There’s a book I need to get back to. It’s Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. The book is great, but the copy I have is a hardback reprint that’s too big for my carry-on. When I packed for my trip to the U.S., I left the book waiting on my nightstand and took something smaller, Lara Pawson’s Spent Light, a slim paperback that slides easily into my bag.
I haven’t started Spent Light, though. As soon as I got to my parents’ house, I noticed an old copy of Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. I like both McMurtry and the movie, so I started reading. I’ve devoured The Last Picture Show in part because it’s a good book, and in part because it’s been with me throughout the trip so far. My parents’ copy of the book is the 1972 Dell paperback, which is barley bigger than my phone.
I carried the book in my jacket pocket whenever I left the house. I put it in the back pocket of my pants when I walked from room to room. These old paperbacks have a great form factor, to use the parlance of our high-tech times; they’re just so pocketable. And carrying McMurtry with me around the St. Louis Metro Area reminds me how few books are made like this anymore.
Whenever Linda and I leave the house, there’s a moment when one of us inevitably asks the other “Are you taking a bag?” If one of us answers yes, the other has a followup: “Will you carry my book?” That leads to the response: “How big is it?”
If the book is new, we both end up carrying bags.
Newer books tend to be larger objects, in our experience. I’m curious whether that’s everyone’s experience, but I can’t quite find out. The last study I can turn up came out nearly ten years ago. It “found the average number of pages has grown by 25% over the last 15 years.”
A study of more than 2,500 books appearing on New York Times bestseller and notable books lists and Google’s annual survey of the most discussed books reveals that the average length has increased from 320 pages in 1999 to 400 pages in 2014.
But I’m curious whether books are actually getting longer or just larger. Do they have a larger word count, or are the margins and the typeface adding to the size? The Guardian quotes Max Porter, who was then editor of Granta.
“A big book inhabits the space you’re in,” he argues, “it’s a physical embodiment of your intention to spend the time necessary to read it”. The contemporary novel’s increasing girth can instead be put down to a confident assertion of identity. “The novel has come into its own novel-ness. There so many demands on our attention, so many competing forms, that these novels have decided to relish being big and long, to demand that you sit in a chair, turn off your phone and devote some time to them.”
In the face of digital distraction, a big book is a statement for the writer and reader alike. This supports the idea that word counts are growing, but it would also apply to books being more substantial in how they’re made. If you’re going to spend the time and money, why not get a big object to show for it? That logic still holds today, in the era of “bookshelf wealth” design trends.
The same year this survey came out, I was on a fellowship. The professor of one of my classes took a photo of the local bookstore’s window every few weeks for years. One day, he flipped through his slides, and the shapes of the books morphed from an array of rectangles and squares of varying sizes into a neat grid. All the books were the same size.
I know there are reasons for this. I’m not a publishing insider so I’m not going to assess those decisions. I know that ebooks are an option, too, but I’m not interested in carrying an e-reader around. The design of a book—the way it’s printed, the color of the cover, and the size of it—are decisions that artists and craftspeople make. I like to see their work when I go to a bookstore or library.
I just wish they’d make the decision to make books more pocketable.
This thinking goes back to the invention of the modern paperback. According to legend, Penguin publisher Allen Lane1 was disappointed with the reading material available at train stations. Inspired by the low-cost, mass-market paperbacks put out by German publisher Albatross, Lane adopted the idea to the English market. Soon, pocket-size paperbacks were everywhere. Commuters got them from vending machines. Soldiers had them in war. Metal spinner racks sprouted in kiosks, newsstands, and drug stores selling books from Penguin, Bantam, Dell, and others.
Not every book was a classic. They could be pulpy, like their predecessor the dime novel or like another popular form of spinner-rack literature, comic books.
It was a populist form, fit for a classic or a true crime story, priced as an impulse item. My parents bought a lot of paperbacks in the ‘70s. When I was a kid in the ‘90s and 2000s, I dug through boxes of these old books, pulling out titles that fit so perfectly in the side pocket of my backpack. This was my introduction to more advanced reading—puzzling Orwell long before we’d get to it in school. When I got to the last page, the one that listed titles of other paperbacks, I wondered if I could still send $1.50 to a PO box in New Jersey and get a copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Those end pages show the aspirations of paperback reading; they advertise best-sellers, literary classics, and lurid crime stories. For a small amount of money, readers could stay current with the zeitgeist, familiarize themselves with the canon, or read for pure entertainment.
As an ad, the pages aren’t subtle. There’s not a lot of subtlety to paperbacks. The covers have bold titles, bright colors, and breathless descriptions, all designed to win over a shopper who just came in for their prescription or a candy bar. The type is small and crowded. The manufacturing is just solid enough to make the books last for two or three reads before the cover or binding fails. They’re not as varied as the hardbacks and modern paperbacks that are built to age and display. But the paperbacks, too, are good design. They get the job done cleanly and affordably.
Ebooks fill some of this void, yes. But there’s a higher cost of entry—you have to buy an e-reader and choose what books to put on it. And there’s surely some version of the sunk cost fallacy at play in how we think about the value of intangible digital files compared to physical items that sit in our homes.
There’s no going back to the old way, of course. The fortunes of publishing aren’t likely to change and the tiny paperback has been firmly replaced by another pocketable distraction—our phones.
But this is not an obituary for the tiny paperback. On a work trip this winter, I spent most of my time between trains perusing the station bookstores. I’m always impressed at how crowded the stores are, with people of all ages. In the English section, I’ve started to see small paperbacks get more and more shelf space. The most common titles seem aimed at people whose phone and laptop batteries have died, along with their ability to read long paragraphs—quotes from famous stoics, transcriptions of podcasts about unplugging. Sometimes there’s a New York Review of Books classic, and this series is small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, though would bust the seams on any pants I own. And Penguin itself is back to selling in train station vending machines.
Maybe the commuters’ paperback will return. And hopefully there will still be physical stores to buy them in. In the meantime, I think there’s another box of Dell and Bantam books up in the attic, and I have a week more of vacation.
As in he was publisher of Penguin books. He wasn’t a penguin who was also a publisher.