An Ode to the Mass Market Paperback...

[Jaxom 1974]

I can't agree with the sentiment enough...I love MMPB books and wish they were still a thing.  Oh the bigger, brick-like trades that are more common now are okay, but there is something about the days of picking up a MMPB for 6.99 back in the day and being able to just use a pocket to transport it...

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

39 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

I can't agree with the sentiment enough...I love MMPB books and wish they were still a thing.  Oh the bigger, brick-like trades that are more common now are okay, but there is something about the days of picking up a MMPB for 6.99 back in the day and being able to just use a pocket to transport it...

I read a lot of them in my day.  The MMPB is really the only thing eReaders have replaced. 

I still love my paper books.

[Zorral]

The size of the print in mms made reading many of them, like the Signets, that also broke into pieces immediately, nearly impossible for me back then. I can't recall when I gave up reading mms entirely, but it was prior to e-read programs that allow for reading on fones, tablets, laptops, etc., with adjustable size etc. of the fonts -- even bolding the print too.

 

 

[Jaxom 1974]

3 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I read a lot of them in my day.  The MMPB is really the only thing eReaders have replaced. 

I still love my paper books.

Oh I do too. I don't even own an e-reader, and have no desire to.  My library is probably at least 70% MMPBs though.

[Wall Flower]

We still get a version of the mass market paperback in Australia. We don't generally get a hard-cover edition of a new release book here. The first release is usually a trade paperback and subsequent releases are then a smaller paperback, a little bigger than the old MMP but much smaller than the trade version. I have the same issue as Zorral but there are still a fair selection of the smaller books with reasonable sized print.

[Zorral]

Back in the day almost all genre fiction that was 'detective' and sf was mm publication, the cheapest of the cheap production.  But this is when there was such a thing as the solid mid-list and books stayed in print. And there were many publishers, with lots of competition.  That was a long time ago. 

It struck me so hard in Spain, how many bookstores there were everywhere, and how much real life shopping was offered and going on.  So different from here.

[Wilbur]

Just a reminder for those of us who love paperbacks and SciFi that this website exists:

Good Show Sir - Only the worst Sci-fi/Fantasy book covers

[Zorral]

Mass market fantasy, the mm paperback, the mall book store chains, and the corporate monopolization of publishing came together!

The Man Who Invented Fantasy
All those wizards, ogres, and barely-clad elf queens in the bookstore? You have Lester del Rey to thank.

https://slate.com/culture/2023/10/lester-del-rey-invention-fantasy-book-publishing.html

 

[Jaxom 1974]

That was a nice read. And fits so well with this thread.

[C.T. Phipps]

I love my Dresden Files and Garrett PI paperbacks.

My Vampire: The Masquerade collection as well.

[Leofric]

I have a couple thousand paperbacks stashed in my house and garage, collected over the last 50 years.  They are mostly stored in plastic bins, alphabetically by author.    I have converted to a kindle now, mainly for the sheer convenience of grabbing a new book any time day or night, but one of the things that spurred this transition was many publishers switching to the taller paperbacks that totally screwed over my storage system,  which annoyed me.   I still buy used paperbacks, the regular sized ones, but most of my new book purchases are now ebooks.

That article is interesting as I was a young teen having just burned through all of the science fiction and fantasy authors, Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert, Tolkein, Lewis etc. in my local libraries and finally had my own money from mowing lawns when DelRey books appeared to give me more reading material. 

[Zorral]

How the Humble Paperback Helped Win World War II
A new exhibition tells the story of the Armed Services Editions, pocket-size paperback weapons in the fight for democracy.

Terrific fotos, as this is a NYT Magazine piece -- therefore also long.  Gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/06/arts/paperback-world-war-ii-grolier-club-nyc.html?

.... The program, one of the more heroic chapters in American publishing history, is the subject of “The Best-Read Army in the World,” an exhibition at the Grolier Club in Manhattan. The show, on view through Dec. 30, is curated by Molly Guptill Manning, a law professor who accumulated more than 900 of the volumes while researching her 2014 book “When Books Went to War.” ....

I'll probably go see this next week.

Quote

 

.... The paperbacks were intended to help soldiers pass the time. But they were also meant to remind them what they were fighting for, and draw a sharp contrast between American ideals and Nazi book burnings.

That’s an aspect of the story that has only grown more resonant, amid today’s partisan battles over book bans. And Manning, for one, sees a clear lesson.

“During World War II, the American public came out very much one way,” she said. “And that was that there should be no restrictions on what people read.”

The idea that good soldiers needed good books didn’t start with World War II. During World War I, the American Library Association collaborated with the Army to gather and distribute donated books. Even before Pearl Harbor, the association had planned a new “Victory Book Campaign,” with the goal of collecting 10 million books in 1942. The goal was met, though there were concerns that too many were dirty, outdated or unreadable. The campaign was renewed in 1943, with a caveat that the public should donate only “good books.”

Books were seen not just as diversions, but as weapons in the fight for democracy. In American propaganda, the dedication to the free exchange of ideas was explicitly contrasted with Nazi book burnings. In a 1942 message to booksellers, President Franklin D. Roosevelt extolled freedom of expression, which was at the heart of his idea of the Four Freedoms. “No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny,” he said.

