If you could identify a book’s most perfect form, what would it be? What would it feel like?
By form, I don’t mean format—whether ebooks or audiobooks or print. I’m talking about the actual shape of a print book: the height and width, the way it fits in your hands. And beyond that, the way it feels in your hands. Does it have that divisive “soft touch” jacket, the kind that feels ever so slightly like human skin? Is it embossed or dotted with gold foil? Is it hardcover or paperback, large or small, short and thick or tall and narrow?
It wasn’t until I was in college that I encountered what I still think of as the epitome of book form: the Vintage trade paperback.
If you grew up on SFF, you most likely know the experience of small hands gripping the chunky pages of a mass market paperback. These are the books that fit into grocery store spinners, that stack on shelves laid horizontally maybe even better than they do upright. When I was a kid, they were still five bucks a pop, meaning the $25 Waldenbooks gift certificates my grandmother sent for birthdays could keep me in new books for a good while.
This was pretty much all I knew, apart from the handful of hardcover children’s books I had carefully arranged on my shelves, or the middle-grade novels that came in a slightly larger size that somehow suggested they were more serious tomes. And the mass market has a lot going for it. You can put a lot of them in a backpack. You can, if you are spry and careful, walk while reading them. It’s hard to feel precious about a regular old mass market, though as with any book, a specific volume can be special, whether for rarity or sentimental reasons. Or maybe you just have that one book you always buy when you see it on a used shelf, just waiting for the right friend to hand it to. (For me it’s Jo Clayton’s Duel of Sorcery trilogy. Serroi was my first favorite green girl, long before Wicked’s Elphaba.)
At some point in my late teens, I became convinced that I ought to read “real books.” That was—foolishly—how I thought of things that were not SFF. My mom gave me Tess of the D’Urbervilles, into which I ventured only a few chapters. The first “real” book I bought for myself—after a long wander through the Strand—was Milan Kundera’s dazzling and meta Immortality, which came in a weird, tall, awkward shape that made it seem slightly ostentatious. (What a perfectly odd book for a kid who felt she needed to expand her horizons.) I still have that copy, and I still don’t really understand why it’s shaped the way it is. If anything, it ought to be weirder. It is not a normal book.
It wasn’t until I got my first bookstore job, in a long-gone Barnes & Noble, that I began to appreciate the Vintage paperback. They just shelved beautifully. They didn’t waste space. Many of them had a matte texture that felt like the movie adaptation of A Room With a View looked. (I hadn’t yet read the book.) The only books I still have from that job are Martin Amis’ London Fields, in a tattered, highlighter-yellow edition, purchased because the band Blur talked about it in an interview, and Blake Nelson’s Pacific Northwest coming-of-age tale Girl, with its highlighter-pink spine. The ’90s were a different time.
It was years before I learned the term “trade paperback,” which is what those perfectly medium-sized books are. They’re in theory higher quality paperbacks than mass markets, though I suspect many people just think of them as a different (and more expensive) size. I still gravitate toward them, toward their perfect size and shape, their tendency to be neither too thick nor too thin.
Why do we care what form our books come in? Is it just that one size or another is most comfortable for our particular hands and the ways we like to read? I read mass markets rarely enough now that when I picked one up yesterday, to reread Garth Nix’s magnificent Sabriel, I dropped it three times in the first few chapters. I was out of practice.
There’s no reason for me to think trade paperbacks feel “right.” And it doesn’t apply to all of them. I have a pair of Iain (M.) Banks paperbacks of a ridiculously floppy size, like hardbacks that lost their covers, which are simply too tall. They only tower an inch or so over their more average-sized neighbors, but the feel is wrong. (The worst shape is the “premium” mass market, a taller version which feels gangly and awkward, like it will never grow into its body. Somehow these give the impression that one has to open them wider in order to counteract the unnecessary height.)
Hardcovers have a whiff of inevitability about them. If you want to read a new book in its made-of-paper form, you are often doomed to a hardcover, no matter that sometimes they’re so heavy, they give you a backache if you mistakenly try to carry them around with you. (Yes, I am speaking of A Dance with Dragons. Mistakes were made.)
Hardcovers come in their own range of sizes, which I also think of as right and wrong. The smaller size that most YA books come in? Correct. The tall ones that SFF and a lot of nonfiction come in? No. Please, don’t make me hold this. It is too much. I understand that some books are simply so long that if they were forced into a smaller size, they would exist in the dimensions of the bricks we so often joke that they are. I understand this, but I don’t have to accept it.
What I do accept are hardcovers for which designers have had the leeway—and publishers the budget—to do something cool with the form. The original hardcover of Wicked has a window, or die-cut, in the jacket. These die-cuts are the bane of booksellers everywhere: They snag, they tear, they result in new books that look like they’ve been around the block. But Wicked’s jacket hides a book printed with the witch and her animal companions, a secret second cover image that perfectly suits the story inside. Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World was initially, and somewhat inexplicably, published with a fuchsia-and-neon-green jacket on which the fuchsia parts are velvet. (Technically it’s “flocking.”) It’s weird and lush. The only other time I’ve seen this velvety texture is on the advance reader’s copies created for Marlon James’ Black Leopard, Red Wolf. It doesn’t just grab the attention; it grabs the fingers, insisting that you consider the book as an object as well as a story.
Buy the Book
A Marvellous Light
Everyone has their book-object hangups. There’s something compelling about a gorgeous paper-over-boards book, which is industry-speak for “those hardcover books that don’t have jackets.” I love a small-format hardcover like Jenny Offil’s Dept. of Speculation; they feel compactly special, the literary equivalent of a petite but intensely flavorful dessert.
The book as beautiful object is, more often than not, now the province of specialty publishers—of The Folio Society, with its expensive volumes, or Subterranean Press, with its signed and limited editions. Creating books that fancy, books that can be keepsakes as well as stories, does get expensive. (Living with a former production manager will teach you a thing or two about the making of books. I walk into a bookstore and go, “Ooh, this book is out!” He walks in, touches the cover of something new and buzzed about, and says, “They spent money on this.”)
People love hardcovers and they hate hardcovers. My feelings are decidedly mixed. I want lovely things—the outsides as well as the content—to be available to everyone. A beautifully designed paperback has its own kind of value. But there is nowhere to tuck the skull that graced the case (the term for the cardboard covers themselves) of Gideon the Ninth, or the embossed authors’ initials on so many other hardcovers. And there’s a truth about hardcover books that rarely comes up in discussions of format and shape and size: They give a book more than one chance to succeed. A book first published in hardcover gets two promotional cycles: One when it first arrives, a shiny new hardback, eligible to be included on all those best-of-the-month lists and reviewed in all the most literary papers. And another when it lands in paperback, when the media pays less attention but everyone who didn’t buy the expensive hardcover discovers that the book they wanted to read is now somewhat more affordable.
Not all—not even that many—of my paperbacks are actually from Vintage, though I will still smile and pet the spines of those when I see them in a bookstore (when it is safe to go in bookstores). If pressed, I will admit that, yes, of course, I care a lot more about what’s between the covers than what’s on them. But I still have an eBay alert set for the Folio Society’s A Wizard of Earthsea. I still ordered Harrow the Ninth twice because the first copy didn’t have the black-sprayed edges.
Neither of those things exist in quite the same way in paperback. Though I kind of wish they did.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
You know, with the notable exception of Murakami’s The Strange Library, I haven’t put much thought into it. It’s occasionally useful to be able to slide a small paperback into a pocket for travel, but if what I’m reading at the moment happens to be a doorstopper (I think my record here is probably The Power Broker, weighing in at nearly 1,300 pages and more than four pounds in hardcover- the only time I’ve ever bothered to note the weight of a book) then it comes with me wherever I think I might want to do some reading- on the bus, in the park, in bed…
The Strange Library unfolded though, in such a way that you didn’t so much open it and read it as peer down into it at the story, which unusual experience I think suited the subject matter fairly well.
I would just like to point out that the taller mass-market sized paperbacks are an abomination. Standard mass market size is great. East to slip into a bag or even a pocket sometimes. I’m not a huge fan of trade, but I can deal with it. Hardbacks are great for longevity but less portable.
But those tall mass markets don’t fit on the shelf the same as standard, have the cheap glue of mass markets, and don’t really cut down on page count for larger books. They are just horrible in every way. All the disadvantages of MM with none of the advantages of trade or hardback.
