Genre fiction redux

I’ve been following the discussions about genre and literary fiction in the threads started by “Henry”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000875.html and “Maria”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000881.html with some interest. As I mention in a comment to Henry’s thread, I’ve always rated Ken Worpole’s writing on this topic both in his “Dockers and Detectives”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805271988/junius-20 and in another little book he produced called “Reading by Numbers: Contemporary Publishing and Popular Fiction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0906890454/junius-20 (Comedia, 1984). I picked it up of the shelf this evening to check on a passage I dimly remembered about book design:

bq. Paperback cover design in the 1940s and 1950s was often very strong and innovative, employing traditions borrowed from Expressionist and Surrealist styles of the early part of the century. Typography was often highly innovative too.

bq. Unfortunately, what displaced this bugeoning populist publishing tradition was the introduction of the “trade paperback” in the 1970s, a development of questionable value. The “trade paperback” is a larger format, more expensively produced paperback designed exclusively for bookshop sales, and carries an aura of a higher “seriousness” than the cheap, easy-to-fit-in-your-pocket book. Many publishers moved their more “serious” writers over into their new “trade” paperback lists or re-printed books with new “classical” covers … This not only raised the price of the books but literally took them out of the supermarkets and the chain-stores. The “trade” paperback was designed specifically to be sold by the book trade. Much writing was thus taken out of the arena of popular literature, as can be gauged by thumbing through the paperback sections in second-hand bookshops, where it is not unusual to find Sartre, Trocchi, Lawrence, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Nell Dunn, Mary McCarthy, Cesare Pavese, Ignazio Silone, Norman Mailer and many others being promoted as sensational fiction with garish covers – and being sold in their tens of thousands rather than thousands. It is the development of the trade paperback which further separated out “serious” literature from “popular” literature and created a vacuum in the cheap paperback field which formula writing rushed to fill. (pp. 7–8)

Now I don’t know about the very last bit there, but he’s definitely onto something with his observation that the publishing industry does a great deal via its marketing and packaging of books to categorise some as “popular” or “genre” and others as “serious” and “literary” and that this leads some readers to think of certain books as beyond them and others to think of other books as beneath them (quite independently of the actual content) — and that’s a great pity.

One question to ask is which books could survive — and indeed flourish — when repackaged on the “wrong” side of the divide. Most of the writers Worpole lists clearly can, as can Hemingway, Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, Jane Austen, and Emily Bronte (I’ve a wonderfully garish supermarket Wuthering Heights somewhere). I mentioned Dashiell Hammett in Henry’s thread. Philip Roth could do well in both incarnations but Don DeLillo …. sorry, I fell asleep there for a moment.

I don’t mean to suggest, by the way, that it is necessarily a bad thing if a book could not be successful if repackaged in a popular format. Some books both great works and only accessible to a restricted readership. But many other works can, if not presented in an inaccessible not-for-the-likes-of-me form serve as a bridge between popular and literary work.