A fair number of my ongoing review projects involve works from the era when mass-market paperbacks ruled the shelves. Consequently, I find myself handling increasingly vintage artifacts. As with every media transition, the evolution away from MMPB towards a market dominated by formats on which publishers actually make a profit has, as a side effect, the loss of certain features. The adult thing to do would be to gracefully accept change. I, on the other hand, would prefer to moan interminably reminisce about elements I miss in the trade, hardcover, and ebook-dominated world in which we are living.
I am sorry to report that these boil down to four elements, rather than my preferred five.
Ubiquity
Under the market conditions present prior to the wave of distributor consolidations in the 1990s, print runs were huge. Book outlets could offer an array of books that modern-day outlets would find hard to rival. There were also more outlets: as well as conventional bookstores, convenience stores, department stores, and grocery stores also offered books, sometimes in extensive displays.
Critics will doubtless point out that today books are far more ubiquitous than they were half a century ago. Rather than being dependent on the vagaries of book distribution, one can go online for immediate gratification (if ebook) or slightly deferred gratification (if real book).1
Portability
As might be guessed from the fact that one publisher literally called itself Pocket Books, mass-market paperbacks were small enough that in many cases they would fit in the pockets of men’s clothing.2 Even if readers couldn’t carry a dedicated book bag, a determined young reader could hide on their person at least one more book3 than pesky adults could locate and confiscate on the usual absurd pretexts4.
Nowadays ebooks are even more portable and even easier to hide than mass-market paperbacks. With e-readers, phones, USB sticks, and even cutting-edge neurological implants whose side-effects aren’t fatal (probably), it’s trivial to conceal whole libraries on one’s person.
Cover Art
I cannot overstate how often my choice of book to read was influenced by a luridly garish cover, often featuring gratuitous nudity skillfully executed cover art that may not have actually reflected the events inside the book, but which did inspire great curiosity about the contents. Having replaced paper books with ebooks as I have, one drawback is that my chosen e-readers offer only black and white images, which I do not find engaging. [It’s been noted that if I were to read on my phone, as some people do, this would not be a problem. Hmmmph.]
I should admit that hardcovers and trade paperbacks offer the same opportunity for eye-catching art and that they do so on a scale more favorable to appreciation by aging eyes.
The Ads
Admittedly, this might be even more of a personal issue than the previous three… but I miss the ads so often found in old paperbacks. The “Also by this author” lists, the “If you enjoyed this book, you might enjoy these other books” lists, the pitches to avoid distribution bottlenecks, and even lists of best-sellers by the same publisher.5 Heck, I got a whole fifty-book review project out of a single ad run in old-time Ace books!
Other folks might well point out there is no shortage of ads in this exciting, commercialized world in which we live. Indeed, avoiding them is now the trick. Still, somehow, for reasons I find hard to articulate, it’s not the same.
Are you old enough to remember the golden age of the paperback? Are there features you miss that I somehow overlooked? Feel free to mention them in comments below.
- It’s not the same for one simple reason (vague handwaving about the difference between in-person browsing through different selections of books versus online browsing in venues that are all essentially echoes of each other). ↩︎
- Then as now, pockets in women’s clothing were more aspirational than useful. I have a very long list of issues I thought would be resolved by now, and the absence of decent pockets in women’s clothes is towards the top. (It comes up over and over in the theatre where I work, as front of house staff have to juggle ticket scanners, flashlights, keys, and programs. It’s not hard if you have pockets to store away items not in use. I have pockets. Most of my fellow workers do not). ↩︎
- If you’re imagining one of those scenes where a person being disarmed produces weapon after weapon in implausible quantity, except with books, that’s the correct image. ↩︎
- Such as “This is math class, not Rocket Ship Galileo class.” ↩︎
- I also enjoyed magazine ads, particularly those for upcoming books. I apologize to the staff of Scribes Books for the number of times I asked if The World is Round was out yet. ↩︎
5: You actually owned books, instead of having books yanked from your library due to changes in corporate licnesing agreements.
Abso-fraggin-lutely!
Libraries make you give the book back too.
Although our local library no longer has late fines.
You can borrow a library book again, and you don’t have to pay for it each time you do.
I never had to recharge a paperback.
I will grudgingly grant that the time my Kobo ran out of juice two days before my trip ended was somewhat more annoying than the time my electric razor ran out of power halfway through shaving my head.
