by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
My favorite era of publishing is the post-war mass market paperback boom of the 1950s. Here was a galaxy of genre fiction, from hardboiled detectives like Mike Hammer and Shell Scott, to standalone crime fiction from the “red-hot typewriter” of John D. MacDonald and a slew of others. And the covers! Oh, those glorious covers, with just enough salaciousness to catch the eye, but not enough to get the book placed in brown paper at the far end of the newsstand (what they used to call “smut”).
I have a story about that. When I was a kid I read many of the classics well ahead of my classmates. I mean, I read Moby-Dick, The Count of Monte Cristo, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Les Misérables, The Last of the Mohicans,The Hunchback of Notre Dame and other such like. Full disclosure: these were in the form of Classics Illustrated comic books. Those gems were written with great care to be true to the source material.
I made regular trips on my bike to Sipe’s Market and Green’s Drugstore to buy these comics, along with Archie, Superman, and Batman. And then I’d spend a little time at the spinner racks of paperbacks. At the time, the early to mid-60s, secret agents were hot. Not only James Bond, but also the hit TV show The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (I still remember what that stood for: United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.)
So one day I was spinning a rack and came upon a series I didn’t know. The title was The Man From O.R.G.Y.
Cool, thought I. A new secret agent! I brought it to the cash register. But the man took one look and said, “This is not for you, son.”
“But I have the money,” I said.
“I’m not going to sell it to you,” he said, then added, “You can ask your parents why.”
Which I did. My mom delicately, oh so delicately, informed me that this was inappropriate for kids, and that the abbreviation stood for something “bad” that adults did. Later, in the schoolyard, I found out from a classmate what that bad thing was. Sheesh! Adults did that? Gross!
But my love of paperbacks was firmly established. Much later, when pursuing a writing career, I would scour used bookstores for titles from the classic era of Fawcett Gold Medal, Bantam, Dell and others. I eventually acquired a full set of all the 1950s stand-alones by the great John D., and bunches from other writers of the time. They are on my shelves now.
My own early books came out in trade paperback size, then hardcover. But I always wanted to be in MM. I realized my dream when I got a three-book contract with Kensington for the first (and only?) zombie legal thriller series, written under the nom de plume K. Bennett. I have the rights back and publish them under my own name, with new covers…though I wish I had rights to the old ones!)
That’s why it is sad to hear about the imminent death of the format. In the Substack Inside Agenting by the noted literary agent Richard Curtis, he writes:
[Mass market paperbacks] are scheduled to die at the end of this year.
Their death notice was recently announced in Publishers Weekly: “Sales of mass market paperbacks have steadily declined in recent years, to the point where they accounted for only about 3% of units sold at retailers that report to Circana BookScan in 2024. The format will take another big blow at the end of 2025, when Readerlink will stop distributing mass market paperbacks to its accounts.” ReaderLink describes itself as “the largest full-service distributor in North America” with six U.S. distribution centers supplying over 100,000 stores. All major publishers are shifting their focus to trade paperback as the format of choice both for originals and reprints. Even paperback publishers that prospered with genre literature like romance and science fiction are pushing their chips onto the larger trim size.
The reasons for this demise are:
- Tissue-thin profit margins. Publication and distribution has become exceedingly cost-ineffective compared to other (and higher priced) print formats like hardcover and trade paperback.
- The gradual disappearance of paperback racks and other displays in drugstores and supermarkets, and the explosive growth of chain bookstores whose bookshelves do not display MMPBs as effectively as trade paperbacks.
- The decline of book departments at big-box stores like Walmart, where paperbacks failed to meet the test of profitability per square foot of display space compared to other consumer goods like deodorant and panty hose.
- The rise of e-books as a preferred reprint format. Because e-books are released simultaneously with hardcover editions, as opposed to mass market paperbacks which are traditionally issued a year or longer after a book’s first edition, e-books have a huge advantage over MMPBs. Plus e-books are cheaper.
The one thing that never changes is change, right? But we writers are corks on the surface of the roiling sea of publishing upheavals, surviving, because no matter the format we have what the world needs—stories. And good stories, with actual human voice, will find their place. Always.
What has been your relationship with mass market paperbacks?
“…Moby-Dick, The Count of Monte Cristo, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities…”
As soon as I saw these titles, I recognized the Classics Illustrated series. We had a dozen or so of these in our comic book collection, including “The Fall of the House of Usher” and other stories by Poe, and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” They were good reading.
I purchased the entire collection some year ago. I still like reading them from time to time.
