Posts Tagged ‘paperback’
“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all”*…
Ah, but “good”?… Past a certain level of quality, our definitions of “good”– that’s to say, the books that entertain and enlighten– vary for each of us. How to choose? Literature-Map is here to help…
The Literature-Map is part of Gnod, the Global Network of Discovery.
It is based on Gnooks, Gnod’s literature recommendation system. The more people like an author and another author, the closer together these two authors will move on the Literature-Map.
If you found a typo or a duplicate, please report it here.
Is an author missing on the map? Please vote for them here.
Want to jump to a random place on the map? Click here
Help in finding your next book: “The Literature-Map.”
* Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
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As we turn the page, we might recall that this date in 1935 was a big one for the book business:
Allen Lane, Chairman of the London publisher The Bodley Head, was returning home after traveling with author Agatha Christie and her husband. At the train station, he browsed the kiosks looking for something to read on his way home. All he could find were magazines or low-quality paperback stories that he had no interest in reading. Then the thought occurred to him that people, like himself, might be more inclined to read good quality books [literature in paperback was then mainly poor quality lurid fiction] if they were more affordable. And since he was in the position to help build up lagging sales for his company, he ventured into printing previously hard-back books into a paperback format. The first was released on this day in 1935…
– source
Penguin Books featured no photos and were priced about a fifteenth the price of a hardcover book. The traditional book trade initially resisted; but the purchase of 63,000 books by Woolworths paid for the project outright, confirmed its worth, and allowed Lane to establish Penguin as a separate business in 1936. Indeed, by March 1936, ten months after the company’s launch, one million Penguin books had been printed.
[More here]
“Oh, I am fortune’s fool!”*…
Something on your mind? Ask the (interactive version of) xkcd’s oracle…
* Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
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As we plan accordingly, we might recall, with gratitude, that it was on this date in 1935 that Alan Lane released the first ten titles in the Penguin paperback book series. At the time a junior player at a publisher called Bodley Head, he was frustrated by the lack of affordable contemporary literature. He wanted to offer cheap, quality books through outlets like railway stations and newsagents as well as traditional bookshops– to make good books accessible. So his volumes were priced at 6 pence each, while the typical hardcover book sold for 7 and 8 shillings. The experiment was a huge success: within a year, Penguin had sold 3 million paperbacks; skeptics– there were many (an earlier experiments in paperbacks in Germany had fizzled)– had been proved wrong; and Lane launched Penguin as a standalone publisher.
The original Penguins are an eclectic mix – a biography of Shelley, a Hemingway classic, a novel set in a pub, a novel about an old lady, two mysteries, an autobiography, and three more rather romantic novels– by authors both still widely read (Hemingway, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie) and not so well remembered (e.g., Mary Webb, E.H. Young, Susan Ertz).
Today, 80 years later, more than 600 million paperbacks are sold annually worldwide.
The First Ten Penguins, 1985 reprint box set
Lurid is as lurid does…
Readers can craft their own sensational pulp novel covers (your correspondent’s first essay, above) at Pulp-O-Mizer.
[TotH to Richard Kadrey, whose example your correspondent follows in this, as in so many things…]
For inspiration, readers can browse Steven Brower’s wondrous Breathless Homicidal Slime Mutants- the Art of the Paperback.
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As we prepare to turn the page, we might send glamorous birthday greetings to Sári Gábor, better known in the U.S. as Zsa Zsa Gabor; she was born on this date in 1917… or so the preponderance of sources suggest. While the month and day of her birth are agreed, other sources suggest the year was 1918, 1919, or 1920. Ms. Gabor has not been forthcoming on the question.
Crowned Miss Hungary in 1936, Gabor emigrated to the U.S. five years later, and began a career as an actress. But while she had some success in supporting roles on stage and in films, her celebrity was as a socialite and as a frequent visitor to the altar. She has been married nine times. She is the second of three sisters: her elder sister, Magda was a socialite; her younger sister, Eva, an actress and businesswoman. Together, they were known as “The Gabor Girls”– in the words of Merv Griffin, “glamor personified… All these years later, it’s hard to describe the phenomenon of the three glamorous Gabor girls and their ubiquitous mother. They burst onto the society pages and into the gossip columns so suddenly, and with such force, it was as if they’d been dropped out of the sky.”
A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.
I am a marvellous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house.
A girl must marry for love, and keep on marrying until she finds it.
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