Subject: Re: New full size paperbacks
From: Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Date: Thu Jan 25 2001 - 23:02:01 GMT
On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 03:55:23PM -0800, Paul Miller wrote:
> sipped my coffee. They are put out by Back Bay books
> part of little Brown, their covers mirroring exactly
> their hardbound counterparts. $13.95 a pop, but the
> print is about the same size as the hardbound
Just another way of exploiting the backlist [publishing term for the
perennials published by a house], and in an especially profitable
format. Trade paperbacks, as these are called, are a profitable niche
that publishers and many readers just love. (Does this mean that the
good old pre-rainbow-and-white-background jackets are back? Many
cheers for that.)
Random House has just started its own "Random" trade paperback line,
after years of churning out its very profitable Vintage paperbacks
and other trade paperback imprints. (Yes, Random House competes
with itself by running parallel product lines, but apparently some
bean counters figured out that if Vintage can act as a cash-printing
machine, it can't hurt to have another Random division that targets
a similar audience, in the hopes of creating another Vintage-style
cash cow for the parent company.)
> read those pocket paperbacks, I can read the print I
> just like some room between and around the words.
I haven't seen these new ones yet, but I'm delighted, because I find
the mass-market Salinger paperbacks tight, with stingy margins and
(by today, anyhow) old, broken, worn type. I can't really afford to
shell out the money to keep a set of hardcovers sitting around to
read casually or to mark up with comments and notations.
As a digression ("digression!"), one of my favorite unusual books is
an early twentieth-century printing of Walden, by Henry David Thoreau,
that inexplicably has margins nearly two inches wide all the way
around the page. It was a splendid edition for a student (me) doing
an independent study seminar on Thoreau. I was able to make remarks
in the style of the Talmud, with remarks upon my remarks, and quotes
from critics and from other Thoreau texts, and so on, giving the
text a richly layered effect, and making scholarship a little easier
in days before Post-It notes existed.
> Does anyone know if Salinger authorized this or did
> Little Brown always have this right? I assumed all
> these years that the reason his books were only
> available in "pocket" paperbacks was because the man
> himself had mandated it.
I don't know the answer to this, but I would imagine that Salinger has
wide latitude to veto just about anything he doesn't want his
publisher to do. My literary-agent wife says it all depends on what
his latest contract spells out, but she agrees that he probably has
kept all the marbles for himself, so that he can dictate the rules of
the game.
--tim o'connor
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