Go you now and feast your eyes on one of the most well-realized and gorgeous web sites I’ve seen in a long time, The Paperback Revolution. Why should you care? As the site says:
It is difficult to overestimate the influence of the paperback upon the twentieth century. While paper-bound books have numerous historical antecedents — from chapbooks, penny dreadfuls and dime novels to pulp magazines to European paper-bound books such as the Everyman series, Tauchnitz Editions and Albatross — it was the twenty-five cent paperback and the hundreds of millions of books produced during the Paperback Revolution which transformed the reading of all kinds of literature into an undeniably mass phenomenon in the twentieth century.
From a purely aesthetic point of view, I’ve long been enamored of mass-market paperbacks from a certain vintage. Of course the Anchor editions with the Edward Gorey drawings, which I hoard like rubies, are special. But even items like my rather hideously illustrated 1950s paperback Liberal Imagination somehow touch me. Perhaps this paperback love is more than just the unbridled nostalgia I’ve always taken it for. Maybe it has to do too with the assumptions inherent in the very physical form these books take: that Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, Joseph Conrad, and Herman Melville were in mass demand by people of ordinary means and could be thought of as everyday reading. Today’s Oxford and Penguin Classics, while offering writers like Conrad and Melville, don’t convey quite the same invitation to reading, or the same faith in an enthusiastic reading public of some size. With their wearisome uniform designs and batteries of prefaces and documentation, they seem resigned to lives of course adoption and captive audiences. Not so much as picking up a little finger to sell themselves, they tend to limit their own audiences to the initiated and the coerced. To me this makes them, compared with their snazzier counterparts from the Revolutionary era, vaguely depressing.
In any case, the thing I love best about the amazing Paperback Revolution website is its loving attention to the look and feel of paperbacks produced from 1935 to 1960. Do not miss the Virtual Paperback Rack. That’s the catnip for the sensualists among us, while you more analytical and historical types will be equally diverted by the Animated Paperback Timeline, launchable here.
This site is so cool, I feel like I’ve done my good deed for the day just linking to it. Enjoy, and don’t thank me–thank the ever-indispensble Coudal Partners, who posted the link a whole week ago.