For the 80th anniversary of the paperback book, it is good to reflect on how far back they go in Scholastic’s history. (Also, it gives me a chance to share a picture of my favorite aisle in the archive.) Chase's Calendar of Events states that "the modern paperback revolution dates to the publication of the first Penguin paperback by Sir Allen Lane at London, England, in 1935", but they go back further than that! Louis Menand wrote earlier this year in The New Yorker that "They date back to the sixteenth century, and paperbacking has been the ordinary mode of book production in France, for instance, for centuries." According to Scholastic: A Publishing Adventure, our first "paperbound" book was The Glory That Was Greece, in 1930, and Scholastic published 50 or more paperbacks before 1947 (p. 237-238). Some of the titles mentioned are: Modern Basketball for Girls, How to use your Library, Problems of America, The War for Freedom, and The United Nations in Action. Here are two of the older items in the archive, pulled off the shelf so that we can wallow in nostalgia a bit:
Carcajou: King of the North (Rutherford Montgomery)
- Carcajou, the wolverine - 30 pounds of diabolical cunning and snarling fury - feared by every killer from cougar to grizzly. Indian trappers say he is possessed of an evil spirit. Nature's forces take a hand when Carcajou declares war against Indian trapper Two Gray Hills, and when two deceitful traders plot to steal Two Gray Hills' pet bear. [Published in arrangement with The Caxton Printers, Ltd.]
Boy dates Girl (Margaret Hauser)
- Those three words, BOY DATES GIRL, can run into hundreds of questions. In this book, we tackle those you've asked most often. We look at your individual problems: Which is the salad fork? Is it alright to "dutch date"? And we dig into basic issues: What makes a successful person? What makes a successful party? Naturally, there are many questions that we haven't answered. More are covered in the sequel to this book, called YOU'RE ASKING ME? Any unfinished business will be dealt with in the column "Boy dates Girl" which now runs every week in Senior Scholastic and Practical English.
In 1946, the Teen Age Book Club, co-sponsored by Pocket Books, gave children the opportunity to get inexpensive paperbacks through the mail. This quote from the intro to Scholastic's They Love to Read: Report on a study of Paperback Book Clubs in Classrooms of Five Cities sums up the reaction that the book boxes still elicit today:
"Boys and girls greeted the arrival of the carton of books as if it were Christmas packages arriving every month. Reading, they reported, became contagious."
To learn more, check out Morgan's post "The fascinating history of paperback books" from last year, and read Louis Menand's "The Birth of Pulp Fiction". Here are some more gems from downstairs:
