I’ve become a very big fan of the midcentury paperback over the last few years. John MacDonald, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Fredric Brown, Evan Hunter, Orrie Hitt, Gil Brewer, Robert Silverberg, and more, along with all of their various pen names. Genre-wise, this is mostly crime and noir, though some of these writers wrote…well, sleaze. I mean, it’s called sleaze, but it’s extremely tame by today’s standards. In 1959, though, it was enough to get you investigated for obscenity; we’re much more obscene today.
Lawrence Block wrote quite a few of these types of novels when he was starting out, and it took many years for him to own up to having written them, even once famously joking that he was glad that they weren’t printed on acid-free paper, as this way the acid had 50 years to destroy the evidence. But really, while they might be a young writer’s earliest efforts, they’re perfectly readable and often veer pretty close to a crime plot anyway (in fact, Block has two product lines that he self-publishes to bring these books back into print–Classic Crime, and Classic Erotica–and there are a few books that have been printed in both lines).
OK, OK, this is really just an attempt to argue that I don’t read porn, right? Is it working? They’re mostly crime novels. Yes, they have sex in them, but very little is mechanically described. Still, my wife loves to ask me how the smut is coming when she sees I’m reading. I’m fine with it.
I’m hardly a collector of these things, but I do own quite a few original 4 inch by 7 inch mass market editions from the 1950s and 1960s, as sometimes that’s the only way to read the book: there’s no Kindle edition, no subsequent reprint, and these things never had hardcover runs. Many of these authors were widely published in their day, published for 35 cents on a giant rack in a drugstore, and are now either out of print, or are having their books brought back into print but in more cost effective multi-novel collections. I both support this and lament it. I support it because these are fun reads, and it’s never good to see an author’s work go out of print and be largely unobtainable. I lament it because it’s not just the book that matters, but the size and shape of the book as well. Reading one of these in a larger 5 inch by 7 inch trade paperback size in an omnibus edition doesn’t feel the same. I know it’s the same story; I don’t care. It doesn’t feel the same.
The mass market paperback was really what got me reading. When I was younger, this was the size book that most appeared on my shelf and in my hands: Jurassic Park, The Hobbit, anything by Steven King, R.A. Salvatore books about Drizzt set in the Forgotten Realms, Raymond Feist’s Magician series, Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, 1984, Michael Crichton’s Sphere, etc. It was a good size for a book, you could easily hold it in a one-handed grip, it could fit in a pocket, I could afford it at age 14, and more. This size book was reading for me.
Charles Ardai is bringing back a lot of mid century crime books in his Hard Case Crime line, and the first decade or so of his books are all the mass market paperback size. He commented on how at one point they had to find a new printer, and they realized it didn’t make economic sense to do the smaller mass market size anymore, so subsequent books are all the larger “standard” paperback size of today. I can’t say I’m thrilled about it, but he pointed out that at least the covers are bigger so you can better see the cover art.
Last night I found myself reading, which is not strange. What was slightly strange was that I was reading by the light of a streetlamp, in the middle of an REI parking lot. I was really only able to do it because I put a book into my jacket pocket, and since it was a Robert B. Parker mass market book, it happened to fit. This is also reminiscent of my earliest young adult reading, when I’d bring a book with me wherever we went, even to the mall, when I’d read 30 minutes on the drive to the mall, would read while walking around the mall, and then 30 minutes on the drive back. Nowadays I sneak paperbacks into my pocket whenever I bring my son to baseball or my daughter to gymnastics, then I find a quiet, well-lit place.
A lot of people like to say that having children keeps you young. I have three kids and am not sure how young I feel, though I do love their sense of wonder when they see things for the first time. They’re positively in awe whenever we get to a new hotel room, for example, and are incredibly impressed by amenities that the rest of us have become blind to. They also are still on the upswing as far as experiencing movies and other cultural artifacts like songs, stories, food, and art, and so I do like being near that kind of wonder again. But really, my love for reading has taken a major step forward the last few years, and I have to think my return to the mass market paperback size has something to do with it.