Some of my fondest memories are making monthly trips to Waldenbooks, etc. to grab the latest Star Trek (original series) paperback back in the 80’s. I purchased a few westerns in MMPB format although most of my Zane Greys were a certain hardcover collection.
Sadly, I veered away from print fiction in recent years due to aging eyes. I’d rather have the physical books but e-readers have also been a blessing.
RE: Print books in general–pricing is all over the place. Just this weekend I was looking up a historical reference paperback I’d just heard about and the bloody thing was over $35!!!!!! For paperback! For that kind of money I want a 600 page tome!
And I’ve noticed Kindle prices in general are rising.
But I do miss use of MMPB. Lightweight and easy to tote around–very handy.
Price point really hurt MM as the pubs had to keep upping the price just as ebooks were hitting big.
I used to always bring a couple of paperbacks on planes, but the Kindle is just so much more convenient.
When I was 6 or 7—bored and unsupervised—I went mining in my dad’s closet. (This was because there was no Netflix back then; explain it to the youngsters). There I discovered an old box filled with what looked like magazines. In a normal house, this would have been my dad’s porn stash, which would have solved the boredom problem until my mom caught me. Instead, it was a treasure trove of old Classics Illustrated Comics, which held my fascination for many, many years.
War of the Worlds, The Count of Monte Cristo, Moby Dick, The Invisible Man, Faust, Lorna Doone, Macbeth and dozens of others. I read and re-read them well into my teens and I still wonder if my life might have taken a different path if that box had been filled with porn mags instead.
MMPBs are disappearing. Sad, but I thought that had happened years ago.
Good that Dad had Classics Illustrated rather than Hefner’s Titillated.
Kindle prices need to be lower, especially with books that are 20 years or older.
Interesting point. Priced like remaindered books?
This just makes me sad 😞 I have so many memories of reading these books in this format—they are what originally inspired me to become a writer.
Fond memories indeed, Edie.
My bookshelves abound with MMPBs. Their demise will mess up my symmetry.
OK, JSB: What does S.M.E.R.S.H stand for?
SMERSH don’t have no periods. I think it was a Russian word.
Bad morning brain. THRUSH.
T.H.R.U.S.H., was the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity.
You’re welcome!
The demise of the mass market impacted my career directly with my publishing house of 12 years. As well as other authors of the Amish fiction genre. I had decent sales with trade, ebook, and audio, but when the mass market edition came out, my sales would skyrocket. I theorize it was because that’s what my readers could afford. They’re older women and less likely to prefer ebooks (which aren’t that much cheaper for a traditionally published novel). My publisher dropped Amish romances all together. Some of the authors were able to stay on writing sweet romances, but I don’t write straight romance. My editor said it was the inability to get the books into Wal-marts that was the last straw. Not having a pipeline for them. Even Love Inspired & Harlequin have gone to trade-sized books to keep their Walmart sales. I read all the gothic mysteries/romances like Mary Stewart and Barbara Michaels in mass market. I remember as a struggling college student waiting patiently for books to come out in mass market so I could afford to buy them. Now I use Libby and check them out at the library. I worry that books will become so expensive only wealthy folks will be able to buy them. $30 for a hardback book I read in 2 days is tough to rationalize with so little discretionary income. The attacks on libraries these days are worrisome too. At any rate, I mourn the loss of the of the mass market for a slew of reasons!
A good and sad reflection, Kelly. I always used to race out to buy the paperback of a previous hardcover release. And there were several places to get them—bookstores, news stands, grocery stores.
The first memory I have of a mass market paperback was a science fiction novel my mom was reading, it had a giant radioactive spider-thing on the cover. I must have been five or six. Not long after I turned twelve, we were at our local K-Mart and I was looking through the book section, and discovered a science fiction collection in mass market paperback by Roger Zelzany, “Four Against Tomorrow.” It had a space ship on the cover. I bought it with my own money. Not long after, I bought another SF novel, ‘the War Against the Rull,” by A.E. Van Vogt, also of course in mass market paperback.
By the time I moved out at age 20 to get married, my personal library of novels and non-fiction was a few hundred books, ninety percent in mass market. The collection grew while we finished college and started our careers. When we bought our house in 1988, a carpenter friend built us custom floor-to-ceiling bookshelves sized to hold our mass market paper backs. Those shelves are still full.
