Kenneth C. Davis (1)

Kenneth C. Davis, far better known for his later Don't Know Much About series of popular-history compilations, proves himself a capable practitioner of original historical research in this study of the rise of the paperback-book industry in America. Published nearly forty years ago, it remains the only book-length history of the subject that I'm aware of. Thankfully, it's a good one.

Two-Bit Culture is, despite its title, first and foremost a history of paperback publishing as a business. Its nearly 400 pages of text chronicle the rise and fall of companies, imprints, marketing strategies, and editors. The text is stuffed with names, dates, facts, and figures (press runs, sales figures, cover prices, money paid for reprint rights, and money advanced to authors). For the period the book covers -- the eve of World War II to the first Reagan administration -- the book covers what must be every significant development in the industry. If you want to trace the history of Pocket Books, Ballentine, New American Library, or Avon, this is the book you want. If you want to learn about E. L. Doctorow's early career as an editor, or Ian Ballentine's industry-changing arc through the business, you'll find it here.

Davis doesn't neglect the cultural impact of the paperback, by any means--there are interesting discussions of Dr. Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care (the first paperback-original bestseller), the legal battle over publication of an unexpurgated paperback edition of Lady Chatterly's Lover, and the role of paperbacks in bringing the work of African American authors to mass audiences--but his coverage of such issues is scattered rather than sustained. They're well-developed pauses in the central narrative of changing business practices, rather than a parallel narrative of their own.

The book's greatest drawback is Davis's patent lack of respect for paperback originals that -- in his view -- lack seriousness and literary value. Paperbacks are, for Davis, a conduit of getting cheap reprints of "good literature" and serious non-fiction into the hands of the general public. He treats anything short of that mission with disinterest or barely concealed disdain. That high-mindedness leads him to unforced factual errors (having John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series begin in the mid-50s, rather than 1964), and shallow, unsatisfying treatments of the paperback's role in the evolution of science fiction and hard-boiled mysteries. His treatment of Harlequin and other "category" romances is a few pages long, and every paragraph of it drips with contempt. The paperback original's relationship to pulp magazines, episodic television, and similar forms of genre storytelling go entirely unmentioned.

Two-Bit Culture is unlikely to be bettered as a history of the paperback industry, but after forty years it's long past time for a new, deeper, and less judgemental history of the paperback as a cultural phenomenon.… (mais)