Clarence Petersen - The Bantam Story: 25 Years Of Paperback

[dem bones]

Clarence Petersen - The Bantam Story: 25 Years Of Paperback Publishing (Bantam, June 1970)

Introduction
The Paperback Revolution: 1777-1945
The Bantam Takes Flight: 1946 - 1954
A New Direction: 1954 -
It's What's Inside That Counts
The Revealing Cover
Show And Tell
The Making Of A Paperback
Delivering The Goods
Books Across The Sea
The Next Revolution

Appendix: Bantam Books In Print (June 1970)

".... cover paintings a:-t exhibited in art galleries. These exhibitions recognise the inherent quality of paperback art, but more than that, they acknowledge the fact that paperbacks are spreading modem art in a way that galleries and museums not. The average man may never lei inside the Guggenheim, but he can't stay out of Walgreen's.

Even its staunchest defenders, however, will not maintain that all modem art will survive, imperishable as the Sistine Chapel. It's interesting, it's fun, but most of it will pass, and with it will pass much that has achieved excellence on the paperback covers. The style that endures is the plain and familiar, and the classic example is the gothic novel. The first gothic mystery showed a terrified, virginal blonde running from a brooding castle in which gleamed a solitary light. The most recent gothic shows the same thing. The draughtsmanship may improve, but nothing else changes except that sometimes the girl is running off the right side of the cover and sometimes off the to the left. Westerns don't change much either. There's always a cowboy, often a six-shooter, and sometimes a horse."

Imagine in Paperback Fanatic themed issue minus the sumptuous cover reproductions and you've Clarence Petersen's potted history of Bantam. Coming in at a very doable 120 pages, 26 of which are devoted to the listing of their then available publications, i read The Bantam Story through in one hit on the Churchyard Wall and it's a book you know you'll revisit on a regular basis. The Appendix is surprisingly light on horror & supernatural titles, though enough there to build one of our illustrated listings, so will get cracking on one soon.

Chapters The Revealing Cover and Show And Tell are of particular personal interest. It's probably no news to you but was to me that a predominately red cover sells books - or, at least, it did in the 'sixties. Once publishers caught onto this, for a time everybody was doing it, making it difficult to distinguish one paperback cover from another at the glance of a spine, so Bantam experimented with white. Several best-sellers later, and other companies either went the same way or tried a colour variation of their own. Another Vault favourite, the staged photo seems to have dropped in and out of fashion since the close of World War II. Those of us with a fondness for macabre fiction have lived through our own genre's trends. The dread embossed abomination was all the rage for the best part of a decade, the horror novel designed to look like anything other than a horror novel still is. As to print runs, Bantam published in quantities of 200, 000. In some cases we are talking reprints of tried and trusted literary classics, but even so, these days they'll pin a medal on you if you sell 200! Favourite line in the book is provided by John D. MacDonald; "Those of us who use the paperback original as a permanent base often feel as if we were part of an ironic underground, offhandedly dismissed by everyone except the contented publisher and a very large and unexpectedly demanding readership."

A straight to 'Best reads of 2013'

[killercrab]

A thirty years version ( presumably an update) was printed in 1975.

KC

[dem bones]

Sept 11, 2013 15:24:27 GMT killercrab said:

A thirty years version ( presumably an update) was printed in 1975.

KC

That's halfway to proving his claim that paperbacks have an average four incarnations (different covers, new blurbs, etc.). Or that's the way it was at close of the 'sixties, not sure if it holds true today.

Bantam founder John Ballantine is a fascinating character, brilliant, but too obsessed with innovation for his board's liking and they eventually got shot of him in the fifties, whereupon he started over with his own publishing company. We've Ballantine Books to thank for all those gloriously strange Richard Powers covers.