Word: paperback
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...plain intention of out-trashing the trashiest. As business boomed, prices for reprint rights were bid to extravagant heights: $20,000 for a novel became a commonplace. Some hardcover publishers accepted manuscripts that they would ordinarily have rejected, if they could be sure of a profitable resale to a paperback firm...
Once upon a time, record stores were as dignified as the free public library. Popular recordings were stacked in bins, and hardly anybody thought to dignify them by collecting them in albums. Nowadays, pop albums are almost as common as paperback novels. And more and more, they are packaged with the same kind of half-dressed jacket heroines that the reprint publishers have long used to sell paperbacks...
...died as he had lived-violently, sensationally and in squalor. The operator of a cheap rooming house near the Bowery found Bodenheim, 60, and his third wife, Ruth Fagan, 35, dead in a sleazy furnished room. The poet sprawled on the floor, a paperback copy of Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us propped awkwardly on his chest, covering a .22-cal. bullet hole. On a bed beside him was the barefoot body of his wife, her face cruelly beaten and a deep knife wound in her back. The murderer had locked the door behind him with a padlock...
...most preoccupying subject in the U.S. book trade just now is the future of paperbacks-and the chance of finding a big market for paperback originals as well as for reprints. But in all the chatter, few ask the question: How good is the stuff being published? The talk runs, instead, to sales and distribution problems, to authors turning from established publishers to the better royalty deals and bigger circulation promised by the paperback newcomers...
...simple fact is that while reprints have been aiming at generally higher quality, paperback originals worth reading have been extremely rare. No first-rate U.S. novelist has yet left the conventional publishers, and all the paper publishers together have not turned up a promising newcomer...