The beloved mass market paperback is dying

It seems almost strange that the mass market paperback is named such — for those not acquainted with it, the books give the appearance of something rather vintage. Found in fluorescent lit airport shops and supermarkets, the air they give off now is old and rare.

The books are four inches wide, seven inches tall, and printed on paper so acidic it smells faintly of a vanilla-scented forest fire. The “rack size” books  have been a cultural workhorse that for eighty years provided the cheap, portable fuel for the American imagination.

To walk into a contemporary Barnes & Noble, Daunt Books or Kunzum Books is to witness a landscape transformed. The shelves are dominated by the “trade” paperback: larger, heavier, priced higher and designed with the matte-finish elegance of a literary object.  

Meanwhile, the humble mass-market — once the $4.99 staple of the commuter’s coat pocket, has been relegated to a shrinking spin-rack near the restrooms, or vanished entirely. We are witnessing not just the death of a format, but the end of an era of democratic reading.

The pocket sized stories

The mass-market was born of a touch of mid-century desperation. In 1935, Allen Lane sat on a platform at Exeter railway station, frustrated by the lack of decent reading material for his journey. His gamble, Penguin Books, was built on the radical idea that a good book should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes. In America, Robert de Graff followed suit in 1939 with Pocket Books. Suddenly, the classics were available at the local chemist for sixpence or a quarter.

The design was iconic. In Britain, the colour-coded “tribes”— orange for fiction, green for crime, blue for biography, created a visual shorthand for a new generation of readers. They were built to be carried around and read, some soldiers apparently even took them to war. The books were folded back until the spine cracked, or left on a Mediterranean beach to be warped by salt spray. They were the original handheld portals, with a twinkly-eyed charm, inviting every passerby into a tiny, imaginary land of their own.

The cost of cheap

The decline of the rack-size book is a story of cold economics and the change in where we spend our time. For decades, the mass-market survived on non-traditional distribution — grocery stores, petrol stations, pharmacies and the likes. No marketing was required.

In the 1980s, a spy thriller by John le Carré or a romance by Danielle Steel might see an initial printing of millions. Nowadays, publishers find the math increasingly difficult to justify.

The margins on a nine-pound or ten-dollar book are razor-thin. Unlike the larger, more elegant paperbacks, mass-markets are often strippable: if they don’t sell, the retailer rips off the front cover to return for credit and pulps the rest. In a world of tightening margins, this level of waste has become a corporate heresy. It’s a bit like a band you love fading into oblivion just when they were trying their best.

The digital players

If economics weakened the mass-market, the Kindle and the smartphone delivered the coup de grâce. The “rack size” book traditionally served the commuter and the genre devotee. Now, that same reader carries ten thousand titles on a slim little phone. The digital transition has decimated the “commuter read,” making the tangible beauty of a physical book feel like a cultural relic.

Furthermore, the rise of BookTok and the aestheticisation of reading have favoured the trade paperback. For the modern reader, the book is no longer simply a story it is woefully an accessory (there have been fashion articles about the books models choose to carry), and a “shelfie”- ready object that demands a higher production value than yellowing pulp can provide.  

The aesthetics of the disappearing

There is a specific nostalgia associated with the mass-market that a high-end trade paperback can’t replicate. It is the aesthetics of the pulp era, the lurid, hand-painted covers of the fifties; the embossed, foil-stamped lettering of eighties horror novels; the smell of a second-hand shop that deals exclusively in “three-for-a-pound” stacks.

The mass-market was the great equaliser. It was the medium of the disreputable genres that eventually became our modern mythology. Dame Agatha Christie, Stephen King, and Arthur C. Clarke didn’t built their legacies on the spinning wire racks of WHSmith and neighbourhood pharmacies.

As these books disappear, we lose a certain tactile relationship with fiction. The trade paperback, with its French flaps and creamy paper, invites us to “curate.” The mass-market invited us to read. It was a format that understood a book’s greatest value was its ability to be anywhere, to be dropped in the bath, lent to a stranger on a train, or finished in a single sitting on a cross-country coach. It possessed a soul that didn’t need a fancy cover to be cared about.

The final chapter?

The mass-market is becoming a boutique item, a relic for collectors. We are moving toward a world where books are collectors’ items rather than just stories that need to be carried everywhere.

As the sun sets on the era of the cheap paperback, we might find ourselves missing the very thing we once took for granted: the ubiquity of the written word. There was something radical about a society where you could find a masterpiece of literature priced between a packet of crisps and a fruit.