On the other hand, thirty years later I still haven’t recovered from finishing my last paperback halfway across the Atlantic after misestimating how many I’d need.
Not that I’d let it happen again, but the odds that will happen to my Kindle *and* phone, and that I’ll neither have a charger nor be able to beg or borrow one, seem lower.
Even though I have a tablet, phone, older phone pressed into service as auxiliary reading device, and probably another tablet somewhere, I still have emergency paperbacks in both the car and the pickup.
Being from outside the US, my life completely changed when I bought a kindle. I no longer had to pay huge shipping fees to import a book from abroad. I could buy the next book from a series immediately after I finished the one I was reading.
Sure, I love physical books, and I still buy some that are special for me, but the amount of books that were available for me after the kindle cannot be overstated
I have the opposite problem. I am in the US.
There are lots of paperbacks I purchased in the 1970s-1980s which I would like to purchase in eBook format. Unfortunately the only place that sells them is SF Gateway, and their products are not for sale to US customers
In theory, if not in law, you can photograph every page of a book that you own. What you do after that, I’m not sure. Maybe first see how much of it you can get from Google anyway. I’m visualising a structure that suspends two camera phones over a sheet of glass with the opened book under the glass, so you photograph both pages. Then… you carry both the phones with you, to read each page in turn? I’m just thinking, would something that’s less trouble be more trouble.
Until the collapse of some strategic book distributors about 20 years ago, being a Canadian book buyer was awesomepants. Both US and UK editions were for sale in Canadian shops, which was esp great when it came to books that had no US edition.
The downside from the perspective of a Canadian book seller is that if one imported books from the US (in my case, ttrpg books), and if one was not Classics or Coles or maybe WH Smith, it was pretty much a guarantee that each and every shipment would be opened and examined by Canada Customs. This was because the customs people firmly believed the only books Canadians imported from the US were pornographic books.
Of course, US publishers let you return (air quotes) books by stripping the covers; UK publishers did not.
I agree with you on the first comment; I used to love visiting bookstores whenever I traveled to Canada because of the UK editions I could find. I discovered many great British authors that way (many of whom still have not been widely published in the US) as well as classics long out of print in the US that still had UK editions. Amazon UK and Blackwell UK have taken much of the fun out of in store book buying in Canada (though I still will visit a BMV, Chapters, Indigo or Bakka when I go to Toronto).
Regarding your second comment, in the first half of the 90s I worked for a book wholesaler in the US named Inland Books (you may or may not have heard of them). They were probably the #1 reason that Canada Customs opened all those boxes from the US. We did trade shows for CBA, and I was bringing some newly printed catalogs from my company by luggage to the latest show, I wound up having all the catalogs confiscated as well as almost being strip searched as a result. Not fun to go to a trade show without any catalogs to hand out (the strip searching, on the other hand, remains a “what if”, depending on who would have been doing the searching).
One more point regarding Ubiquity: in the 80s I worked for Waldenbooks, and I can tell you that in the golden age of the mass market paperback, you could certainly display more books (especially faced-out) on shelves than you could do with hardcovers or trades in the same space, just due to the size of mmpbs.
The smell of mass market paperbacks, either new or vintage. Instant nostalgia perfume. Can’t get that from an e-reader.
Not something I personally experienced, but back in the day German SFF MMBs had a very unusual form of advertising. One of the major publishers also owned a company that produced powdered soup and teabags. As a result, the action in the novel or a story in a collection would pause while the characters would take a break for a cup of branded soup or tea. The relevant paragraph would be in a slightly different typeface so the reader would know it wasn’t part of the original text. While this is reminiscent of the early days of TV, it happened well into the 80s, in fact to a point where Terry Pratchett had the clout to put a stop to it in his books.
My favourite German translation story involved a Brunner that was exactly 100 chapters in English, and 33 in German.
PREACH! I do miss mmpbs. I also miss how they got dinged up and worn out and how your thumbs would leave a smear of ink on the fore-edge of the book as you read it day in and day out on a bus or a subway commute. By the end, you and the book had _been through stuff together_ and were both changed by the experience.
I have some mass markets I cherish but I also have to acknowledge that many are crumbling apart in my hands :(
Someone has also sneaked in and replaced the type size younger me found entirely comfortable with something small and inconvenient. There’s a lot to be said for resizable text.
You are right about ubiquity of sales outlets. I bought my first Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein Ace editions from a spinner rack in a stationery store across from where I’d catch the city bus after Boy Scout meetings.