Until the ebook revolution, we did our best to buy books in mass market, waiting a year to buy new novels by favorite authors in that format. There were times we gave in at times to the lure of well made hardcovers and trade paperbacks, to the point that we have two floor-to-ceiling book cases in our living room crammed with them but mass markets were our first choice for new books until we bought our first kindles. Our house was out of room, and a new print book meant an old book had to go.
I’m sorry to see the demise of the mass market. They will always have a special place in my heart and on our bookshelves.
My shelves are stuffed, too, Dale. I need to weed out titles, but I am really bad at that. I want to keep them all.
I was a SciFi kid – E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein and a bunch of others. Then I discovered Ian Fleming and went through a spy novel stage. I’ve lost so many over the years to falling apart and floods.
I loved searching for new books in the mall stores and on spinners. I discovered used bookstores in the 80s. The aisles of bodice-ripping Romances! I picked up some mystery and suspense novels for a different sort of reading and went off on another binge.
The best thing about MM paperbacks was the size, they were all the same. I pretty much stopped buying paperbacks when the publishers came out with all these different sizes.
Yes, the glory days when bookstores not only had the new books, but also space for backlist titles of popular authors.
Friday night was shopping night in my house growing up. Either the local mall or the 6-floor department store (no cash registers, they used pneumatic tubes for transactions). I had a paper route so had my own money–whatever was left after Mom squirreled some away in my college fund. As soon as we were inside, I would head for the books (Walden Books in the mall or the fourth floor in the back corner behind women’s lingerie at the department store). I still own many of the MMPBs I sat on the floor debating over back then. ERB’s Tarzan, the Ballentine Conan reprints, etc. I still prefer the MMPB to trade editions because I have always held books while I read and the MM is easier and lighter for my hands to hold. I’m sad to see them go.
I’m right there with you, Douglas. Many a time I’d be sipping my Chock full o’Nuts coffee in NYC, with a paperback open in one hand.
When ebooks began to grow in popularity, most pundits believed they would take over the price point of mass markets. It took a heck of a long time for this to finally happen. I wonder if one of the reasons publishers are happy to see mass markets go is because of the rip the cover off and send only the cover to the publisher for a full refund tradition in bookstores. Making it so easy and cheap to get a full refund made it too easy to use mass market publishers as a bank. Stories about stores opening boxes and ripping off all the covers so they could afford the newest bestseller have been common for many years.
Right. I’d forgotten about that little scam, Marilynn. No honor among book-loving thieves.
Jim, fond memories of the spinner racks in the corner drugstore (which also had a soda fountain). MMPBs were affordable on a kid’s allowance. As I got older, I’d drool over the hardbacks of new releases but wait to buy until MM came out a year later.
MM fitted easily into purse or pocket–gee, is that where the name “Pocket Books” came from? ;). Wherever I went, I always carried one.
But aging eyes make reading them impossible now. The Kindle shines with larger font and storage capacity.
The Kindle does have that advantage. It’s nice to be able to carry a whole library with you on a plane.
I didn’t discover John D. MacDonald until his Travis MdGee series and can remember waiting for the next book to come out.
I too read on my Kindle mostly because … it’s easier. I also read on my phone if I get stuck somewhere.
John D.’s 50s books are great, though one of the early ones, Judge Me Not, he never allowed to be reprinted (he may have thought he was trying too hard to write a James M. Caine type). I finally scored a copy of it to complete my collection. It’s not so bad.
I’ve noticed the spin racks slowly disappearing for a while now. Heartbreaking. It was one of my early dreams, to see my name on the cover of a MMPB. Times are a changing, and not necessarily for the better. The other day, YouTube sent me a notification. After I listened to the song—beautiful and heartfelt—I discovered from the comments it was created by AI! Not sure if the voice wasn’t human (it sounded so real and emotional) but the music was, though my ears couldn’t tell the difference. Knowing that ruined the song for me, as I’m sure most of it was stolen from a gorgeous singer. Just because we “can” do something doesn’t mean we should.
Ack! I do think most people (right now, at least) feel the same as you, Sue. If they enjoy a song or a story and find out it was AI, it immediately ruins the experience. They feel duped. Will that always be so, or will we gradually cede the playing field to the machines, and think nothing more of it? Gad, I hope not.
Late to the party . . .
Nancy Drew & The Hardy Boys for me! 🙂
Love the mention of Classics Illustrated. I read a lot of them. When my junior high school English teacher asked the class if anyone had read classic novels and started listing them by name, I raised my hand and asked if the comic book versions counted. I still remember her scorn and my shame. However, I’ve never been able to wade through the original versions.