The Man Who Created the Trade Paperback

In 1953, Jason Epstein was a recent Columbia University graduate working in publishing—temporarily, he thought—as an editorial assistant at Doubleday. He lived in Greenwich Village, a short walk from the funky but glorious (and now defunct) Eighth Street Bookshop, which counted among its patrons Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag, E.E. Cummings, Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka.

To Epstein’s wide young eyes, the place was paradise. He visited after work, sometimes lingering for hours. But his editorial assistant’s salary paid so little (forty-five dollars a week) that he couldn’t afford hardcovers, and that was all Eighth Street Bookshop stocked.

One day Epstein asked the store’s owners if they might be interested in selling less expensive paperback editions of their hardcovers to appeal to working folks and young people like him.

Not Pocket Books. Heaven forbid!

No, Epstein explained, he envisioned a larger format and better paper, the size and guts of hardbacks, but with paper covers—quality products costing more than Pocket Books but less than hardcovers. The owners were intrigued. That conversation launched “quality” or “trade” paperbacks, the first softcover books sold in bookshops.

Epstein called his Doubleday imprint Anchor Books and released his first list in 1953 at the tender age of twenty-three. Trade paperbacks were an immediate hit. Today it’s impossible to imagine publishing without them.

Trade paperbacks fueled a bookstore bonanza. Two groups loved the new format: adult readers who wanted to stretch their book dollars, and the huge baby boom generation, whose seventy million members were starting to buy books and had no prejudice against paperbacks.

The book boom also created more space for indie presses, notably one with a bohemian, avant-garde edge, Grove Press (now Grove Atlantic). Founded in 1947, Grove soon was publishing Albert Camus, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bertolt Brecht, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. The house was also indicted on obscenity charges for publishing unexpurgated editions of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and William Burrough’s Naked Lunch.

Grove’s publisher, Barney Rosset (1922–2012), went to trial at great expense and prevailed in all three. Those cases played a pivotal role in ending literary censorship in the United States and made Rosset a hero to advocates for freedom of expression.

Throughout the 1950s, publishers and booksellers enjoyed soaring sales. Then, during the 1960s, sales exploded, almost quadrupling. Publishers rushed record numbers of titles into print: in 1959, 14,876, and by 1969, more than twice that, 29,579, which prompted the New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell (1908–1996) to resurrect an old lament:

If there was anything the human race had a sufficiency of, a sufficiency and a surfeit, it was books. When I thought of the cataracts of books, the Niagaras of books, the rushing rivers of books, the oceans of books, the tons and truckloads and trainloads of books…only a very few of which would be worth picking up and looking at, let alone reading.

In addition, a record number of entrepreneurs decided that what the world needed was another independent bookstore. Membership in the American Booksellers Association rose steadily from 1,200 in 1955 to 5,500 in 1995, including Ferlinghetti’s City Lights in San Francisco, California (founded in 1953), Tattered Cover in Denver, Colorado (1971), Powell’s in Portland, Oregon (1971, the world’s largest indie bookseller), and Skylight Books in Los Angeles (1996).

But even as publishers and booksellers hit the jackpot, they fretted that paperbacks might destroy the great engine that had always powered publishing, hardcover books.

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After trade paperbacks appeared, how did publishers keep selling hardcover books? They published books in hardcover, then waited at least a year to release them in paperback. But how many books must be read immediately? And if they absolutely had to be, they could be found in libraries. Otherwise, why not wait for the cheaper trade paperback? Or the even cheaper mass-market edition?

Every time consumers opted for paperbacks over hardbacks, their decisions hit publishers, booksellers, and authors in the wallet. Book people saw only one way to recoup the loss: volume and plenty of it, selling mountains of books in all formats from morning to night.

That’s exactly what happened. During the 1960s, books sold as never before. Better yet, publishers of bestsellers discovered a new way to hit the jackpot: auctions of mass-market rights. In the 1950s, bestsellers’ mass-market rights sold for around $10,000. In the ’60s, some netted six figures, and by the ’70s, millions.

Even so, in the 1960s, the University of Chicago professor Edward Shils (1910–1995) declared bookselling endangered, asserting that Americans showed little interest in reading. And in 1966, the media analyst Marshall McLuhan said, “Clotheslines, seams in stockings, books and jobs—all are obsolete.”