Our local supermarket has two book racks. One next to the magazines- and it has a spinner- but mostly trades or hardbacks. The other back near the pharmacy and dairy products which has mostly rather bad children’s books.
Right, so where can you go now for a new Norton or Heinlein novel? An artificial intelligence Web site, I suppose. But don’t do that. It’s one of the things that anxious authors have been warning us against since Hugo Gernsback. Another is Hugo Gernsback. :-)
Try Early Bird Books and The Portalist
I miss covers that were, in theory at least, optimized for books and not optimized for thumbnail pictures on phone-sized displays.
Of course, one of the attractions of mass-market paperbacks Back-in-the-Day™️ was that they were cheap. Alas, this no longer true. Mmpbs were one about 1/10 the price of a hardcover, not about 1/3.
One could argue that HC have become incredibly cheap, not that MMPB are expensive.
This matches my recollections (and recent observations from finally cataloging the decades-spanning collection of a local club); I’d say that HC prices went up by a factor of ~10 in 50 years, while paperbacks went up by a factor of 20. Comparing this with current salaries (cf Glory Road, in which $6K/yr is a good salary for an engineer) suggests that there are economies in HC. This may be because there are so many titles being published that few MMPB sell enough copies that they’d break even at ~10x inflation — my understanding was that sales per title were trending downward long before ebooks became significant.
Continuing a thought about publishers’ treatment of writers, I just realised that I never particularly questioned my magazine publishers’ explanation whenever their price went up that it was the cost of paper nowadays. Just the paper.
To be fair, you get better paper now, if you haven’t gone for electronic reading.
Then why do eBooks cost more like hardcovers than MMPB is paper cost is so significant?
I refuse to buy an eBook that is priced over the corresponding paperback – I just wait or skip it.
Those of you in the Seattle area, hie thee to the Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, where near the book buy-back section they have a real, authentic spinner rack of vintage MMPB, many of them SF (and the others mainly mystery/crime). It’s just a visceral thrill to spin it around every time I’m there to see what’s ‘new’.
Powell’s in Portland has spinner racks of MMPB in their SF section that they advertise thus: “Buy for the cover!”
As someone who prefers physical books…
MMPBs will fit on bookshelves made from 18mm boards on a nine inch pitch, most recent paperbacks won’t. I need to come up with a process to generate thin (5mm?) placeholders to go on the sensible shelves that say something along the lines of “Yes, you have the next book in this series, but it’s (a stupid size | electric) and is on the (big books | huge books | Calibre) shelf”.
Or browse your digital index instead of the shelf. ;-)
Empty DVD cases probably are too big for your solution, and CD cases too distracting. Trying to think what will be sold in cartons that you can slip onto your shelves to represent books elsewhere, I’m stuck on pencils. Or maybe menthol cigarettes. If the product is cheap enough, which these may not be, you could buy just for the cartons. Or… there are actual obsolete books. Aftermarket guides to obsolete computer games and old iPhones. Your horoscope in 1995.
My gripe with the switch to trade paperback is that they’re not a standard size in height or width – sometimes even within the same series! an ultimate sin in my eyes – so in many cases I can’t double-shelve my books.
You can fit ~500 MMPB into a Billy Bookshelf from Ikea, with careful packing, *and* still have them shelved in a sensible order, so that you can find what you’re looking for quickly.
Thinking about size the books also tended to be shorter to fit into the pocket size. A 400 page paperback was an outlier. Even a 300 page paperback might have been odd in some genres. Then in the 90s we all started buying books by volume wither the story needed to be that long or not.
Granted you can get shorter books in eformat from non-traditional publishers easily. But if something is going into a bookstore it’s probably 400+.
I remember in the 80s and 90s when those outliers started to become a little more common. In particular, I still have somewhere two of the volumes of James Clavell’s “Asian Saga”, Noble House and Whirlwind, which in paperback approached 1,000 pages, if I recall.
I think they had to develop new processes, starting with paper that was thinner but just as durable, to produce these,
Mass market paperback spinners were a huge part of my life from childhood through adolescence. They were EVERYWHERE and offered a wide, regularly rotated variety of fiction, genre and non-fiction titles one would otherwise never encounter on an almost daily basis in a small city out in the Great Lakes region. Every time I tagged along with a parent to the grocery store, drug store, department store or discount store I encountered a staggering cross section of books one otherwise never would have encountered. No library or proper bookstore would dare jumble categories and demographics like the humble wire rack and good luck being exposed to books you’d never otherwise seen via an Amazon algorithm or at the book ghetto otherwise known as Barnes and Noble. You could also pick up a book with your junior high lunch money and hide it from your parents (“ANOTHER book?!”) in a jacket pocket until safely tucked away in a bedroom book shelf.
