiring cultural literacy and never, indeed, missing it. 

     If I rue the end of such cheap books of the very highest quality, still that loss is trivial compared to the loss of the readership that once welcomed those old paperbacks and with them came to take possession of their own literature, including poetry so beautiful as to make the reader weak in the knees, drama so sublime as to refresh the soul, and stories truer than the truth of everyday lived reality.  People who settle for an episode of Breaking Bad or a tune from Taylor Swift will never, I am afraid, know what they are missing.