Lately, I have been giving rather a lot of thought to the humble paperback. I say humble, for this is a format with no pretensions of grandeur, no fancy binding, no place-keeping ribbon, no dust-protecting jacket that can be slipped on and off as you will. I have always been told that modesty is a good thing, yet I worry that it is the paperback’s quiet humility that has so endangered it.
Everyone in the book world seems to agree that the rise of eBooks is at the cost of paperbacks. Towards the end of last year, Victoria Barnsley, C.E.O of HarperCollins, said that for paperback fiction, ‘the market this year is down 7 per cent in retail value. I put this almost entirely down to the sale of eBooks’. The argument goes as follows: for a book to survive in printed form, it needs to be a piece of high quality production, otherwise people have no incentive to buy the paper version over the digital.
How I love beautiful books! I wrote about them adoringly and at length here. Give me a paperback from Pushkin or Persephone, and I will treasure it almost more than the words enshrined within. But, try as I might to foist these gorgeous objects on to bemused customers in the bookshop, more often than not they are perfectly content to go with a bog-standard paperback from a mainstream publisher like Hodder or Random House, a book that costs only 50p to make.
This is in part because customers tend to want to read a new novel by an English or American author, rather than either a forgotten woman’s classic (published by Persephone) or a forgotten European classic (published by Pushkin). But it is also because most people simply don’t care whether or not a paperback is a beautiful thing. And the more I think about it, the more I can see that paperbacks don’t have to be beautiful; perhaps they’re not even supposed to be. A cheap shoddy paperback is perfect for the job it sets out to do.
When Allen Lane first began publishing paperbacks in the thirties, thus engendering the mighty Penguin Books, he wanted to publish current writing in a cheap format that made it accessible to everyone. He was inspired to do so when he was getting a train from Exeter to London and wanted a good book for the journey. All he could find at the station bookstand were magazines and reprints of old Victorian novels. He wanted a book that was current, good, portable and cheap and found that it didn’t exist. So he gave birth to the paperback, priced at sixpence each, the same as a packet of cigarettes.
You see paperbacks never have been designed to line shelves, to last for centuries. It comes as no surprise that libraries tend to get hardcover copies of books, as they are so much more durable. I said it at the beginning, and I say it again now — paperbacks are humble. They don’t expect to be around for long. Read me quickly, easily, and as roughly as you want, and then you can get rid of me. That’s their message. (I worry that now I’ve made them sound like prostitutes.)
But really, no one should be precious about a paperback. The very fact that they are so cheaply made should prevent our covering them with plastic, treasuring them, lining them up grandly on our shelves. They are made to have their spines broken, to be read in the bath, curling with damp; they are asking to have their pages dog-eared, to be rammed haphazardly into an overcrowded handbag; they don’t even mind suffering the odd food-stain, when keeping one company over lunch. They don’t let themselves matter as objects.
While I hate our culture of throwaway things, our world of plastic bags, paper napkins, coffee cups that are made of a peculiar non-recyclable papery thing, when you really think about it, a book is a single-use object. How many times do you read an individual book? My guess is that, with a few exceptions of all-time favourites and classics, you’ve read each of your books only once. With this in mind, perhaps a book should be cheaply made, designed to be disposable.
Perhaps you are, like me, a hoarder, and feel a sense of safety, comfort and order by lining your shelves with books. And, for sure, you can put an old paperback on the shelf. Its spine might be a little crooked, its pages a little swollen, but it can stand up there with the best of them, or if it can’t stand upright, it can lean against and support its neighbouring books, like a row of terraced houses.
But I very much doubt that you’ll take it down off that shelf until you move house. You could just recycle it once you’ve got to the end. But in any case, you certainly don’t need to store that book on a little handheld machine, there to call up, scroll through, dip into, at a moment’s notice. A book isn’t a track of music. Really very few people want to read a book again and again and again until they know all the words off by heart. I bet you don’t have a favourite paragraph that you need to read in order to get through the last five minutes on the treadmill.
Why reinvent the wheel, I cry out in vain. Why do we need digital machines to read books, when paper works just fine?
When Kindles first hit the market their advertising campaign hit upon our love of paperbacks — ‘lighter than a paperback’ it boasted. Well, not much. Having just used my very accurate kitchen scales, I have determined that the average weight of the last three paperbacks I read is 213 grams. The Kindle 4 is 170 grams. I refuse to believe anyone who says the extra weight of 43 grams (equivalent to the weight of a small tangerine) is too much for their feeble wrists to bear.
I can see that the Kindle’s boast of ‘carrying your library’ can be useful for travelling, or for an academic who needs to have various different texts to hand, or for those lucky people who have several different homes and like to carry their books between them all. But, for the rest of us, for you and me, do we really need to carry our libraries everywhere?
Given that so few of us read books more than once, it could be argued that the reason to have a library, to keep one’s books, is to create a nice space. Cicero famously said that a room without books is like a body without a soul. It’s certainly more soulful to look at shelves of books — whatever cruddy condition they’re in — than to scroll through the sleek screen of a Kindle.
Paperbacks are cheap and shoddily made and perfect. Yes, it’s very nice that some publishers are upping the production cost on them, making them into more covetable things. But if you don’t care for smart covers, if you’re not bothered about thick creamy paper, if you just want a quick read, be that by the pool, in the bath, or in a greasy spoon, a paperback has got to beat a hardback and an eBook hands down.
Emily Rhodes blogs at Emily Books and tweets @EmilyBooksBlog
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