Oh yeah, this is a discussion I can get into. I LOVE the trade paperback size. It’s my favorite for actually reading and enjoying. Usually they have the same layout as the hardbacks, but for half (ish) the price. For collecting though, there’s nothing like the hardback. And yeah, when I carry around WoT or SA hardbacks my carpal tunnel flares up. But the books are so pretty! And they look so nice on the shelf. Mass market though, is the book of my childhood/teen years. When I could maybe afford a new book this month if it was paperback, no matter how tiny the print. The vertical stacking power of those are amazing, it’s true.
But yes, the tall mass market editions are the bane of my bookshelves. It’s also one reason my Dresden Files books are on their own dang shelf. They need to enjoy either the trim size of a regular MM, or admit they want to be trade size and just do it. Being the gangly teen of my bookshelf forever doesn’t make you my friend.
Like most of us, I grew up on mass market paperbacks. One of my mother’s friends (all of whom were librarians) sent me boxes of sf on a regular basis, many or most of them Ace Double editions. I have a lot of affection for those books but I can’t read them now. As convenient as a paperback is the single limiting factor is the font size. You can’t do Ace Doubles with 12 point type, and for a lot of us as we age the teeny letters just become blurs.
The best books on my shelves are in the complete run of Dorothy Dunnett’s The House of Niccolò, eight beautifully designed and constructed novels from Alfred Knopf, published as hardcovers were meant to be in signatures *sewn* together and bound between boards. Not like modern “hardcovers” that are pasted together just like a paperback, but with slightly sturdier covers. They weren’t meant to be stuffed into purses because they were written to be read at leisure, in a comfortable chair, possibly balanced on a cat. Actual typographers chose the fonts and designed the pages and even left a note at the back explaining which font was chosen and what its history has been. The sort of thing that led me to spend a few decades as a typographer myself.
–Jeff
Physical books as objects hold a lot of potential appeal to me. Nothing like a carefully done trade paperback with a striking cover, nice paper, and a deliberately chosen font. Though I tend to love books anyway under most circumstances, and mass-market paperbacks being small, light, and easily beaten-up means I generally take more of those on long trips and worry less about the cover or spine showing wear.
I’m really curious as to whether there’s a causal relationship in one direction or the other (or even a feedback loop?) between there having been so many more SFF trade paperbacks since 2010 and SFF as a genre being so much more mainstream/vibrant/eclectic nowadays and arguably taken more seriously all around.
I shelve my permanent collection by size and then publisher, generally (for reasons of aesthetics and space), so the ones with oddball dimensions stick out easily. The very largest paperbacks are in with the hardcovers. Not that I regret the giant paperback of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell from 2005 – though I’m amazed that I hauled it on a 10-day trip to the other side of the continent given the proportion of my suitcase that it occupied.
For me, the perfect book size was always slender enough to stuff into a back pocket of my jeans, which generally meant the old, thinner mass market paperbacks, or the (very) occasional hardcover. I still feel the thrill of placing a “new” used paperback into its proper holder. The only redeeming quality of my e-book reader is being slender enough to hitch a ride in the back-pocket “book slot”.
I suspect that paperback book sizes have for years been relative to the dimensions of standardized shelving and racks in bookstores and newsstands. With the ascendancy of online bookselling and the decline of “bricks and mortar” bookstores, publishers can get more “imaginative” about the shapes and sizes of volumes.
I dislike those large sized paperback books, They just don’t fit anywhere. But, here’s the thing, and I know I will be reviled:
I love my Kindle, it is the right size and I can change the font. I don’t end up moving boxes of books I’ll likely never read again. It has x-ray look-ups so I can search easily for parts I want to re-read. I can carry it in my purse and not squish the other contents. I can carry almost my entire library with me. With my laptop or my phone I can even view the images in a book in color and zoom in. I am 100% an e-book lover.
I was a bookseller first back in the 1980s, and I would say that the Vintage look you described first got its start with the Vintage Contemporaries series of paperbacks, designed to appeal to people who appreciated artistic album covers (remember albums, before they left and came back?), or the art of Patrick Nagel. I believe the first one may have been Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. I loved the look of those books, and at the time collected all of them. That size and style then carried over to the rest of the line as soon as Vintage / Random House knew what a hit they had.
