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Post by ollonois on May 11, 2019 17:23:51 GMT
hi, here Francisco from Spain, I hope you excuse my ignorance but I've got some questions related to the pulp horror paperback of the 70s in England to you. Were they really popular in the UK? were them everywhere? bookshops. newstands, groceries, supermarkets...? which kind of people read this kind of books? mainly men I supposed but teenagers, elder people, workers, soldiers, prisoners in jails...? again excuse my ignorance and my poor English
Greetings from Spain
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Post by helrunar on May 11, 2019 23:57:49 GMT
Hail and welcome to the Vault! Hope you enjoy your time kicking around our cozy little crypt. I'm from the US. In the early to mid 70s, horror paperbacks were typically sold in places such as newsagents and book racks in department stores, as well as in your actual fully-fledged bookstores. I don't myself recall them in supermarkets but I think they did show up in some stores that had a book and mag rack. I've heard accounts of the magazine version of Man, Myth & Magic which had some horror content under the guise of anthropological or esoteric writing about various topics, showing up in supermarket mag racks, for example. You might enjoy having a look around here: vaultofevil.proboards.com/board/37/seriously-off-topicEspecially the thread on used bookshops on screen one, and the thread somewhat enigmatically entitled "Dark they were and golden-eyed," on screen two, which is different people's memories of horror/fantasy/sci-fi bookshops back in the 70s and later periods. Best wishes, Helrunar
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Post by ollonois on May 12, 2019 8:53:34 GMT
Thanks!!! those threads look very interesting
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Post by helrunar on May 12, 2019 13:14:22 GMT
I will also comment about your question on gender and readership. I personally think more girls and women read horror fiction during the era of the Sixties-Seventies than was once commonly believed. I think people have done research on this, but I'm a more casual kind of fan so I haven't looked for those articles where this has been explored.
It might be that once Anne Rice got going--mid Seventies, wasn't that?--there was a kind of space that opened up for women writers to be acknowledged more broadly and discussed. There were a lot of popular women writers of horror fiction back in the Victorian era--too many for me to name-check. So it seems a little strange that we need to make an effort to remind people that women are good at horror; it seems almost patronizing to me now to write about this. And one thinks of Christine Campbell Thomson, one of the most important horror editors of the 1920s-1930s (I wish she had written more fiction).
All this was somewhat at odds with the fact that horror/fantasy fandom in the Seventies, at least the visible parts of it now (zines from the era and accounts of conventions) was a boys' club. I was looking through a couple of early Seventies issues I've kept of the Baltimore horror/fantasy film zine Gore Creatures (the title was changed in the mid 1970s to Midnight Marquee). I think only once or at most twice did I see a woman mentioned in any context other than as an actress or a model. I think one of the mentions was a woman who either edited or wrote contributions for a zine.
Just some thoughts I had because you asked about readership.
cheers, Helrunar
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Post by ollonois on May 12, 2019 16:10:38 GMT
and don't forget about Paula Guran and Ellen Datlow nowadays as editors, Lisa Tuttle, Nancy Holder, Kathe Koja, Melanie Tem, Tanith Lee as authors... lots of women in the horror field
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Post by Dr Strange on May 13, 2019 14:40:06 GMT
hi, here Francisco from Spain, I hope you excuse my ignorance but I've got some questions related to the pulp horror paperback of the 70s in England to you. Were they really popular in the UK? were them everywhere? bookshops. newstands, groceries, supermarkets...? which kind of people read this kind of books? mainly men I supposed but teenagers, elder people, workers, soldiers, prisoners in jails...? I grew up in a fairly remote part of the north of Scotland in the 70s, and remember picking up most of the horror paperbacks I read from small newsagents in various towns and villages. The ones I remember most clearly were the Panther collections of the likes of RE Howard, HP Lovecraft, and CA Smith. They were certainly very popular with teenaged boys, though I don't remember many girls reading them. These same little newsagent shops were also often full of American Marvel and DC comics - there is a (possibly mythical) story that they came into various seaports in huge numbers as ballast on ships from the US, and were then sent out in bulk all over the country. Certainly, you could never predict which comics would appear in which shops, they just seemed to be random titles.