I miss the damn things dearly and still rummage through the mass market displays of used bookstores where I invariably find a gold nugget or two. Right now I’m on a quest to track down as many of the Lin Carter edited fantasy series from the seventies as I can. No online mind you but in the dim recesses of the odd little used bookstores ringing the Detroit suburbs.
There is nothing like searching for and finding ancient treasures on used book store shelves. I just recently got my hands on Gawron’s Algorithm, out of print since Jimmy Carter was president [1].
1 CanCon dictates that I say “since Trudeau was PM” but that’s not entirely helpful.
I see all three of these things all the time in the ebooks I read, but I read a lot of progression fantasy and LitRPG. Many authors in those genres are self-published and seem to have a community of mutual support, so lists of “also by” and recommendations of other authors are often at the back.
The cover images are also often amusingly misleading and/or terrible in general.
I can visualize the store, the SF shelf, visiting every few days, as new books came in. The latest of some series that kind of embarrasses me now, complete with the lurid cover. Just happy times. My wife is happy with her Kobo, but I kept a good half of those pocketbooks, and they’re still favourites.
Having replaced paper books with ebooks as I have, one drawback is that my chosen e-readers offer only black and white images,
I’m curious which e-reader you are using. I generally buy kindle and the covers are in full color. My books have colors when I upload them for sale on the main platforms.
That said, I also prefer physical books and MMPBs especially.
“This is math class, not Rocket Ship Galileo class.”
Ridiculous pretext, indeed. I used to get the same argument re: chess. I gave it the attention it deserved.
Ah, so many memories, so much that comes to mind at the smell of an old paperback, or sometimes it’s the cover that gives me flashbacks.
Yes. I loved them as I was commuting by train and the book store at the main station had looooots of them to chose from, sometimes wisely, sometimes because of sequels, sometimes for lesser reasons already stated.
On the other hand, one of my most cherished books is Fahrenheit 451. There is an upside to being able to conceal a whole library on an SD card that you can store in virtually any place where it is next to impossible to be found, including in cracks in your neighbor’s houses walls if you seal it in plastic.
Yes, the chances for needing that are low, and I still love a printed book. Throwing away a book is to me like discarding a part of my life. But many of my old SFF MMPBs do not look all that well today (some are 50 years old and from a time my dad scolded me for reading that rubbish) and start to crumble at the margins. One even had pages disintegrating to flakes when I opened it a while ago.
Being able to convert books to other formats by software or scanning them and doing OCR is in my opinion something that may preserve much more of literature for the future than paperbacks. Printing them again, if the whim takes you personally or maybe even society, is not a problem.
But if they are printed again, please, please: do it on something with sensory characteristics that linger in the back of your head forever, as that is an experience almost as valuable as the contents of the pages.
Regarding footnote #2, I believe this is changing. Teenage young women’s clothing seems to have pockets, and teenagers won’t buy or wear things that don’t – otherwise where do you put your cell phone. Not as many as on men’s clothing, but much better than it was.
The tendency of old MMPB paper to disintegrate is a bit of a drawback – the little drifts of book frass are hard to corral and clean up.
In some instances where the PBs are literally falling apart and the pages are crumbling when you look at them, I’ve actually taken them and scanned them to PDF.
So technically they are now e-books.
A handful which I inherited from my Mom may actually have been older than me (I’m 64).
Update: One of these was Star Bridge by Jack Williamson and James Gunn. Ace, 1955. Cover price 35¢.*
*(I had to look up the “cents” sign; it’s not on modern keyboards anymore.)
I live in Australia and grew up on an island with only a few bookshops available to me so the Kindle (or the app that I use on my iPad) has been a godsend for finding books that I missed out on in my youth due to the tyranny of distance.. But I infinitely prefer the feel of a book. I also have more Proustian associations with paper than with electrons because I have more memories of reading a physical book.
I cannot honestly remember the last time I bought a book. I only use libraries. I feel buying books and movies is a waste of money when most libraries have hundreds of books or more for free.
Pretty much the same here, but mostly because my living quarters are so full of books there’s no room for new ones. Especially big clunky ones like what publishers favor now. And the cover art is no longer enticing (as of the last half dozen or so years), so that’s one less motivation to own.