Yet during the 1960s, despite the lure of movies, television, and transistor radios, baby boomers became history’s largest generation of readers, and book sales reached heights previously unimagined.

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Although PR pioneer Edward Bernays failed to dissuade Depression-era book borrowing, another of his ideas bore juicy fruit. He urged publishers to encourage builders to add something novel to new homes: built-in bookshelves. Bernays figured that homebuyers would fill them—which they did, during the post–World War II explosion of suburbs—and thanks to Epstein and Pocket Books, they were not above filling them with paperbacks.

But where did literary suburbanites go for books? Until the 1960s, independent booksellers inhabited small, funky, cluttered shops off the beaten track. This made perfect sense. Bookselling was a low-volume, low-profit business best suited to low-rent locations.

But after the war, bookselling changed, which transformed publishing. The middle class moved to the suburbs, where they found not historical retail districts with perhaps a little bookshop down a side street, but enormous shopping malls anchored by department stores.

Starting around 1960, mall-based department stores faced a strategic dilemma: What to do about books? Eighty years earlier, the first department stores had embraced bookselling to capitalize on their cachet with upscale shoppers. In the 1960s, department stores in the new malls began turning their book departments into freestanding bookstores for the same reason, to add class to suburban shopping centers.

Walden Book Company went from renting books during the Depression to selling them after World War II. Renamed Walden Books (later Waldenbooks), in 1962, the company opened its first store in a suburban Pittsburgh mall and soon expanded to others, becoming the first chain bookseller.

Executives of the Dayton Company, a Minneapolis-based department store firm (now Target), watched closely. They liked Walden’s model, and in 1966, at a mall in Edina, Minnesota, they opened the first B. Dalton Bookseller.

Over the next decade, other chains appeared, among them Scribner’s, Pickwick, Crown, and the two that became dominant: Borders, launched in 1971 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as an antiquarian bookshop, and Barnes & Noble, founded in 1917 in New York City and now owned by Elliott Management, which also owns the Waterstones bookstore chain in the UK. By the early 1980s, department stores had departed the book business, and most malls boasted stand-alone bookstores, overwhelmingly chain outlets.

For independent booksellers, competition from department store book sections had been bad enough. Now the independents’ rivals weren’t little nooks up the escalator but full-fledged stores with high-visibility sidewalk frontage, huge display windows, and more titles than ever.

[/pullquote]Epstein was appalled that for its duration, no book reviews would be published in the nation’s book capital. So he, his wife, and two friends launched the New York Review of Books.[/pullquote]

In addition, the chains’ many outlets, huge volume, and centralized ordering gave them unprecedented leverage. Crown negotiated eye-popping wholesale discounts, then offered deeper-than-ever retail discounts, snatching market share from the indies and driving many out of business.

By the 1970s, a militant faction of the American Booksellers Association pressed the organization to sue the chains for antitrust violations. Other ABA members feared the high cost of litigation and the real possibility of losing. The controversy simmered for a decade, then boiled over in 1982, when a breakaway faction, the Northern California Booksellers Association (NCBA), sued several majors for granting the chains preferential discounts.

The ABA eventually joined the suit. Publishers retorted that standard business practices granted discounts based on order size. The independents placed small orders and got the standard discount. The chains placed much larger orders and received larger discounts. What’s wrong with that?

In 1986, after four years of litigation, a judge ruled in favor of the NCBA, not because of preferential discounts, but because publishers had granted them in secret. The publishers appealed. The case dragged on another decade.

In 1996, the publishers finally settled, agreeing to end secret discounts. But the independents’ victory was Pyrrhic. By the time the suit settled, ABA membership had declined from 5,500 members to 3,200, a drop of forty-two percent.

Meanwhile, the chains continued to grow, spread, and merge. Eventually, both Waldenbooks and B. Dalton disappeared, and by the 1990s, Borders and Barnes & Noble together accounted for forty-three percent of trade sales, approximately the share Amazon claims today, with the independents selling around twenty percent.

Jason Epstein ultimately left Doubleday for Random House, where he was editorial director for decades. In 1962, New York newspapers went on strike. Epstein was appalled that for its duration, no book reviews would be published in the nation’s book capital. So he, his wife, and two friends launched the New York Review of Books.

They considered it a temporary stopgap publication, but when the strike ended, the New York Review continued to publish. Today its circulation tops one hundred thousand.

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The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing by Michael Castleman is available via Unnamed Press.