In 1946 most neighborhoods in the city had no bookstore, but you could buy paperback books in neighborhood candy stores, drug stores, newsstands, and the ubiquitous five-and-ten cent stores. But paperbacks had only begun appearing at these vendors seven years earlier when Pocket Books launched at Macy’s and Liggett’s drugstores. By 1946 far more New Yorkers were reading paperbacks than hardcover books.
Books with soft covers were not a complete innovation. In Europe a niche publisher had long distributed paperback travel editions of British and American novels in limited quantity. Newspapers in the States had distributed paperback pirated editions of penny dreadful novels as promotions during 19th-century circulation wars. In the early days of book publishing, when books were a luxury good for the libraries of the wealthy, they often were sold in soft covers so buyers could have them bound in their personal choice of covers. What was new this time around was the mass distribution of paperbacks at a bargain price.
Like other publishing innovations, including book clubs, the modern paperback was born in Germany between the World Wars. Penguin Books in England soon copied the success of Germany’s Albatross, selling its paperbacks at train stations and chain stores like Woolworth’s. Several American publishers tried the paperback format in the United States in the mid-1930s but couldn’t figure out how to make a profit at 25 cents a copy or how to persuade consumers to pay more than that when they could buy a hardcover reprint for $1. The most ambitious of these early efforts was Modern Age which started in 1937 and went out of business in 1939.
In 1939 a former executive from a Doubleday discount line started Pocket Books with backing from Simon & Schuster. He slashed royalty payments and distributor discounts to carve out a half-cent-a-copy profit margin at the 25-cent price point. His business model depended on high volume sales and quick turnarounds. Around the same time, Penguin hired a 22-year old American to distribute its books in the United States. Initially Penguin America was a shoe string operation. But the paperback revolution had begun. New players quickly entered the field, mostly from the world of pulp magazines. Pocket Books was a success story from the start, but paperbacks really took off during the war. The military distributed paperbacks produced by Pocket Books and Penguin in special editions that were wider than they were tall to fit into uniform shirt pockets, introducing paperbacks to many servicemen. Pocket Books was the leader in the field with Dell a distant second. Bantam was the newest entry placing their first books in stores in December. Avon was another major while Popular Library had carved out its own niche. A number of smaller firms existed, some of them only publishing a few books before folding. To succeed you had to have contacts with the hardcover publishers to secure rights and a distribution deal to get the books on to shelves.
In 1946, according to a New York Times story of May 5, the five major players cumulatively would issue 110,000,000 books. Even more were expected in 1947, when the quota on paper was eased further. Already, according to the article, Pocket Books alone had sold more books since its inception than the combined total of all hardback bestsellers published since 1880. It would have a huge success later in 1946 with Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, one of the biggest bestsellers ever thanks to the baby boom. For decades Dr. Spock was virtually synonymous with child care.
Despite the explosion in sales, the business model faced challenges in 1946. The profit margin for paperbacks was small and success depended on high sales volume. Getting display space was becoming a problem. Most paperbacks were distributed by companies that also distributed magazines. The first postwar months had not only seen a proliferation of paperbacks but also a flood of new magazine titles, many of them pulps. This led to a fierce battle for limited display space at the retail level. Returns, particularly from newsstands, had become a serious issue. Sometimes cartons and stacks of books and magazines would be returned unopened because vendors had no place to put them.
According to The Times, the typical first printing of a Pocket Book or Bantam book was 300,000 copies, for Penguin 200,000 plus, for Pelican, Penguin’s non-fiction imprint, 50,000, for Dell 150,000 and for Avon 100,000. If a book bombed, it could wipe out the profits of two successful sellers. With high volume and quick turnover an issue, most publishers yanked titles that did not have significant sales within days of their release to make room for better sellers. Penguin, which went after a somewhat higher-end market, showed the most patience with its titles and Bantam and Pocket Books also maintained a back list. The others mostly pulped the books that did not sell.
