On Saturday, I went to Newbury Street to get my hair cut, then wandered through the Public Gardens and Boston Common heading toward the financial district. I nearly decided to walk to Cambridge, which was my end destiantion, but thought, "Na, it's too hot, just browse a bit and then take the T."
So I went into Borders and - because I am who I am - browsing of course turned to buying. I've been on a weird reading cycle lately, going from chick lit to sci-fi to Harry Potter to mystery to whatever. I'm always on the lookout for good books. I found a variety of books that I wanted to get - Dennis Lehane's Mystic River (my friend Zabeth is in the movie, coming out soon!), two Jodi Picoults, a book on wedding ceremonies. One of the Jodi Picoults was part of a Buy Two, Get One Free deal off the various books on one rack, so Icouldn't pass that up and I piled on two more.
Anyway, I was looking at the books that I'd piled up and noticed a trend. (This is actually a trend that has long-since begun, but I'm only getting around to being pissed about it now.) I got seven books, of which six were fiction. Of those six, only one was a mass market paperback sized book; the others were all trade paperback.
When did that happen?
When I was a kid, everything was mass market; you didn't have the trade paperback size. And mass market paperbacks cost $4.99, maybe 5.99 if it was really thick. Now you're lucky if you can find one for under 7.99. And the trade paperbacks are worse, they're at least twelve bucks a pop. I just want to READ. I don't want to have to sell my soul to be able to buy books.
But more than the money thing, I just sorta miss mass market paperbacks. It used to be that everything I read was that size - and maybe it still would be, if my tastes hadn't changed a bit as I've grown older. Now, you can really only get sci-fi, mystery, and romance novels in mass market size, everything else is bigger. And that kind of stinks, because there's just a different feel to mass market paperbacks. It fits right in your hand, the print is tighter together, and the binding is tight. There's usually some weird emboss-y thing on the cover, so you can feel the letters of the title and the author's name rising under your hand. And there's crappy coming attraction-type ads for other books by the same publisher in the back, books that have little similarity to the book in your hand, but they're there nonetheless.
I miss that. In a trade paperback the only thing at the back of the book is the occasional reader's guide. It's just not the same.
On the bright side though, it means that someday all my mass market paperbacks will be collectors' items.
Comments (3)
You make a good point about the cost of trade paperbacks vs. mass market paperbacks. But oddly enough I've always felt the opposite way. To me, mass market paperbacks conjure memories of bindings breaking in half and Annie's Book Stops filled with shelves and shelves of Harlequin romances. So I think I view trade paperbacks as progress. Plus, they look nicer.
Irrational, sure, and nobody I know agrees with me. But there you go.
Posted by: Mike | July 15, 2003 3:14 PM
Ah, but there's the challenge. Can you keep the binding from breaking? How long can your book remain remotely pristine?
I can also see shelves full of romance novels, but I can also picture the regular paperback fiction as far as the eye could see at the back of the Readmore Booksstore in Taunton. SOmehow going to used bookstores and seeing lines of trade paperbacks is even worse; used books just ought to be mass-market, in my view.
Posted by: joy | July 15, 2003 4:23 PM
Tactile sense accounts for so much, not to mention the sheer convenience of the size. I've been searching for my copies of two books: Le Petit Prince and Meridian. You cannot get Le Petit Prince as a mass market paperback anymore: it has been discontinued. I can't find my copy and I refuse to buy a new one as a result. This may not be true of Meridian but I was desperate so I bought a new copy at Borders last week. The size sucks and the new illustration, although fine in and of itself, just isn't what I wanted to see.
Posted by: cds | July 17, 2003 12:41 AM