I'm a second-generation secondhand bookseller building the used bookstore of the future. Join me every other Tuesday as I learn the family business, curate news from the book industry, and celebrate books as the pinnacle of art and the foundations of civilization. This was originally called Bookseller’s Register.
In my family’s bookstore, there is one section that I think is better than all the others. That section is paperback.
But first, a little background. The process of how a book is put together is called “binding.” Traditionally, there are two major types of binding: hardback and paperback. Most people are probably familiar with these words because they are options when you buy a book on Amazon.
To vastly simplify things, most books since the invention of the printing press were what we consider hardbacks. For a long time, books were a luxury, and they were important stores of record, so books needed to be bound (put together) with a hard outside to preserve it. Then, in the 1840s, some publishers innovated and made books whose exterior was made of only a slightly thicker paper than the interior. Doing this made it a lot cheaper to print books.
Starting in the 1930s, some enterprising publishing companies realized that they mass print cheap books in genres that people really enjoy reading, and sell them in unconventional places where books hadn’t been sold before. One of the most famous publishers who started a business on this philosophy was Pocket Books, which published mysteries and romance alongside fiction and classic literature. Due to their strategy of making the book super cheap ($0.25) and selling them in places like convenience stores and grocery stores, they sold 1.5 million books in their first six months after opening in 1939.
The books printed by Pocket Books and other similar publishers were a little over four inches wide and a little under seven inches tall. They were called “pocket paperbacks” and quickly became the most popular size of book by volume sold. (I tried to figure out if the publisher named itself Pocket Books planning on people to carry the books in their pocket, or if pocket paperbacks were called that after the publisher, but I couldn’t find a definitive answer.) As a result of the popularity of this size, there have been a ton of pocket paperbacks printed since the 1930s.
There were so many pocket paperback books printed that in our bookstore, there are a few different sections made up strictly of pocket paperbacks. There is Classic Paperback, which has canonical classic Western literature, Western Paperback, which has tales of cowboys and the American Old West, and then Romance Paperback and Mystery Paperback. Every other pocket paperback for sale in the store goes into one section, just called Paperback.
Paperback is, for me, the best section in the store. There are two main reasons I love it.
First, my family’s bookstore is deceptively large. It is probably close to 3,000 square feet with books jam-packed into every square inch, lining the halls and falling out of the ceiling. Visitors often don’t even realize how big it is until their second or third visit. I love Paperback because it is in the very back of the bookstore, so to get to it shows everyone how big the store is.
But the second reason I love Paperback is because it is a microcosm of the store. One of the reasons I love our bookstore—and used bookstores in general—is because there is such a high chance for surprise and serendipity. Most people have forgotten what it really means to browse. Most shopping people do these days is online, and we seem to have collectively forgotten that almost everything we see is presented to us by an algorithm that uses what we’ve looked at in the past as inspiration.
And Paperback, with its huge assortment of sections, gives the maximum chance for serendipity. I explained this to someone once and they said, “it doesn’t sound like serendipity, it sounds like randomness.” And I said, “the difference between serendipity and randomness is whether or not it affects you. If you just look at a bunch of books and don’t take home any to read, then yeah, it’s a random pile of books. But if you pick one out, take it home and read it, then find a piece of yourself inside it, that’s serendipity.”
That’s why Paperback is my favorite section. The next time you visit a used bookstore, I urge you to check out their equivalent to the Paperback section. If you ever have a chance to visit the store in Houston, Texas, I’ll walk you back there myself.
Until then, you can check out this YouTube short where I give a one-minute tour of the store and lead people back to the Paperback section.
I also posted this video on Instagram and TikTok if you want to follow me there.
Update
📚 Total Inventory 1,470 | Inventory Since Last Issue 0!📚
Every two weeks I’ll be updating you on how much inventory I’ve added to my store. These last two weeks I was laying the groundwork. I got my system in place but I’ve been very busy with my job as a Professor (since classes just started) that I wasn’t able to actually add any books. I have them on deck though and hopefully next update will be bigger.
As I was organizing though, I did manage to pick out two interesting pocket paperbacks to share below.
Stay Until Tomorrow by Anne Maybury
This is not a very well-known book now. It has a whopping four reviews on Goodreads. The author was super popular and prolific, writing over thirty books in her time, but does not have a Wikipedia page.
I picked it out because I liked the cover art, but also because I think it makes a cool point about serendipity. A minority of people who hear my serendipity shpiel will say something to the effect of “well you can find anything listed on the internet.”
But this book actually only has four reviews on the internet’s most popular book review site. And the once popular, prolific author doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. So I like to point out to people that the idea that everything is already on the internet is wrong. There is so much good stuff out there that’s not.
I’m probably not going to read this book, but there’s a chance it’s a forgotten masterpiece. And finding that kind of thing is a special type of serendipity that only comes from used bookstores.
Flying Saucers and the Three Men by Albert K. Bender
It should be obvious why I included this—I just thought it was cool and timely, what with the UAP news dominating headlines recently.
Links
I wanted to share a few videos from one of my favorite “book influencers” today, Clifford Lee Sargent. His YouTube channel is called Better Than Food. The long form book reviews he 'posts there are probably my favorite book reviews anywhere.
I think one of the reasons that I like him so much is that he reviews very weighty, dark books which is so far from what I would normally read. He also has a kind of weighty, dark affect, (but without pretense) and he swears casually, so ignore if that bothers you.
This review of The Stand by Stephen King is how I discovered him.
If you want to actually read something and compare it to the review, I suggest reading The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe at The Poe Museum by clicking here. (It should take less than fifteen minutes.) Then watch this review:
See you in two weeks! Please let me know if you enjoyed this, and what you would like to see covered in future issues.
This is why I love Little Free Libraries too!
Oh man that is a huge bookstore, I absolutely love it! It's almost a historic and unique investment in culture. As much as people consider paper books a 'depreciating' / old asset, I bet that entire collection increases in value each day as they become more and more rare.
Also regarding the fact that that prolific author only has 4 reviews on Goodreads and no wikipedia page, I've been reading Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, with over 16 million copies sold and one of the 10 most impactful books ever, and the Wikipedia article for the book is okay but nothing what I would expect for a book of this caliber. So I'm going to write a review on my blog about the book and also I have been editing the wikipedia page for it in order to beef it up a bit.