Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
|
I hadn't either. I did a bit of googling and I found quite a bit about early paperbacks that I didn't know. I knew Penguin began publishing paperbacks in the USA in 1935 and that was when they first became "a thing". I had read some things about the history of paperbacks a few years ago and I thought I remembered them beginning in the early 1950s just before I began reading them. But it seems I remembered wrong.
Interestingly, I read somewhere yesterday, I don't recall where but one of the sites Google found for me, that Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" was one of the first paperbacks. I just googled again and I can't find that reference now. I don't think I imagined it.
It seems one of the early paperbacks was Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth". That was in 1938.
I'm not sure how paperbacks are distinguished from the pulps and paper novels popular during the civil war and thereafter, but they seem to be taken as something different. I've never seen one so I'm not sure why. I have more googling to do.
Barry