Wow, I agree one hundred percent with you, Molly. Trade paperbacks are the perfect size! Tall mass markets are hella awkward! And your thoughts on hardcovers… It felt like the article was a call coming from inside my skull, if ya know what I mean, because that debate is ongoing and eternal for me, too.
Also, I bought that Jo Clayton trilogy you mentioned because clearly you have great taste and I hadn’t heard of that series before. I thoroughly enjoy your articles! Can’t wait to read the next one!
A REAL book is and must be a hardcover, nothing else really lasts. Paperbacks disintegrate. Sadly even hardcovers NOW are not as well made despite the cost. I will not buy anything else. I own thousands of books, literally, and among them are a few, very few “paper” books mostly dating from the 1950’s which are simply not available in anything else…and, of course some of the old Analog and even older SF magazines. REAL books live.
If “soft-touch” is the type that gets smudged whenever you hold on at the same place for more than 5 minutes then it is truly the Devil’s concubine.
Personally I have a soft spot for hardcovers, the big hardcovers, not the YA ones, though I admit the YA ones are more comfortable to hold while reading. I like the standard hardcovers because it’s standard, they all stand up at the same height and width, I can put books on top, whereas when I put books on top of a row of paperbacks with different heights there’s gaps and I feel like I’m wasting space. And the binding with paperbacks is more variable too, the paper and the glue affects how floppy the book is and I don’t like breaking the spine.
My favourite non-special edition book-object is a Premier Classics edition of Great Expectations, it’s the perfect size, the perfect thickness for the size, it has a bunch of rose petals on the cover which drew me to it in the first place and made it the first classic that I got for myself. And since I got it the pages have yellowed to perfection, like perfectly toasted bread where it’s golden brown instead of just golden, it’s where I can tell the pages are yellow without needing to compare it to newer books.
The “premium” mass markets just confused me, but luckily they seem to be going out of style.
One thing I didn’t see mentioned is deckled edges. If the easily smudged covers are the Devil’s concubine then deckled edges are the Devil, I absolutely hate it. It makes turning pages so much more difficult, the edges recede and protrude from page to page and I have to take my mind off the story to pay attention to the act of turning the page just to make sure I haven’t caught two or three pages.
Hardcover, trade or MM format, each has its pros and cons. Just don’t change the dimensions of each format half-way through the series (or almost as bad, redo the cover images half-way through – Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunter series, I’m looking at you specifically here).
The one I can’t find any use for is the deckled edges they seem to like to use on trade paperbacks. Those just get in the way of turning pages!
Of course, who am I to complain, who seems to have entirely switched my reading to my e-reader in the last year.
Lots of resonance with this topic! My favourite by far is trade paperbacks, but I don’t mind tall mass markets. I like the feel of flexible paperbacks as opposed to hardcovers. Books with smudgy ink are awful. If a book is ugly or has a dumb cover I hate to buy it or read it. Changing jacket design in the middle of a series is a very, very bad thing. I ended up getting myself new copies of the first (two?) of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London books.
What I haven’t seen mentioned yet is when a great series goes to hardcover and you really don’t want to wait, but you don’t have any enthusiasm for the format that is less comfortable to hold, heavier to carry, more expensive, and has a dust jacket that keeps falling off or getting lost or damaged, AND takes up more space. Then you have a weird collection of books that don’t settle in well with each other on the shelf. Yes, Dresden Files is a real offender here! Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series also. If hardcovers disappeared, I wouldn’t miss them much.
The biggest paperback I have ever read is Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, which I love. But I might have thought twice if I had seen how big it was – except I ordered it back in the 90’s from the Quality Paperback Book Club, without knowing it was > 1,400 pages! (I would still be a member if they were still around. I found books I loved through them.) I was a third of the way through A Suitable Boy when I heard him do a reading on CBC radio and realized I had been missing much of the humour – he was very funny. I decided I had better start over, paying better attention.
Old books, a hundred years old or more, bound in leather but not with a hard board, are often smaller than mass markets, and seem more personal somehow. Not printed by the gazillion. Elegant little items. They are lovely objects in themselves, and attract me even if I don’t know anything about the book – they make me want to find out.
