Radical Chapters: Pacifist Bookseller Roy Kepler and the Paperback Revolution

7 Kepler’s Books & Magazines

120 7 Kepler’s Books & Magazines Paperbacks were a problem child. They were coarse, cheap, and morally soft. Proper books were hard clad, a firm handshake between High Culture and Dear Reader. Downtown Palo Alto, a fundamentally conservative university town in the mid-1950s, had several booksellers that maintained strict hardcover standards. The Stanford Bookstore buyer, content with her campus textbook monopoly, shunned the paperbound slop as unworthy . “She thought they weren’t really books,” Roy recalled in a 1984 interview. This sentiment prevailed among gentlemanly purveyors of serious literature, “the sherry and biscuit boys,” as author Kenneth C. Davis called them. When a Penguin Books salesman first approached the venerable Old Corner Bookstore in Boston, shortly before World War II, the owner assured him that paperbacks would “be dead and gone in five years” (Davis 1984, 54). But the revolution had already begun. Penguin Books arrived with its first ten offerings in July 1935. Penguin was an immediate hit, inviting Pelican Books to follow. It was likely a Pelican Book that introduced Roy to George Bernard Shaw’s twovolume Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism and Sovietism . One success bred another. The patrician publisher Robert de Graff had used Pearl Buck’s popular novel The Good Earth to test the concept of an inexpensive paperback service, an idea formalized in 1939 that was made formal with Pocket Books (Davis 1984, 31). Pocket Books announced itself in a June 13, 1939, New York Times advertisement, proclaiming that the new paperback editions were “handy as a pencil, as modern and convenient as a portable radio, and as good looking.” Kepler’s Books & Magazines  121 War propelled the business. The mass mobilization of World War II expanded the market, as the Red Cross and the military began buying millions of books for a captive audience. Business boomed for Pocket Books and the British-based Penguin Books. When paper shortages and overseas distribution impediments proved troublesome, civilian and military officials combined to produce, starting in June 1943, the Armed Services Editions. A mix of fiction and nonfiction, each volume vetted by army and navy officials, the Armed Services Edition line produced upwards of forty books a month. By war’s end, the Armed Services Edition had published 1,324 titles and circulated some 123 million paperback copies (Bonn 1982, 48). These were stapled, cheaply printed, and precious beyond measure to men far from home and fighting for their lives. The captain could pass the paperback to the sergeant who would pass it to the private who would send it around the barracks , the cover avulsing a little more with each handoff. “The books are read until they’re so dirty you can’t see the print,” one soldier reported gratefully. “To heave one in the garbage can would be tantamount to striking your grandmother” (Tebbell 1987, 345). In the Civilian Public Service world too, books were a precious commodity. Some of Roy’s camps, like Gatlinburg, had reasonably good little libraries. The men would also swap books among themselves and occasionally sell them for a pittance. In Germfask, Roy had once paid a dime to get an evening’s worth of reading. The pacifists and the soldiers were alike in discovering books during World War II, and an industry had found a market. In 1939 some 3 million copies of paperback books were published. By 1951 the paperback population had reached an estimated 214 million. New publishing houses seemed to arise annually, each finding their respective niches. Avon Books was begun by the hard men of the American News Company, the muscle behind magazine distribution. Avon catered to the popular market with blood-and-guts titles like Rex Stout’s Over My Dead Body. Dell Books began in 1943, offering the equally morbid likes of See You at the Morgue. In 1945 Bantam Books entered the field, favoring Westerns (Davis 1984, 126). The new business was a natural fit for magazine publishers, with their existing distribution 122  Radical Chapters channels and their fingers on the pulse of the mass market. The Fawcett family, for one, had gotten its under-the-counter publishing start when World War I veteran Wilford H. Fawcett returned from Europe with a footlocker full of randy French jokes. Fawcett published True, for male readers, and True Confessions, for women, and then in 1950 the company launched a succession of original Westerns, mysteries, and thrillers...