But just how to get those weapons into soldiers hands was complicated. Shipping heavy books overseas was impractical. So in early 1943, the Council on Books in Wartime, a publishers’ group formed in 1942, approached Ray Trautman, the Army’s chief librarian, with the idea of producing special paperbacks for soldiers overseas. The result was the Armed Services Editions. which were designed to fit in either the breast or pants pocket of a standard-issue uniform.

The series mixed entertainment with more edifying fare. The first title was “The Education of Hyman Kaplan,” a collection of comic stories by Leonard Q. Ross (a pseudonym of Leo Rosten, future author of “The Joys of Yiddish”). The more than 1,300 titles that followed included literary classics, contemporary fiction, poetry, history, biography, humor and even one art book, a compilation of soldiers’ paintings.

A 1945 pamphlet credited the books with helping to create “a young, masculine reading public,” including some who may not have been eager to dig into, say, Herman Melville’s “Typee.” One Marine quoted in the exhibit said that when that book was given to him, he eventually “had nothing to do but read it.” His verdict? “Hot stuff. That guy wrote about three islands I’d been on!” ....

 

 

[LongRider]

I've seen those when I worked at an online used bookstore.  They were small, unabridged, and easy to carry.  Go see them Zorral, you'll love them!   

[Lord Patrek]

Personally, I hate the trade paperback format. Just a few dollars cheaper than the hardcover and takes nearly as much space. And chances are that if you couldn't/wouldn't afford the hardback, you won't be willing to fork out that much dough for the trade paperback.

Ebooks make my eyes bleed after a while, so mass-market paperbacks were always a better option for me. Especially when traveling, when it's easy to bring one with you everywhere you go.

Too bad the costs of production went up and the profit margins went down and they're no longer a viable options for lots of publishers.

[Larry of the Lawn]

 Mmpb's are great, but I prefer trades over everything, I think.   bottom of the list for me is hardcover.   Simply not as comfortable to read.  The portability of mmpb's is wonderful but to me the best  reading experience is trade paperback.

[Durckad]

I guess I'm going to be the naysayer in this thread and say I do not miss the mmp format much. I've had so many mmpb's fall apart from the simple act of reading and yes, they are cheap, but also, they are CHEAP. Trade paperbacks are great, like a nice medium between mmpb's and hardcovers. I love all of my hardcovers but they are very definitely 1) expensive and 2) heavy and suck to move. Trade paperbacks fit nice next to my hardcovers (they're usually around the same size), they're not as heavy and ergo are more portable and usually are a bit more durable that mmpb's.

The one shining benefit of mmpb's are their portability or, I guess, if you want to bring a book someplace where it might get fucked up and damaged, then I guess a mmpb is also a good choice.

[Freshwater Spartan]

The best thing about mass paperbacks is that they would spawn used book stores that had huge stacks of ....you guessed it..... Mass Paperbacks! Take your cheap mass paperbacks and go to the local used book store.  Sell them for a couple of bucks and walk out with an armload of MOARR paperbacks!!!!!

Pure 1990s grooviness.

[Caligula_K3]

I also really miss MMPBs for their portability and cheapness. If e-books had replaced MMPBs in price, I would also be more willing to accept their absence, even though I prefer physical format. But books, no matter what, are expensive these days.

That said, working in a bookstore, I was witness to the huge amounts of waste MMPBs led to. If we didn't sell trade paperbacks and hardcovers, we'd return them to warehouses, to be shipped out again for sales or for use in online orders. MMPBs, though... We'd get tons of them, and the ones that didn't sell would be dumped into recycling en masse, with their front covers torn off. It was so environmentally wasteful, and I always felt horrible ripping up and destroying books, especially once I learned that most "recycling" just ends up in a landfill anyway.

[Durckad]

On 11/21/2023 at 4:19 PM, Caligula_K3 said:

I also really miss MMPBs for their portability and cheapness. If e-books had replaced MMPBs in price, I would also be more willing to accept their absence, even though I prefer physical format. But books, no matter what, are expensive these days.

That said, working in a bookstore, I was witness to the huge amounts of waste MMPBs led to. If we didn't sell trade paperbacks and hardcovers, we'd return them to warehouses, to be shipped out again for sales or for use in online orders. MMPBs, though... We'd get tons of them, and the ones that didn't sell would be dumped into recycling en masse, with their front covers torn off. It was so environmentally wasteful, and I always felt horrible ripping up and destroying books, especially once I learned that most "recycling" just ends up in a landfill anyway.

Not a big fan of MMPB's but that's just fucking sad. So much waste and for so little reason.

[Zorral]

I listen to and read many, many ebooks, and I've never paid for a single one. Libraries are my best friends.  My phone and my tablet are far more portable than mmpb ever were, and vastly easier to read.

OTOH, I'm not talking about the hard cover histories and studies and exhibit catalog books, and so on that I also read in vast multiples, where I want the illustrations, graphics, references, maps, bibliographies.  I buy those -- or borrow, too, from a library.  Though even among these there are wonder e-edition exceptions, such as one I have on my tablet right now, The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance by Simon R. Doubleday. The contemporary art works used to illustrate the text, and the maps, are wonderfully included, right where they should be in the text itself, instead of tipped in on the glossy paper in the middle.  The references are  linked to go to them, and then to return to the text.  It's a magnificent e-book production.