I like small books – smaller than mass market. Again, they seem more personal, somehow special. I love my diminutive copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists. A perfect little package of propaganda for an excellent cause which still has more work to do than most people realise
@8: No reviling here. The e-book format has so many good traits. For me, clarity of reading in low light, portability, and so forth. The only thing I tend to miss are any book with art inside (I have Sanderson’s Stormlight in ebooks because that’s how I started with them but I do wish I had hardback for the art prints inside.)
I tend to favor hardbacks with dust jackets, and those are usually of about the same size, though I do like that there are variations. (The only dust jacketed book I have that’s somewhat annoying is Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things, because the jacket feels… fragile.) There’s something nice about seeing a ragged top crown of books on my bookshelf, reminding me that each is unique.
I love trade paperbacks too, though I have fewer of those. It’s always a little awkward when I start a series in trade, but then move into the hardbacks — Terra Ignota is like that. I might need to find a hardcover of the first book for that just to get some library matching.
I don’t know the American terms for different book sizes, but it is annoying when a book is larger than the rest of the series and you have to move the whole series to a higher shelf where the one large book fits.
Removable dust jackets on hardbacks don’t make sense, I always remove them to read the book so they don’t get in the way and slip off.
Another annoying format are series in a box where you can’t fit the books back in without damaging them.
Allow me to pile on in the hatred of the tall “premium” mass market paperbacks. At least when they first appeared, they were a bit pricier than the other mass market books and I’ve always thought the variation in format was designed to justify the higher price.
On the other hand, I’m somewhat fond of the fractionally shorter than normal paperbacks that were common in the 1950’s and retained by Ace for a good time longer. I’ve got some Ace Doubles and Edgar Rice Burroughs books in that format.
I’m also fond of the cheap smallish hardcover Science Fiction Book Club editions, both as reprints of trade books and original works.
Much of my reading these days is electronic, which offers many adntages but may spell disaster for the used bookstores of the future.
As someone who works at a used bookstore, thank you for mentioning the abomination that is the cut out on the cover. Nothing gets trashed faster.
I also wanted to bring up the new Mass Market Paperback size. We started seeing them last year. They’re wider then the normal MM and so stick out annoyingly on the shelf. On the other hand, they are easier to read than the tall premium MM. I am undecided.
Me personally, I love the hardback. And yes, it’s best if they match in style. I don’t mind the trade, but there’s something so satisfying about a hardback. It’s one of my favorite things when a favored series gets popular enough to be released in hardback (though these must get snatched up quickly as they usually don’t have a huge print run).
For eyesight reasons, I depend on my Kobo but if my eye wasn’t such crap, I would prefer MMPB for fiction [1]. For non fiction, hardcover. For RPG rulebooks, hardcover + a searchable pdf….
When I started reviewing old books, I discovered I am incredibly fussy about cover art. Even for ebooks: I will swap new cover art for the art from the edition I first read.
1 Ebooks also offer instant gratification, and I can carry a surprising number of them.
I love real hardback books the most. But I have to admit, for ease of reading and toting, trade paperbacks do have advantages. Trade paperbacks just don’t hold up well over time, though, and since I mate for life, it is hardbacks for me.
The real size issue, though, is length. Books that exceed 100,000 words tend to be wordy, overstuffed, and take too long to get to the point. Not to mention they get so thick, they tend to hurt your wrists when you read them.
And electronic books just do not work for me. Call me a luddite if you will, but there is nothing like a real, paper, book.
I just read Anna and the French Kiss because I found a beautiful edition of it at a bookstore. I didn’t BUY it at the bookstore– but the embossed cover in delicate pastels, the Art Nouveau endpapers, the edges stamped with a peacock feather pattern, it all told me that this was a book to love and to cherish. So I got it out of the library and guess what, it’s good.
Grady Hendrix’s My Best Friend’s Exorcism used the endpapers as props: they were done up like the endpapers in a high school yearbook, with different handwriting styles, names, nonsensical jokes, the works. Another example that the publishing house really cared.
If you ever read Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa by Nicholas Shrady, the first edition was a parallelogram, not a rectangle.
