Never Judge a Book By Its Shape

A Story of Mass-Market Paperbacks

I recently came across the sad news in Publishers Weekly that mass-market paperbacks may soon go the way of the scroll and the folio.

The format will take another big blow at the end of 2025, when Readerlink will stop distributing mass market paperbacks to its accounts. Readerlink’s customers, which include Walmart, Kroger, Hudson News, and other mass merchandisers, account for as much as 60–70% of mass market paperback sales in the U.S.

Mass-market paperbacks are the pocket-sized editions that were the economic engine of publishing for decades. The magic of mass-market was that it saw no inherent conflict between a book’s literary merit and its potential for popularity. Mass-market paperbacks could be highbrow, lowbrow or anything in between. For a long time, the form—and price—of a book wasn’t an immediate indicator of its content.

A few mass-market paperbacks from my collection.

Mass-market paperbacks were the first book format to be sold widely outside bookstores, spreading the written word to pharmacies, grocery stores, and airports, which I guess will now exclusively stock nonfiction titles like Never Lose: The Four Keys to Always Winning, and Stink: The Curious History and Surprising Science of Things That Smell Bad, which are not real books, so get to work, AI.

When I was a kid, my dad worked as a publisher, mostly of paperback books, in the heyday of mass-market. Our house was filled with short, fat books and I quickly became accustomed to unlimited access to New York Times bestsellers. During my first summer away from home at sleepaway camp, surrounded by beefy little barbarians with butt-cuts, I worked out an arrangement with my dad’s office to keep my camp bookshelf stocked with a steady supply of new paperbacks.

While my bunkmates got care packages filled with Pringles and Sour Patch Kids, I got manila envelopes from the Time-Life Building, stuffed with mass-market paperbacks—and if I were especially lucky, the sports section from that day’s newspaper, so I could keep up on my box scores. (I was not good at camp.)

There wasn’t much time in the day set aside for reading, because it would have interfered with swimming in a lake or doing archery with kids named Scott or Jeremy. Since we weren’t allowed to hang out in the cabin during the day, I had to find a daily activity where I didn’t have to participate in any active way.

What a happy summer day it was, then, when I discovered that nobody ever signed up for our camp’s worst offering, weightlifting. I spent huge chunks of two summers lounging on a bench press, reading military thrillers written by men in their fifties for other men in their fifties, while the counselor spent an hour doing what teenagers did before there were phones, biting his nails and staring off into space.

I’m an adult now, so I don’t need to pretend to exercise so I can have time to read. Purely as a matter of availability, I don’t read mass-market paperbacks quite as often anymore, though I’ve recently been working my way through a mass-market copy of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. I’d loved the miniseries as a kid so when I found a copy of the book abandoned in the basement of my old apartment building in Brooklyn, I grabbed it right away and started reading it a short ten years later.

A brisk 945 pages.

I’m enjoying the book—I have a collection of essays by McMurtry but have never read his fiction—but I’m also enjoying the physical book. It’s a tangible reminder that great literature—Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986—can come in any form. The same goes for the award-winning TV adaption: the first installment of the 1989 miniseries on CBS had an estimated 44 million viewers.

We all know about fragmented audiences and the challenge of breaking through the noise and how can any of us compete with a thirty-second video of a person making an entire Thanksgiving dinner using only their vacuum cleaner and a blowtorch. That’s why I’m so inspired by Lonesome Dove.

Not the cowboy story in the book—my wife thinks I’m barely equipped to drive a rental car when we’re in South Texas, much less ten thousand head of cattle—but the story of the book. A Pulitzer-winning mass-market paperback and an Emmy-winning network miniseries, both blockbusters, are reminders that, at their best, mass-market paperbacks and broadcast television represented the aspiration for works of imagination and creativity to reach lots and lots of people.

The specific forms of mass-market paperbacks and broadcast television may seem obsolescent but the intent behind them—making high-quality creative works accessible and affordable to as many people as possible—shouldn’t be. Mass-market and broadcast simply describe their intended audiences—mass and broad. Which sound like the names of two detectives on a network show, so get to work again, AI.