The paperback revolution …

… The Birth of Pulp Fiction | The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

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. Whether it also transformed the country is the tantalizing question that Paula Rabinowitz asks in her lively book “American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street” (Princeton). She builds on a lot of recent scholarship on the way that twentieth-century literature has been shaped by the businesses that make and sell books—work by pioneers in the field, like Janice Radway and Lawrence Rainey, and, more recently, scholars like Evan Brier, Gregory Barnhisel, and Loren Glass. Paperbacks, even paperbacks that were just reprints of classic texts, turn out to have a key part in the story of modern writing.