Is there a Platonic ideal for a book? Yeah, the Bible.
Perfect size for a book? A Kindle.
Quarto
Bound in half calf with gilded edges and restrained gold tooling.
If you’d asked me 20 years ago, this would never have been my answer, but right now it’s mass market paperbacks – probably partly because that’s the format for a bunch of my old favorite series, definitely partly because there are so many ways to stuff them into the wooden crates I use for most of my bookshelves (the standardized height/width is perfect for stacking). I also get mildly frustrated that my new books come in so many different sizes that I can’t readily stack books on top of a lower row. And mass markets are about the largest books that can fit in my favorite tiny purse.
That said, nothing will ever compare with a well-bound hardback for reading wordy books, nor with a well-made trade paperback for smaller ones. The way they just fall open wherever you want…
I work at a public library and also have a hatred for the tall mass market paperbacks. Have you all seen these oddly shaped paperbacks that are coming in now? Ugh…. the Mass Market Paperback Max. All Max titles will have a larger trim size (4.75 inches x 7 inches). Personally I love my Kindle. I can take my library everywhere and it fits in my purse. :)
I’ve been a fan of hardcover since I first encountered the Science Fiction Book Club just out of college, lo, these many years ago. I’m not a member of SFBC anymore, mainly because no matter how good their prices are, they just can’t compete with the free shipping from Amazon Prime. But I digress.
My only issue with the usual hardcover these days (and I do include those gigantic Rothfuss and Sanderson hardcovers — the weight is not a problem for me) is that the print is just too damn small for my aging eyes.
Much as I love the experience of holding and reading a good hardcover, my perfect “book” these days would probably be a Kindle, if only I could get one with at least a 16 inch screen. A screen that big, combined with the ability to set the device font size somewhere between 24 and 30 point, would give me something I could Actually Read without having to mess around with 5x magnification clip-ons for my glasses.
I worked in an independent mystery bookstore almost twenty years ago and one of the things I absolutely loved were hardbacks of a smaller size with captivating covers. John Dunning’s BOOKED TO DIE in its original edition is a perfect example; also POSTMORTEM by Patricia Cornwell; Minette Walters’ THE SCULPTRESS (UK edition); and Jasper Fforde’s THE BIG OVER EASY (UK edition). I treasure these books, even though 99% of my reading is now digital, and I take them off my shelves periodically to enjoy again their uniqueness and creativity.
@21: “… it all told me that this was a book to love and to cherish.” Exactly. As soon as I saw Jamie Harrison’s THE EDGE OF THE CRAZIES, I knew I would love it. As with the others I mentioned, someone in the design/production department must have felt these books were worth the extra effort.
Hardback books today, especially in the crime/thriller genre, are all a uniform size, sans serif font and stock cover image; they should be identified as mass market hardbacks. And the books themselves could be great, but no one took the time to make them stand out.
I used to hate the trade paperback size; I never really understood why they existed. P.C. Hodgell’s books (aside from the first, God Stalk) only seemed to come in that size – awkwardly large, overly expensive. Now I know that they’re cheaper (per word, as it were) to print, but I’m still not really a fan. Give me either a standard mass-market paperback like The Dosadi Experiment or To Die in Italbar or a fancy, weirdly short hardcover like almost any Patricia McKillip book.
I have Ace Doubles with a cover price of 75 cents. And I was upset because they had gone up.
For novels, I need high quality artwork on the silky-slick surface of the lightweight, a little bit larger than my hands-sized book, coupled with a well-printed, dark, moderately large, and easy to read font. I prefer paperbacks, for their more tactile, ergonomic qualities. But, for coffee table picture books, give me huge hefty hard cover tomes I can linger over for an afternoon and refer back to over years and years of leisure time.
I like the feel & durability of hardcovers, but for ease of storage, I prefer the simple mass market paperback, all of (about) the same size. I have a significant collection, about 3000 F&SF alone, plus a similar amount of other genres. The F&SF stuff is all catalogued by author, then copyright date (except series get kept together with the first book.) They take up so much space that everything is double-stacked – two rows of books on 1 shelf. But every now and then I get something that I want to read, now, or find in a second-hand book store, and it might be a hardcover of varying sizes, or any of the bigger paperbacks. They drive me crazy – it’s either rejig the shelves to accommodate the big ones, or have a few shelves reserved for just the big ones. I usually have a combination of both, shelves that will accommodate slightly larger than mass market, plus separate for the really big ones.