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Post by jamesdoig on May 13, 2019 21:14:38 GMT
hi, here Francisco from Spain, I hope you excuse my ignorance but I've got some questions related to the pulp horror paperback of the 70s in England to you. Were they really popular in the UK? were them everywhere? bookshops. newstands, groceries, supermarkets...? which kind of people read this kind of books? mainly men I supposed but teenagers, elder people, workers, soldiers, prisoners in jails...? I grew up in a fairly remote part of the north of Scotland in the 70s, and remember picking up most of the horror paperbacks I read from small newsagents in various towns and villages. The ones I remember most clearly were the Panther collections of the likes of RE Howard, HP Lovecraft, and CA Smith. They were certainly very popular with teenaged boys, though I don't remember many girls reading them. These same little newsagent shops were also often full of American Marvel and DC comics - there is a (possibly mythical) story that they came into various seaports in huge numbers as ballast on ships from the US, and were then sent out in bulk all over the country. Certainly, you could never predict which comics would appear in which shops, they just seemed to be random titles. It was similar here in Australia - bookshops and newsagents sold lots of Panther, NEL and Sphere paperbacks. Most were remaindered, so you could buy them cheaply - I remember buying a copy of Clark Ashton Smith's Tales of Science and Sorcery cling wrapped with a Bridget Bardot biography and some other book I've forgotten in a supermarket for a buck or 2. They would quickly end up in 2nd hand book exchanges for a few cents. I used to go to this one in the middle of Fremantle (Western Australia) and look for horror and sf books - I don't have too many left, but here's one I kept for some reason. The bookshop sticker is on the 2nd image.
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Post by mcannon on May 13, 2019 23:07:29 GMT
I grew up in a fairly remote part of the north of Scotland in the 70s, and remember picking up most of the horror paperbacks I read from small newsagents in various towns and villages. The ones I remember most clearly were the Panther collections of the likes of RE Howard, HP Lovecraft, and CA Smith. They were certainly very popular with teenaged boys, though I don't remember many girls reading them. These same little newsagent shops were also often full of American Marvel and DC comics - there is a (possibly mythical) story that they came into various seaports in huge numbers as ballast on ships from the US, and were then sent out in bulk all over the country. Certainly, you could never predict which comics would appear in which shops, they just seemed to be random titles. It was similar here in Australia - bookshops and newsagents sold lots of Panther, NEL and Sphere paperbacks. Most were remaindered, so you could buy them cheaply - I remember buying a copy of Clark Ashton Smith's Tales of Science and Sorcery cling wrapped with a Bridget Bardot biography and some other book I've forgotten in a supermarket for a buck or 2. They would quickly end up in 2nd hand book exchanges for a few cents. I used to go to this one in the middle of Fremantle (Western Australia) and look for horror and sf books My experiences were similar to those of James, except that in my case I grew up on the other side of Australia. As well as buying new paperbacks and comics at the various newsagents' shops in the large country town where I grew up I used to frequent the local second-hand book shop. I'd also do the rounds of the many similar shops in the centre of Sydney whenever I visited there. Back then (1970s-80s) there were many such shops in Sydney and the other major cities, and every reasonably-sized town had at least one "Book Exchange", as they tended to be called. These days, sadly, such shops are few and far between, probably due to a combination of falling demand (the book exchange in my old home town closed a few years ago after 40 years of operation as the owners wanted to retire and simply couldn't find a buyer), the growth of internet sales and high rentals in business districts. You can sometimes get lucky, though. On a recent trip along the New South Wales north coast I was lucky enough to stumble across an old-style second-hand bookshop that was chock-full of old paperbacks and comics at reasonable prices. I didn't actually buy a huge amount of stuff as I already had copies of many of the items on offer, but I had a very enjoyable and nostalgic couple of hours rummaging around (and many thanks to Mrs mcannon for waiting patiently......). Mark
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Post by dem bones on May 14, 2019 8:28:40 GMT
From memory, it was very much the same story in London. The NEL's, Pans, Panthers & Co. were phenomenally popular during the early-mid 'seventies. There wasn't any great need to visit a bookshop, you'd find the latest titles - horror, SF, westerns, skinhead, biker, George Tremlett pop biogs - at your local newsagents, or, failing that, the nearest Woolworths. They'd get passed around the playground, but as reading didn't involve kicking a ball around, I had absolutely no interest in them at the time.