At some point the choice of library books will diminish as more and more are banned by the local (though nationally funded) religious extremists. Then I will at least have lots of books to reread. I would imagine that since you don’t own any of the “content” on an e-reader, books that offend the fanatics or promote wrongthink could be deleted from your e-collection without your consent too.
But can the makers of books and movies stay in business if only libraries buy their products?
Libraries are a significant market for books. Or used to be, anyway.
That answers a market share of my question. ;-)
Does anyone else remember the stiff paper ads for cigarettes that were bound into mass market paperbacks back in the 1960s or so?
I just reviewed a 1973 book that had one, Ross Rocklynne’s The Men and the Mirror.
I miss being able to spend hours thumbing through books before deciding on the one that a couple of weeks’ allowance would buy; I could get away with this in a paperback section, where hardcovers were more watched over, and I could do this even in the poky little villages I spent too much time growing up in, because drugstores etc. might not have the space for hardcovers but always managed a spinner rack or some shelves in the back for MMPBs.
wrt “absurd pretexts”: Gaiman wrote something once about being the child the parents would frisk before a family visit, because if they didn’t he’d be in a corner with a book instead of being presented. As someone who was not yet 8 the first time I missed a ride due to having my nose in a book, I sympathize.
I love books in all mediums but I so miss seeing the mass market paperbacks everywhere. I get so nostalgic for them. I’m even guilty of buying an old trashy old Western at used book store, just because I was fascinated by the cover as kid seeing it on spinner racks and swear its got nothing to do the buxom prostitute on the cover ( ok maybe it does).
And oh how I loved those covers by Frazetta, Boris, Kelly etc.. Especially the ones that were in the Men’s Adventure sections.
And ditto about the order form ad pages at the back of those paperbacks. I’ve been re-reading my old Thieves’ World paperbacks and its so tempting to send in an order form for one of those books and they only cost a $1.50 too!! I know they’d just get returned to sender but what if somehow the mail goes through the multiverse to world where that is still the address of a publishing house?
I even went so far as to buy a Stephen King novel not long ago, just because I saw it when I was in a drugstore, which before I could drive, the grocery store and drugstore is where I got my paperbacks.
I’ve been following the New Edge Sword and Sorcery magazine and they hope to soon publish old-school double-paperbacks (2-in-1 stories where you just flip the book over for the other story) and they even hope to have the garishly dyed edges. I’m so excited!!!
I miss being able to let my friends borrow my books. And buying used books.
I miss the serendipity of browsing in bookstores. Amazon recommendations are designed to show you books similar to what you’ve already purchased, combined with self-published books where the authors have paid to be highlighted. In particular, discount bins at the used bookstores were cheap and extremely random.
I also miss the heyday of the MMBP midlist – the collection of authors that never hit bestseller status and weren’t released in hardcover, but provided some excellent reads. That’s been supplanted by self-published books, which can also sometimes produce good reads, but also moves the labour of combing through the slush-pile to the reader.
I started buying books when I was in Teacher’s College from a little store across Lakeshore Blvd that also sold ice cream cones with sprinkles.
One book would take me all the way home on the streetcar and bus. The ice cream only lasted as far as the Long Branch transfer point.
I’m fascinated by the idea of Doubles, because I keep writing novellas and no one seems to want to publish novellas. But two novellas in one volume? Sounds like a plan.
Wild how someone can recognize that women not having pockets sucks but not even give a nod to the fact that they were drooling over art of women presented naked for the male gaze while women and girls hoping to find books in the same genre were reminded over and over and over that publishers literally thought of them as less than fully human consumption objects.
How frequent was that? There were some artists notorious for pictures that probably weren’t displayable in parts of the US in the 1960’s (“szafran” was notable for doing this even for books like Sybil Sue Blue, for which the cover didn’t illustrate anything), but there were lots of abstracts (Powers), blockprint-style (Dillons), spaceships (everyone) — and by the 1970’s there were a fair number of impractically underclothed men as well. (One could also argue that the male-gazy covers saved time when looking for something not so male-centric, e.g. Le Guin.) But pockets were a universal {,in}convenience.
I’m not sure if this particular fad has expired, but we have had a long run of years where book covers featured unclothed male torsos, hairless and very muscular, from the waist up to the bottom of the chin (significant that most of the head was missing from the picture, because who cares what’s in a male’s head). Presumably there was an audience drooling over those too. Admittedly, most of these were for non-fantasy/SF books, but some of them crossed over to paranormal romance and its relatives in the genre.