The stories themselves are meant to be enjoyed in a few hours, as the plots move quickly with a lot of suspense. But it also feels like reading in a way that a lot of my more literary reading never did – that felt like work. Part of the allure of mass market books was always that they were cheap. They were less durable (which in Lawrence Block’s case was a feature rather than a bug), the glue would dry out and fail after enough years passed, the spines would crease, and on and on. But like I said earlier: I could actually afford them.
They have also been in steady decline for a number of years. Despite the nostalgia I feel for them, this makes sense, as it’s not the format that’s important or notable – it’s the need. The need was for fun adventure stories, full of suspense and action. They needed to be inexpensive, and they needed to be able to be distributed quickly. This is pretty much the domain of the eBook these days, and I don’t think that’s bad, despite the love letter to the mass market paperback that you just read.
Yes, a little of the romance of holding a book gets lost. But I really don’t think we should lose sight of the fact that the rise of the eBook to fill a pulp need has meant that thousands of writers are able to be independent authors now, and make a pretty decent living at it. For a long time, the traditional publishing industry was set up so that very few authors were making much money. It was the world, as Norman Mailer put it, where a writer could make a killing, but not a living. Or, as The Guardian put it: you can only be a writer if you can afford it. This obviously excludes stories and voices who are from impoverished backgrounds, who cannot afford to take a year to write a book that will probably only net them a few grand. Consequently, we get a lot of well-off authors writing about impoverished characters not from a place of love or of loyalty, but from economic tourism.
Self-publishing and eBooks have really changed things. There’s the famous story (who knows if it’s apocryphal) of the cowboy lit writer who self-published on Amazon, saw success with a number of books, then was contacted by a major publisher who offered an advance that was quite literally less than a month of his Amazon income. There are non-traditional writers who simply do not need the traditional publishing industry any longer, and while that might terrify the middlemen who rely on the depressed wages of authorship to keep a bloated publishing machine running, it’s a great opportunity for those same authors if they want to strike out on their own and earn more for the same work.
It’s not that hard to make a book cover. It’s not that hard to make an eBook file. Even if you don’t want to do either of those things, it’s not hard to find someone online to do it for you, and inexpensively. As for editing, a quick look at the Best Selling Amazon eBooks will show that readers are far more forgiving of grammar and style issues than we’ve been led to believe; as long as the story is good, the characters believable, the suspense and tension are real, and the prose fairly clean, then the story can be successful. Despite what our MFA programs tried to instill in us, unique writing style and voice aren’t as important in this world as a compelling story is.
A major downside of self-publishing is that success at least partially depends on regular publishing, and this means there’s a lot of pressure on writers to write quickly, publish quickly, and move on to the next thing. The appetite for pulpy stories (whether romance, erotica, crime, or sci-fi) is insatiable, and once a writer gets on that particular carousel, there’s no getting off as things are currently constructed; writers must play along with the almighty recommendation algorithm if they want to make this work.
Since that strategy has the word “algorithm” in it, it might feel new, but it is absolutely not new. All of those mass market noir and sleaze writers I mentioned earlier wrote the same way, except they did it at their typewriters in 1959 rather than at their computers in 2023. Lawrence Block, Robert Silverberg, Donald Westlake, George Simenon – there’s a reason these guys all have hundreds of novels to their credit. Yes, they were following story patterns in how they wrote (hint: this works), but they also had to write 45,000- to 60,000-word novels every couple of weeks to make a career viable. There may not have been a secret algorithm driving that kind of output other than “make money and write a lot,” but it was enough for those writers who could put in the work.
The mass market paperback might be dying off, but the conditions that made it a viable approach to writing and publishing have returned. Admittedly, I don’t get the same thrill from reading on my Kindle that I get from reading an old paperback, but I do wonder what kind of changes we’ll see in self-publishing over the next few years that might start to change that. I’m pleased that lots of writers stand a chance now. How long these market conditions last, and for how long these writers stand a chance, is another matter entirely.