Comments on: Genre fiction redux

By: Arthur D. Hlavaty

Arthur D. Hlavaty — Sun, 30 Nov 2003 16:17:07 +0000

Worpole is a bit off on his dates. Trade paperbacks started in the late 40s with Anchor and Vintage, then mass-market size but priced a bit higher and with less garish covers (many of Anchor’s were drawn by Edward Gorey). By the early 60s Serious Lit (Hemingway, Faulkner) had moved up to the trade pbs, but almost any new novel would appear in mass-market pb a year after publication. Then the standards for direct-to-trade started getting more inclusive: John Barth, then Philip Roth and Gore Vidal, by now John Gregory Dunne and Andrew Vachss.

By: des

des — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 10:11:29 +0000

One of the great joys of French publishing is that the cheap and cheerful “poche” format still accommodates Serious Books, from Descartes through Rousseau to Lévi-Strauss and Barthes. Plus, they are pocket-sized, cheap and the covers are often suitably tacky. Vive l’amazon-france!

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 00:18:57 +0000

I’d like to resurrect a comment I made on the other thread—one of the writers who succeeded in the mass market seems to be Ms Shirley Hazzard herself. There’s a Playboy Paperbacks edition of Transit of Venus with a sexy cover (which has nothing to do with the novel—I think they even get the heroine’s hair color wrong). And in fact it had precisely the beneath-me effect you describe—one of my friends was astonished that a book with that cover could also have the jacket quote, “A nearly perfect novel.”

By: Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Patrick Nielsen Hayden — Wed, 26 Nov 2003 23:53:16 +0000

Publishers, by and large, would be delighted to keep selling those books in grocery stores and other non-bookstore outlets. It’s been changes in what the mass-market distributors (who are primarily in the periodical business) will take that have driven publishers to repackage those kinds of works into “trade paperback.” (Also encouraged by bookstores, who never liked cheap mass-market books all that much.)

By: Henry

Henry — Wed, 26 Nov 2003 21:44:32 +0000

Funnily enough, John Holbo posted href=”http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dissipation_and.html” rel=”nofollow”>http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dissipation_and.html on this self-same issue yesterday, with a particularly juicy piece of Hemingway cover-tat.