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Allen Lane launched Penguin Books
In the Summer of 1935 Allen Lane launched Penguin Books as Britain's first mass market paperback publishing house. -
Robert de Graff launched Pocket Books
On June 19, 1939, a man named Robert de Graff launched Pocket Books. It was the first American mass-market-paperback line, and it transformed the industry. -
The mass-market paperback was designed to be displayed in wire racks that could be conveniently placed in virtually any retail space.
With more than seven thousand newsstands, eighteen thousand cigar stores, fifty-eight thousand drugstores, and sixty-two thousand lunch counters—not to mention train and bus stations. De Graff saw that there was no reason you couldn’t sell books in those places as easily as in a bookstore. The mass-market paperback was therefore designed to be displayed in wire racks that could be conveniently placed in virtually any retail space.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/pulps-big-moment -
In 1943, Dell entered into paperback book publishing with Dell Paperbacks.
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With their sultry covers pulp novels became popular with the average Joe.
Pulps were cheap, portable, and popular and stoked by the sensational. Entire genres of pulp rely on the erotic for their appeal. No matter how unsexy some of them may be, detective stories, with their pulp ancestry, were often ripe for exploitation. As a result, ridiculously sexified covers of books often appeared that were far racier than the actual book. -
Bantam books began publishing pulp paperbacks.
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Dashiell Hammett's 1929 story The Maltese Falcon was released by Pocket Books.
Released with a new sexy cover the gained popularity. -
Paperbacks changed the book business
In 1947, two years after the war ended, some ninety-five million paperback books were sold in the United States. -
Signet imprints began.
1948, New American Library (N.A.L.), published the Signet (fiction) and Mentor (nonfiction) imprints. -
American Penguin became New American Library, the publisher of Mickey Spillane.
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The amount of tough-guy pulp, racial stereotyping, and sexist sleaze far outweighed, and outsold, reprints of books by famous writers and marginal voices
When “The Catcher in the Rye” was published in hardcover by Little, Brown, in 1951, sales were strong, but it was not one of the best-selling novels of the year.In 1953, the Signet edition came out, and the book sold one and a quarter million copies the first year. The Signet cover was illustrated by James Avati, known as “the Rembrandt of Pulp.”
