This brilliant 22-year-old is the reason you can get great literature in ‘quality paperback’
Jason Epstein changed the American publishing industry forever
Jason Epstein was working as a lowly slush-pile reader at Doubleday Books in the early 1950s when he noticed a spiking fiction-reading habit among friends who’d been on the G.I. Bill. Most of them had cultivated a love of literature during their time in the service when they had access to great works in paperback through the wildly popular Armed Services Editions, an initiative of the Council on Books in Wartime that put 122,951,031 books in the hands of Americans overseas between 1943 and 1946.
Epstein had the idea to make books like those widely available to non-military readers, and launched the first American “trade paperback” imprint, Anchor Books, in 1953. He was 22 years old.
Of course, as Louis Menand points out in the New Yorker, paper book covers were centuries old (dating back to the 16th century, in fact.) And dime-store pulp novels had experienced at least two swells in popularity in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The 20th-century history of literary fiction in paperback form can be traced to Germany, where in 1931 Albatross Books printed a color-coded series, and to the U.K., where it really took off. According to legend, Allen Lane, head of British publishing house Bodley Head, was facing a Depression-era dip in sales when he had the idea to sell novels in more places — and cheaply — thinking, according to the Smithsonian magazine, “What if quality books were available at places like train stations and sold for reasonable prices — the price of a pack of cigarettes, say?” The answer was his imprint, Penguin, begun in 1935, which banked on the broadening literary horizons of commuters, travelers, and other newly super-mobile denizens of British cities and towns.
Four years later, Robert de Graaf launched Pocket Books, an American mass market paperback imprint that sold books for a quarter (the price of a toll he’d recently paid and, he thought, a suitably trivial amount). At first, hardcover publishers were deeply skeptical, though they still sold the reprint rights for many of their titles. Following Pocket’s launch, an anonymous publisher told Time magazine, “We feel we ought to give it a chance — to show that it won’t work here.” Among Pocket’s first titles were reprints of Dorothy Parker’s 1929 poetry collection Enough Rope, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and the tragic plays of William Shakespeare. The publishers who’d originally held the copyright to the hardcover editions made a penny for each paperback sold. They looked cheap, and they were cheap, but by 1944, Pocket had sold 100 million paperback books.
So what was different about Epstein’s Anchor Books? For one thing, size. Anchor piloted what’s now known as a “trade paperback” series, meaning instead of the flimsy, twenty-five-cent, literally pocket-sized mass-market Pocket editions, Anchor’s line of what it called “quality paperbacks” were slightly bigger, with heavier paper stock and thicker bindings. Unlike mass market books, which were intended to fit into the racks beside the supermarket checkout stand, trade paperbacks looked classy and smart, tapping into a growing appetite for the portable pleasure of serious reading. As Elsa Dixler wrote in a 2008 New York Times piece on the difference between the two formats, using Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement as an example, “The trade book’s cover is arty and evokes the atmosphere of the book; it even includes a quotation from John Updike’s review [of McEwan] in The New Yorker. The mass-market cover appeals to someone coming to the book from the movie. The trade book is both taller and wider. And finally, the trade book is considerably more expensive.” In other words, affordable, quality paperbacks weren’t only a great way to bring higher-brow literary fiction to a wider audience, and (for the first time) make paperback books themselves an aesthetically sophisticated collectible.
They were also very, very good business. Anchor Books won a prestigious Carey-Thomas Award for distinguished creative book publishing in 1954, and the wunderkind Epstein rapidly rose through the ranks, eventually leaving Doubleday in 1958 for Random House, where he would spend the next 41 years as editorial director, until his retirement in 1999. Along with his wife Barbara Epstein, he was also a founding editor of The New York Review of Books, and a founder, with Edmund Wilson, of the Library of America, a nonprofit organization designed to preserve American cultural heritage through printing affordable hardcover editions of classic American books.
Vintage Books, an imprint of Alfred A. Knopf, debuted a year after Anchor in 1954, and became another esteemed and beloved outlet for literary reprints. Nearly every other major publisher followed suit, and today the “trade paperback,” just called a paperback, is the form most readers know and love best.
In a 2010 New York Review of Books piece about the digitization of media, Epstein wrote that he had been since the beginning of his career “obsessed with the preservation and distribution of backlist” (previously published books). “Without the contents of our libraries — our collective backlist, our cultural memory — our civilization would collapse.”
Epstein would go on to write a history of the publishing industry, Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future in 2001, two years after retiring. In it, he imagined a world in which books would be ordered directly from the Internet — a fact of life now so commonplace that to think of it as an idea at all feels bizarre. In 2004, he also founded On Demand Books, best known for the Espresso Book Machine, an unwieldy, print-on-demand behemoth that spits out (and binds!) out-of-print books while you wait, and looks like a Xerox machine from hell. An interesting option, if you should you find yourself in one of the 10 locations in the world that has an Espresso Book Machine (six of which are printing schools). But hey, perhaps it’s unwise to expect two great publishing ideas from one man.