I don’t remember a lot of real nudity on paperback covers, unlike in the days of the Margaret Brundage magazine covers. Some soft focus and impressionistic examples come to mind, but “scantily clad” was more the norm. Occasionally that extended to male figures (Conan).
That’s not to say the portrayals of male and female figures on covers weren’t sexist a lot of the time. But, as you point out, the best of the older paperback cover artists like the Dillons, Berkey, Lehr, Powers, McCall, et al., were not involved in that. I miss those artists and the slightly later ones like Palencar, Martiniere, Canty, Craft, and Dos Santos; no one of that caliber seems to be illustrating the “clip art look” covers that are most common now.
I still have a few old paperbacks. The main problem is they don’t last. The pages were treated with acid, and I’ve had to throw away dozens of them because the pages crumble and become unreadable.
Not as many as people anticipated — I’ve got some going all the way back to the 1960s that haven’t suffered anything like that.
Interesting how people forget that tablets exist. Reading on a phone would be a nightmare, why would you do that to yourself? I use Libby and the Books app on my ancient iPad Air 2 and it works wonderfully (and in full colour!). Kobo does have an app, it’s kind of garbage though, so I download the epubs and read them with the Books app instead.
Thanks to a new hyperfixation on old Battletech fiction and a desire to just kind of chill out with fun reads this year, I’ve been consuming a lot of mmpbs in 2024. They’re really pleasant… Something in the way that they fit in the hand and can take the shape of how you hold them. For me, it’s a more lovingly tactile experience than you even get with hardcovers. Also, you can’t beat the smell. I got a package of late ’90s paperbacks from Thrift Books the other day, and I tore it open at the mailbox and took a deep huff off it.
Paperbacks weren’t precious.
You could take one to the beach and leave it on your towel and nobody would take it, Try THAT with a phone or an eReader worth a hundred bucks or more.
You could take it to the laundromat and if it got wet, it would be a little sade but, again, not a huge dent in your wallet.
You could let your friends borrow it and, if they didn’t give it back, go get another one easily enough.
Even with 800+ books in my office/reading room, I use my Kindle for 90% of my fictional books ( do have ~450 eBooks on my Kindle). I still keep with physical books for non-fiction as they are easier to navigate, especially with endnotes.
I miss those old used bookstores, used to spend hours upon hours in them, of course I always spent too much money.
Sometimes, I also miss the feel of holding an old and well loved book. Since I reread books, there are some that I have a history with that can’t be matched with eBooks. I still have Tolkien books from 45+ years ago, I had to replace them with newer ones and then eBook versions, but the old ones remind me of the passion I had for Tolkien at 12.
Yes, eBooks are technically more convenient, easier to carry (far far far easier), easier to read with adjustable fonts and I can read at night when camping. But I will never give up the great library I have, it’s a part of me that won’t go until I do.
Tolkien and Le Guin are the two authors for which I ensure that I have quality hardcover copies of all of their work, even where I’ve duplicated the PBs I bought so many years ago. For example, I still have the PBs of the Lord of the Rings from the 70s I bought then.
(And Bored of the Rings as well ;-))
I just went for a walk in my neighborhood, and in one of the little free libraries along my route, I found a MMPB copy of Lord of Light. In the spine and cover, I can feel how the previous owner held it – not something that happens with hardcovers.
I remember fondly the paperbacks my old professor, the Joycean genius Zack Bowen, taught from. Each so well-thumbed–especially “Giles Goat-Boy”–that they had to be held together with rubber bands.
I bought the first volume of the novel that taught me to read, Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer, because I liked the cover of the paperback edition.
I miss perusing the what’s new table, discovering new authors and series due to being attracted to cover art or the description on the back or inner cover, thumbing through the first few pages (or chapters) to see if I liked the writing style, etc. While I appreciate the e-book convenience while traveling, and long ago ran out of bookshelf space in my house to buy more physical books, relying on amazon and other online retailers for products has significantly reduced the number of new or new-to-me authors I find, and overall has led me to simply read less than I used to as a result.
Frankly, my life changed for the worse when most of the physical bookstores closed. I used to enjoy spending hours just browsing shelves and talking with other people to see what they had liked reading, and vice versa. Online forums don’t really replace in person interaction.
