American Pulp How Paperbacks Brought Modernism in Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz

Henry James (Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square) anticipated the arrival of pulps in a close future in one of his writings. It was clear that literature couldn't remain close in a temple for just few people.
It was important a standardization of the phenomenon for permitting to everyone of enjoying classics, crimes stories, romantic novels, new books in general and mainly what it could have been produced by the various publishing houses and writers.

Not only: pulps meant also a trip across the culture of the USA during the various decades. Amazing and impressive. In a pulp we find the history of a country in perennial change, with its contradictions and beauty.
American Pulp How paperbacks  Brought Modernism in Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz is a very excellent paperback book, it couldn't be different, with a beautiful suggestive cover, published by Princeton University Press and a real impressive study about the various genres of pulps.
Rabinowitz tells she is a pulp addicted thanks to her parents and she loves to collecting pulps.

From the housewife intrigued by love-stories to the student searching for classics in the past read only thanks to local libraries, passing through the business-man, the teacher or the working-class man in search for a good book to read, pulps were in grade to satisfy all the necessities of the diversified customers.
And paperbacks helped a lot the construction, the building of a culture, presenting also a moment of escapism from reality.

Legend wants that pulps were born thanks to Allan Lane's intuition in 1935.
Mr. Lane was the manager director of Bodley Head Publishers and he was waiting for the train in a railway station and at the same time, bored, he was searching for something to read.
Not finding anything interesting the idea: it would have been good to publish cheap paperbacks for everyone, distributed everywhere, so that people could live them as part of their lives and daily shopping. But it was Penguin that made the real difference.

Penguin was born at first with this mission: publishing indestructible paperbacks just for a dime. Penguin produced an indestructible product, timeless in every sense giving to the readers all the best, from classics, to crime, from children's paperback book thanks to their children's division Puffin, to essays.

The concept of literature changed drastically. It was important to reach everyone and everywhere. In grocery stores, train stations, news agencies, wherever there was a place interested to selling pulps. People started to read in everyplace. At a cafe, waiting for the arrival of a bus, or in a bus. In a train station or in the train, while they were waiting for a dentist's visit, in a park.

These paperbacks, little, thin, light, were the best friends you could think of bringing with you in the bag while you went for some shopping, or you traveled somewhere. Discreet, available when necessary, strong enough for surviving at the time, they're still fascinating items to be kept with religious respect in a house.

Certain people were more lucky than other ones and they had in their houses hardback classics and many other books as well, but bringing somewhere a hardback meant a lot of weight and a stoic work.

Plus all the rest of people, from the working-class to students, needed to be helped, for starting to read, for discovering fascinating new worlds,  great adventures, beautiful thrillers, crimes, and so on. These generations would have grown-up with a culture available to everyone for a very cheap price. Beautiful!
Every person would have wanted to pick up a pulp. 

Covers were studied for attracting the various customers. These covers could be seductive, violent, explicit, anticipating a lot the plot of the story and anticipating the desire of the reader, all happy to "jump" into that story with all herself/himself.

Readers discovered black writers like Perty, a genre dedicated to gay-lesbians, a novelty, but also important thematic like war, with books treating Hiroshima and what it meant the nuclear war in Japan because the USA have always been in grade to looking forward, looking with very modern eyes at the expectations of the readers offering to their avid readers what the reality was producing in that exact moment, for motivating them, for keeping in their readers a critic eye about the reality and for growing up generations of intelligent, modern, informed readers.

Slowly these paperbacks disappeared and in recent times it seemed also that the book with the advent of the net would have been disappeared, killed and buried by the eBook like it happened for letters as physical object.
But, irony of the irony, if everything else was destroyed by the net in more or less 24 years, letters became e-,mails, postcards e-cards, just two example, the book  survived! at this cultural revolution more alive than before and more strong than ever. Yes. It survived at the worst predictions, and it will remain with us forever.

I truly suggest to everyone this book by Princeton University Press. It can be good for a student in search for some material because there is a lot about pulps genres in this book for a research or thesis, but also for a personal curiosity.
Pulps changed the history of the reading in the USA and its citizens. It says a lot about a winning policy looking at culture, people, their intelligence and instruction because as I say often it's not important what you read but that you keep reading :-)


I thank Princeton University Press for the physical copy of this book!


Anna Maria Polidori