The 1980s were an exciting and highly significant time in the evolution of the publishing format known as the trade paperback. Many tens of millions of book buyers had grown up buying and reading the so-called “egghead paperbacks” that were such a staple of the college curriculum and they had come to prefer these larger and more durable paperbacks to the cheaper (in a couple of senses) mass market editions.
I had a ringside seat to the growth and maturation of this market by virtue of working as an editor at Penguin Books from 1980 to 1988, under the inspiring editorial leadership of Kathryn Court. Kathryn’s remit, as the British say, was to make Penguin, which up until that time had mostly been a college adoption imprint selling significant numbers of Penguin Classics and Pelican nonfiction titles, into a frontlist force—and, moreover, a distinctly American one. This, she and the Penguin staff, which included me, Martha Kinney, Dan Weaver, Patricia Mulcahy, and later such distinguished editors as Nan Graham, Dan Frank, Mindy Werner and Dawn Seferian, definitively achieved.
Early breakthrough successes selling in the hundreds of thousands of copies included Jim Trelease’s Read-Aloud Handbook, Matt Lesko’s Information U.S.A., Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk, Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days, Lester Thurow’s The Zero-Sum Society, Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh, and Roger Fisher and William Ury’s Getting to Yes. By the mid-80s no one thought of Penguin US as simply a distinguished but slightly sleepy publisher of classics and academic nonfiction (though that part of the business remained crucial to us and was lovingly tended to). Penguin was still classy—people crushed on our orange-spined paperbacks (green for the mysteries)—but it had the knack of selling books and lots of them.
One of the special glories of the Penguin list in those years was the Contemporary American Fiction series. As the 80s began, Kathryn hit on the idea of the series as a way to bring attention to the distinctive voices in American fiction that we gravitated towards publishing—to create, in modern parlance, a brand for these books. Early entries in the series included Tom McGuane’s edgily excessive Panama and Edmund White’s exotic and hyper-refined Nocturnes For the King of Naples. (It was the latter book that actually made me think that Penguin would be a congenial place for me to work.)
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