But with two rooms almost totally dedicated to books, plus books in about 6 other rooms of the house, I have given up. Almost everything new is now in an e-book format. Between my various apps, I can carry a library with thousands of books when I go on holidays. I don’t like any of the formats that I have (Kindle, iBooks, Kobo and a couple of others) as far as their ability to sort or locate books – each usually has one advantage where they beat the others, but also one where they fall down. Word of advice – never delete a book, assuming it will be on the cloud forever – I lost a few that way.
I definitely prefer paperbacks and the smaller (tallness) the better, but what I really love-and can be done on paperback-are covers where letters or images are raised.
It’s not SF, though some architects consider it fantasy, but it was several years of having Alexander et al.’s A Pattern Language on my shelf before I recognized that the shape, size, color, texture, and even thickness of paper matched The Book of Common Prayer at my church.
I really love the size of the editions that Slightly Foxed puts out – both the hardcover and the paperbacks (I think they are the same size?). They are lovingly put together, and very easy to read one-handed. (And also very easy to stuff two or three or four into a bag and convince yourself they really don’t add any weight or bulk at all.)
Like others who have posted, I’m solidly in the e-book camp these days. My objection to paperback books that I’ve held onto for years is deteriorating paper, even though they’ve spent most of their lifetime in relatively climate controlled settings. Many treasured hardcover books published in the 70s-90s also used poor quality paper. And as I’m no longer as sharp eyed as I was even in my middle years, the small type faces and narrow ditches used to keep paperback costs down are now difficult to read, with stiff spines and/or dying glue compounding their decay. The book smell many miss is largely composed of dust, chemicals used in manufacture, and even molds. No wonder folks who work in even the best archival facilities are often allergy prone.
I’ve read constantly since childhood, and during RV trips we enjoyed for decades, a box of books and audiobooks on CD was tucked into under bed storage–at least 30 lbs. Tomorrow I’m climbing on a plane for a 3 week trip, with several hundred titles on my Kobo Aura and a dozen audiobooks on a tiny Sandisk Clip–more selections than I used to tote and a total weight of about 7 oz.–the same as a 400p mass market pbk.–in my purse. Several more oz. for shared charger, cable, and light weight earbuds. If either now elderly device is lost or damaged, my iPhone, loaded with reading and audiobook apps, is available. I can replace either Kobo or Clip for a modest price and 2 day shipping–significantly fewer $$ than that box in the RV was worth. All of my content is safely archived and accessible.
I’ve plenty of room in my life for all the formats we love–hardcover books on my nightstand, next to my easy chair and in my kitchen and study bookcases, a paperback in my car glovebox, and a big pile of “real” books for my grandchildren, although all but one are now old enough to prefer digital formats most of the time.
I’ll accept a trade paperback if that’s the only way I can get a book, or if I feel like one doesn’t “deserve” the extra bit of shelf space (or cost). I’ve been a hardcover snob since my mid-teens, though, and I’ll remain one until the day I get crushed under a collapsing bookcase. Book sizes though? I was an SFBC member for years which is probably why I have a fondness for the smaller 8.5″ tall volumes, but I’ll take ’em however.
I honestly don’t mind much of what size my books are. If they can fit into my backpack, wonderful, and if they fit in my pockets? Even better! What I do focus on is the proportion, more often. How thick of a book is it, compared to the size? I have one book, a paperback copy of Eldest (Christopher Paolini, the second in the Eragon series) that is absolutely awful. While I read Eragon to shreds, and while Eldest is my favorite of the series, the book is so thick compared to the size of the pages that it’s hard to read, hurts to hold open, and even after practically breaking the spine, still doesn’t want to lay flat or open on it’s own whatsoever, no matter what I do.
So…I like books that are about an inch thick. If the book needs to be smaller or larger to accommodate that thickness, then that proportion is the most important thing so that it feels well-balanced based on the rectangle the page makes and the thickness of the book.