Competitive pressure increasingly led publishers to abandon the sedate covers of the earlier years for colorful illustrations, particularly as companies experienced in the sale of pulp magazines entered the field. Avon and Dell led the way down this path among the majors. Penguin resisted at the insistence of its English owner who thought cover art cheapened his product. Serious writers like Faulkner were promoted as if they wrote soft-core porn. Perhaps the furthest stretch was a cover of one edition of Little Women, illustrated with a drawing of buxom young women in low cut dresses. The image of the paperback suffered so badly that by 1952, Congress was investigating paperback publishers as purveyors of smut.
Paperback publishers depended on reliable sales and the most consistent genre for sales proved to be mysteries and crime novels, a category that seldom was represented on the hardcover bestseller lists back then. It also helped that these novels were generally short which reduced the cost of production. Thick mass-market paperbacks tended to fall apart as you read them. According to The Times, almost half of Pocket Books and Avon titles were mysteries or crime novels in 1946 as were about 25 percent of Bantam and Penguin titles. Westerns, bestsellers of yesteryear and short story collections were also well-represented, as were classics and even poetry anthologies. Overall, fiction made up about 70 percent of the titles. Humor books were also popular. Hardcover publishers did not usually release their biggest titles to the paperback publishers as long as they showed sales life in either their original format or as a hardcover reprints.
In 1946, the profit equation was further threatened when the Author’s Guild challenged the royalty payment schedule. The usual arrangement was to pay a title’s original publisher one cent per copy for the first 150,000 paperback copies and a penny and a half per copy after that. The publishers passed half of the royalties to writers. Under this formula if a writer’s book sold 100,000 copies in paperback, he made a whopping $500. Publishers, some of whom themselves had interests in paperback companies by 1946, were happy with the formula since in most cases they were off-loading titles that no longer were generating enough hardcover sales to justify the costs of printing, distribution and marketing. But this was particularly galling to writers of mysteries and genre fiction because paperback sales often were several times larger than the hardcover sales and the authors were reaping little financial benefit from their success. Some major writers now were demanding joint control of reprint rights in their publishing contracts. But any increase in royalties were a problem when the paperback publishers themselves only had a half cent profit on each copy sold.
The major publishers did not see paperbacks as a threat to hardcover sales because they believed paperbacks appealed to a different set of buyers. Hardcover readers were motivated largely by positive reviews and word of mouth or they were fans of a particular author. Book club sales played a big role for bestsellers, both through club sales and through the money spent on promotion. A sizable percentage of hardcover books were bought as gifts. Hardcover readers often popped in to pick up a specific title or they liked browsing leisurely in well-stocked stores. Paperbacks, on the other hand, were usually impulse buys, something you might pick up at a newsstand to read on a long train ride, often because the cover caught your eye. They competed more closely with magazines, particularly pulps, than they did with hardcover books. Paperbacks, however, did pose a threat to the book rental business, which derived much of its revenue from the sort of light fiction featured in paperbacks. It was making less sense to consumers to rent a mystery at 15 cents for three days when they could buy one in paperback for 25 cents.
Because of their massive sales volumes, the list of books published in paperback this year were more representative of what the average New York reader was reading at this time than the hardcover bestseller lists.
For more on category leader Pocket Books and the titles they were promoting in 1946, see here.
For more on Penguin Books, whose American managers had been having conflict with their British parent see here
For more on Ian Ballantine, the interesting maverick whose long, contentious career in paperback publishing started when he was a 22 year-old hired to start the American subsidiary of Penguin see here.
Ballantine, the grand-nephew of radical anarchist Emma Goldman, ankled Penguin in 1945 after feuding with the parent company to start Bantam Books with backing from a consortium of publisher led by Random House. For more on Bantam and its initial list of releases see here.
For more on Dell Books, run by George Delacorte, the successful publisher of pulps like Modern Romance and Modern Screen and comic books, including the Disney titles, see here.
For more on Avon, another publisher with roots in the pulps, see here.
For more on Popular Library, which focused initially on cozy mysteries of the type often serialized in glossy women's magazines, see here.