Word: paperback
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...PAPERBACK book publishers are astonished at the record-breaking sales of Signet's 75? reprint of James Jones's From Here to Eternity, especially since many of them thought the price too high. When the first printing of 500,000 copies sold out in six days, Signet ordered a second edition of 300,000 copies, sold it almost as fast. Signet now expects to sell more than 1,000,000 copies by the end of the first month...
...success is the big thing in life. He suggests that Mollie, in her concern for nonprofit community centers, is on a much sounder tack than Bart. But these didactic reflections should not seriously interfere with the sale of the book, either in hard covers or in the inevitable paperback reprints...
Most publishers do not allow their books to come out in cheap paperback reprints until sales in hard covers have petered out. Last week they were beginning to wonder if they had been wrong. They noted that the deal by which Houghton Mifflin and Ballantine Books published Cameron Hawley's Executive Suite (TIME, Dec. 8) simultaneously in $3 hard-cover and 35? paperback editions seemed to be a solid success. Ballantine, which has sold 375,000 copies in soft covers, is getting ready to print at least 100,000 more, a big sale for a paperback. Houghton Mifflin...
...called soup opera, since the hero or heroine usually gets in the soup in the first chapter and doesn't get out till the last. Soup-opera books have a further important characteristic: after modest-sized editions in hard covers, they go quickly into huge editions in paperback-and become the reading of millions. The Birds and the Bees by James Aswell is a typical sample of the species...
Ever since paperback reprints began to flood the drugstores a decade ago, critics have solemnly speculated on what they would do to Literature. Would they spread a cloud of trash over the country? Or bring good reading to millions who rarely buy a book with hard covers...