Come the eighties, newsagents were still a decent enough outlet, though I'm not sure they stocked quite as many titles. Can recall buying Shaun Hutson's Breeding Ground and Robert Bloch's Night Of The Ripper from Fourboys on the Isle of Dogs. The shop gave the new releases a respectable window display. I think the Hutson may even have had its own poster. (Michael Slade's Headhunter certainly did: I first became aware of it's existence via an ad in a tube train compartment). Around same time, various volumes of the Chetwynd-Hayes Fontana Book of Ghost Stories - along with Mary Danby's 65 bug-crushers (© Crom) were a fixture in Asda. Late 'eighties/ early nineties, the newsagents opposite where I worked in Plaistow stocked remaindered American horror novels - Leisure, DAW, the stuff of Paperbacks From Hell etc. - for 89p a go. The one inside Upton Park station had three revolving wire racks of new releases - got copies of Hugh Lamb's Gaslit Nightmares II and Valentina Cilescu's Kiss Of Death from there in 1992.
As ever, we never realised what we had until we didn't have it any more.
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Post by Shrink Proof on May 14, 2019 8:41:50 GMT
As ever, we never realised what we had until we didn't have it any more. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be, dem. But then again, it never was...
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on May 14, 2019 9:23:58 GMT
As ever, we never realised what we had until we didn't have it any more. But there was no internet. How did we even know what day it was?
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Post by cromagnonman on May 14, 2019 10:09:55 GMT
In the same vein as what James was mentioning we had a book exchange chain in London called The Popular Book Centre. Dingy flea infested emporiums of tat. But, when seen through impressionable and myopic ten year old eyes, palaces of wonder. Porn out the back, coffee ringed paperbacks in the middle and comics at the front. I must have spent at least one saturday morning in every three closetted in this den of iniquity in Ladywell (much to my parent's horror I'm sure, but they never ever stood in the way of my pursuit of reading pleasure, wherever it might be found - bless their hearts).
And as Dem said, newsagents remained good sources of stuff right into the early 80s. I remember all my James Herberts coming from the carousel at the local Fourboys. Nowadays the only place you find spinner racks is in the post office (if you're lucky enough to still have such a thing and it hasn't been subsumed into the nearest WH Smiths).
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Post by Dr Strange on May 14, 2019 16:58:33 GMT
There wasn't any great need to visit a bookshop, you'd find the latest titles - horror, SF, westerns, skinhead, biker, George Tremlett pop biogs - at your local newsagents, or, failing that, the nearest Woolworths. As ever, we never realised what we had until we didn't have it any more. Yes, I'd forgotten that I got a lot of books from Woolies too. I also remember tiny newsagent shops where nearly all the floor space was taken up by those revolving wire racks - they often were so closely packed together they were like cogs in a clockwork, you tried to turn one of them and the whole lot would start moving.
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Post by andydecker on May 14, 2019 19:35:38 GMT
There used to be one or two secondhand book shops in my city in the 80s, or I better call them media-shops, as they also sold music, comics, later videos. It became a place to hang out for a while.
With english books I came into contact back in the mid-seventies. The bookshop I worked in had a tiny rack of foreign paperbacks. There was not much trade. I can't remember why I got interested in this, my language skills were non-existant back then. It must have been because I was intrigued by the prospect to read action novels uncensored. To make a long story short, later this tiny rack was my responsibility. At the time there were only two big importers, some of the pricing was outrageous. I had to work with the sales representatives, order new stock and so on. It sounds bigger at it was, sales were few, and I never learned the finer mechanics of the trade. It was was more a change to see what new Nick Carter's were announced and later George Gilman.
Whole racks with English books could be found at the foreign-press stalls at train-stations which mostly sold bestellers, spy and crime novels and porn like Beeline. I should have bought more of them when I had the chance They also sold a few comics, Marvel and DC (the first ever original Marvel's I bought 1977 were issues of Iron Man, Conan and Master of Kung Fu. I still have them) and Warren. I bought a lot of Vampirella. One good thing of the contact with the sales reps was that one could met them and buy books for small change on the Frankfurt Book Fair. Today this is banned, as far as I know, but back then especially the foreign agents were glad to ditch their stock as Fairs end. One year I got there the first three Undertaker and a couple of Death Merchant. There were not a lot of visitors who were interested in this. I still have a few of the great catalogues the publishers produced back then. Wonderful flyers from Zebra Books and DAW come to mind.
When I left the bookselling trade in '80 I lost all contacts, but discovered mail-order. There was this bookseller outfit in Falmouth, Cornwall, which was great. Of course you had to know what you wanted to order. No browsing. They always send you catalogues. I can't remember the name of the firm, but the service was always first rate. I bought Hutson, Gilman, Koontz, Masterton. I also ordered in the US. The last one before the net did a monthly newspaperlike catalogue called Paperback Preview(?). That was nice.
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Post by andydecker on May 15, 2019 8:45:31 GMT
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