'At a Quarter a Tome'

I owe a significant chunk of my education to the existence of paperback books. By “education” I don’t mean what I pretended to do while in the company of professors, though many of them assigned books published in soft covers. I mean self-assigned literature, beginning as a kid with all of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ various pulpy series (Tarzan, Pellucidar, Amtor, John Carter), followed by a brief but intense enthusiasm for science fiction. I recall an oddly fetishistic fondness for books published by Ace Books. I collected the paperback reprints of Mad magazine, and I remember working weekends at Kwik Kar Wash at age twelve and packing a paperback with my lunch. I worked beside an old man, Elijah Waters, who told me he never read books in paperback because they were “low-class.” 

Paperbacks had precursors in the nineteenth century but they burgeoned in the 1930s in England with Allen Lane and his Penguin Books. By the nineteen-sixties, they were still inexpensive. The base-price for mass-market editions was thirty-five to fifty cents. Larger or more prestigious books – the Oscar Williams poetry anthologies, for instance, published by Washington Square Press -- might go for $1.25 or even higher, which seemed extravagant. I remember reluctantly shelling out extra money in Avallone’s Pharmacy for a paperback edition of Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower (1966). Today, paperbacks are shelved indiscriminately among my hard covers:

In Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades (1960), Phyllis McGinley includes “Dirge for an Era,” a poem from the fifties, in a section called “Laments and Praises.” It begins:

 

“O! do you remember Paper Books

When paper books were thinner?

It was all so gay

In that far-off day

When you fetched them home

At a quarter a tome . . .”

 

McGinley writes of a time before I was around, when paperbacks were cheaper still and most were popular books, mysteries and romances. They contained “never a taint of Culture.” In contrast:

 

Cluttering bookstore counters,

    In stationer’s windows preening,

The Paperbacks

Now offer us facts

On Tillich and Sartre

And abstract artre

   And Life’s Essential Meaning . . .”

 

McGinley has an eye for shifts in the culture and the pretensions of the middle class.

 

“You pack your trunk and you’re at the station

But what do you find for a journey’s ration?

Books by Aeschylus, books by Chaucer,

Books about atom or flying saucer,

Books of poetry, deep books, choice books,

Pre-Renaissance and neo-Joyce books,

In covers chaste and a prose unlurid.

Books that explore my id and your id,

Never hammock or summer-porch books

But Compass, Evergreen, Anchor, Torch Books,

Books by a thousand stylish names

And everywhere, everywhere, Henry James.”

 

The rhymes “Chaucer”/“flying saucer” and “unlurid”/”your id” are especially good. So are, in the next stanza, “thrilling”/“Trilling” and “to read”/”seldom Gide.”