Of publishing and canonisation and repetition

I saved, or thought I had, a couple of Twitter threads anent the role of publishing in the formation of the literary canon (in the other browser), only one of which actually appears in my tabs and turns out to be from last year.

But anyway, that had me thinking that well yes and well no, and what about V Woolf self-publishing by setting type herself as occupational therapy, even if the Hogarth Press rapidly expanded beyond that rather kitchen-table operation. And what about J Joyce's Ulysses being nurtured into print by Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare & Co with French typesetters who made Joyce's linguistic playfulness even more bizarre, and moreover being a work you might get confiscated at Customs if you brought it across the Channel? As well as earlier systems of publishing by subscription (C18th Kickstarter/Patreon?) or paying a bookseller on a profit-sharing basis etc, and how many of those works now nestle in obscurity in libraries while a few are considered Gems of Litrachur...

My attention was also drawn today to the British Library Women's Writing Series, which I would be more prepossessed by if I had not looked at the titles in it and frowned and considered that several of them had already been Brought To The Attention Of The Reading Public by Virago or Persephone or other similar endeavours. (Why does no-one ever bring back GB Stern? - except for The Matriarch, sigh.)

(F Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to See The Peepshow is hardly a neglected classic. Though I am aghast that the 1973 TV serial version does not appear to be available on DVD - infamy! infamy!)

(I must say kudos to Furrowed Middlebrow because as far as I can tell they are not ploughing a field already cleared by someone else.)

I also came across today this lament for the Mass Market Paperback (a minute's silence, please).

But that made me think about publishers - as it might be, Allen Lane of blessed memory and Penguin Books - who set up an enterprise and everyone tells them they're mad and it will never take off. (And of course now having shelves of Period Penguins is one of the marks of Poncey Interior Design, no?)

But they clearly owed a lot to his taste and were really eclectic, and maybe one sees parallels with other more recent innovative enterprises that after a bit Ye Corporates take over and it all gets a bit bland and homogenous...

What Penguins and other MMPs also had was not just Other Books by the same author but usually other books of a related nature by the publisher listed at the back. Useful.

***

In other news, I am entirely prepossessed by Molton Brown's Vetiver and Grapefruit Bath and Shower Gel

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Most Popular Tags

aaaargh - 359 uses
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annoyance - 463 uses
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books - 1349 uses
cooking - 1136 uses
crime - 254 uses
facile-preconceptions - 379 uses
fantasy - 280 uses
feminism - 651 uses
fiction - 280 uses
food - 319 uses
gender - 923 uses
health - 496 uses
history - 946 uses
homosexuality - 302 uses
internet - 261 uses
life - 262 uses
links - 361 uses
litcrit - 338 uses
litfic - 766 uses
london - 391 uses
marriage - 297 uses
masculinity - 555 uses
meme - 968 uses
mysteries - 534 uses
nature - 311 uses
politics - 267 uses
reading - 1247 uses
recipes - 1001 uses
relationships - 406 uses
religion - 357 uses
research - 390 uses
romance - 416 uses
sex - 435 uses
sff - 756 uses
social history - 502 uses
thrillers - 384 uses
travel - 478 uses
tropes - 345 uses
unexamined-assumptions - 556 uses
victorians - 322 uses
women - 978 uses
work - 327 uses
writers - 245 uses

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

oracne

I have smelled that Vetiver and Grapefruit gel and it's amaaaazing. I think they also have one called Black Pepper? Also amazing.

I have so, so many MMPB in my collection.

calimac

B. was an enthusiastic early adaptor of the Kindle and gladly abandoned mass-market paperbacks. Their print was too small, and as they aged they fell apart and began to smell musty.

kore

I still have some MMPBs of classics that I swear are printed in eight point type! And they're still huge and bulky and started to peel apart almost immediately. (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were the big examples of this.)

pameladean

Though I guess the Kindle might eventually have destroyed the mass market paperback, it is not the actual murderer at all. The mass-market distribution system collapsed in the late 1990's when Safeway arbitrarily declared that they were tired of dealing with so many very small salespeople who knew their territories intimately, and would deal only with a certain number of them.

This had a bad effect on my writing career in traditional publishing, and I am not the only one by a long shot.

P.

Referring to the article, not to anything you averred. P.

Didn't MMPBs also get partly driven out by the trade paperback being pushed by publishers, because they were supposedly "higher quality" (lol) -- Vintage started doing it in the late 80s? I remember Bright Lights Big City was one of the first big ones -- and Vintage TPs had such ugly covers too. They cost almost as much as a hardback but without the good design or durability.

Nearly all the books I had as a teenager and young adult were MMPBs -- and that was when I could pay for a big hardback with a twenty and get change back! I remember being stuck with Signet editions of Dickens because the Penguin paperback editions were slightly more expensive. And people say "oh it's all on Gutenberg now" but even for that you need an ereader. My first copy of Tender is the Night was this really beat-up paperback I got from the Santa Fe Public Library for a quarter. I still have it.

tl;dr yeah no it wasn't the Kindle what done it

silveradept

Mass Markets were always meant to be disposable objects, good for maybe a read or two before they fell apart, but they're really also only useful for short works, because struggling with tiny type is absolutely not a thing that people want to do these days, especially when they have means of bringing far more books with them that they can read more comfortably. The mass market format was always going to be temporary until something better arrived that could take its place.

And, as you say, one of the selling points of the mass market paperback was to recommend to others something that they also might enjoy, then we have many and varied tools that can do this, and link you directly to where you might purchase such things.

oursin

One often finds old Penguins in quite good nick, but probably the exception.

It's Always More Complicated

The wandering thoughts of a wandering hedgehog