There’s something special about vintage mass market paperbacks: those small, cheap books that could fit in your back pocket if they weren’t so thick. Titles with large fonts, a simple cover — the ones often used for the season’s best romance and thriller books, or retro horror. Yellow, dried out paper with a three-dimensionality that grips your finger. Dark typeface that’s easy to read. The ones you see on the rack of grocery stores, Little Free Libraries, and hotels and resort lobbies for bored visitors who didn’t have smartphones.
Part of my love for them is nostalgia. These were the books that filled my dad’s bookshelves when I was younger, when I’d pull them down and imagine how long it’d take to read them all, how many stories there were in just one room. As I got older, I’d check them out of the library, pulling thick Stephen King books from the stacks of my local branch that stayed so air-conditioned and dark you’d feel you were in a subterranean cave away from the hot and humid summer sun.
But what I really love is how utilitarian mass market books are: they’re cheap and portable, begging to be thrown in your bag or car, read outside and in waiting rooms, underlined and scribbled and dog-eared. Sure, kindles and phones are ultra-portable, allowing you to take entire bookshelves in your pocket. But you can’t scribble notes in them. And expensive trade paperbacks ask to be kept nice, for its edges to stay crisp, its pages clean.
Above all: mass market paperbacks beg to be of use.
They were first published in 1939, cost a quarter, and publishers could license a bunch of different books. Cheap entertainment and cheap information.
They’re the lower-brow book format that don’t take themselves so seriously, whether it’s a pulpy page-turner for the beach or a Lit classic for cash-strapped college students.
And even better: they’re cheap to buy! Mass market books are designed to be a lower-quality, cheaper book to produce. And you can take it a step further when you buy them used, scooping bundles of them at used book stores for the price of a new hardback or shopping used book websites for options where you pay more for shipping than the book itself.
Unfortunately, book publishers are abandoning the format as stores and customers opt for bigger trade paperbacks, a trend that’s been happening since the 80s. More for me! I’ll be shopping used mass market books as long as I can, lugging them in bags and on car floormats until they wear out.