I too miss the mass market paperback. I go looking for them in every bookstore I visit. Our regional grocery chain, Wegmans, used to have a full aisle, both sides of mass market paperbacks. I was able to discover new authors, such as Louise Penney, before she was famous. I look for the MMPs everywhere I go, and buy then when I find them to encourage their continued publication,. I love the way they feel, and smell. Some day I will write an essay about good book smells. Romance novels are still published this way, and once again, I will continue to buy them when I find them. (The good ones.) I love the feel of a mass market paperback –or any book for that matter–in my hands. It relaxes me.
I miss the days of pawing through my parents’ book cases (they’re both SF readers), and friends’ book cases, and so on – to find books and to discuss books. I got together with a friend from out of town yesterday and we spent almost an hour in the SF section of a large used book store pointing things out to each other, and asking “What did you think about this one?” and such.
Ace Doubles
I completely agree. No pockets, but there was room in my purse. I have read a thousand ebooks and don’t remember the titles because of not having a colored cover to cement it into my mind. All that tech in an eReader, why no color? Can’t even read the kid a book as no colored pics to attract a 5 year old. Admittedly, I read so many ebooks because paperback print has gotten too small for comfort.
I think I have most of the ACE sci-fi doubles and probably most of their single title sci-fi books as well. All told about 5-6 K sci-fi paperbacks, some trade paperbacks and a few hard cover. You mentioned what I miss a lot – the lurid cover art. Always great!
I’m not missing them, since I have thousands in my (dehumidifed) basement, along with hardcovers and trade paperbacks. I love that I can (and must) stack them three deep on the bookshelves, though getting to the poor books is like moving tiles on a 15 puzzle. I do miss being able to buy new ones.
I own over 1000 paperback books in various genres. I prefer holding them in my hand while reading them. If I take a break I have bookmarks that will sit nicely between the pages. I also have room for a few hundred more of them to join my library. LOL
i vividly remember slinking across the invisible line between Respectable commercial Mainstreet in Fayetteville NC in the mid-1960s into the newsstand store just the other side of that line, averting my virginal female gaze from the predominant sports news and porn to beeline to the revolving rack of Ace Science Fiction Specials (75 cents a pop!) that led me to so many classics, (LeGuin, Zelazny, Norton, Panshin, Lafferty, Brunner, Schmitz . . . ) with those jazzy covers by Leo and Diane Dillon. Years later I passed most of them to a beloved niece, and now years and years later I’ve been delighted to see many of them resurface on the likes of Early Bird Books and the Portalist.
I’m a child of the ’50s, being born mid 1950. The town I grew up in had no library. The one school had a small collection of books in each homeroom. It was probably collected by the individual teachers. I devoured all of them. At home, my reading matter was old books left by my father from the ’30s and ’40s. (Raised by grandparents, not unlike being raised by wolves; Great Depression era wolves.) Fortunately, my mother was an avid reader of several genres and on my occasional visits, she willingly loaned me her finished books. Mostly paperbacks. I loved paperbacks and carried them everywhere. Loved classic SF and those old Ace Doubles. I also grew up to help found the town’s first true library.
I’ve almost completely replaced my paper books with digital ones. I love the portability of carrying thousands of books with me everywhere I go. My main reader is an 8″ Kindle Fire in the bedroom, but I have older 7″ Kindles that still marginally work stashed in different places like my office and bathroom. Also, through Dropbox, Google Drive, and Kindle App I can access everything with my phone, all fully synced. (I mostly read Epubs) So I am never without my library.
I do miss the feel, smell, and look, of paperbacks and hardbacks. But I love the ease of use and portability of ebooks. I don’t want to go back, but I feel a huge debt to those old paperbacks. They made me what I am today; a nearly 74-year-old struggling author who is too sedentary. A questionable achievement perhaps, but still!
also, remember when you could buy a paperback for five bucks!
dang i miss those days.
While I use the Kindle cloud reader and app for conventience when I’m at work, I prefer print books at home. The house is too small to accomodate large collections. But the public library still carries paperbacks and the fairly recent Little Free Library trend has been a treasure trove at times. In the LFLs around town I’ve rediscovered old favorites and found new ones. As for cover art – I miss vinyl for the same reason!
“Do you ever get nostalgic for the magical time when mass-market paperbacks ruled the shelves?”
I do not. very happy with online and downloadable content. every item you’ve noted is present and arguably better with a kindle or kobo book. loving living in the future.