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One of the pleasures of mid-century mass market paperbacks is comparing them with current editions. Title renaming, abridgements and cover art are all points of change. Here's a good example.
Nana's Mother was published by Avon Books in 1950. The title is, unusually, not an Avon creation. It is seen on the title page of the first American edition (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1879). But the cover is most definitely an Avon - a 1940s Hollywood version of mid nineteenth century France.
L'Assommoir is the seventh in Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle of twenty novels, published in 1877. The Oxford edition is approximately 2 1/4 times longer than the Avon.
Oxford - 2009
Oxford back
Avon 271 - 1950
Avon 271 back
A break from looking at individual books. I want to compare the 29 Bantam Publications books with the early books that its competitors published. Bantam was the third US mass market paperback publisher after Pocket and the short lived Red Arrow. Three other large publishers, Avon (1941), Dell (1943) and Popular Library (1943) started within a year or two after Bantam quit. An analysis of the first 30 books of the four publishers shows :
crime/mystery/thriller 72 (60%) [Pocket 4 books, Avon 14, Dell 24 and Popular 30]
popular 23 (19%) [Pocket 10, Avon 9, Dell 5]
classic 10 (8%) [Pocket 9, Avon 1]
rest fiction and non fiction 15 (13%)
Interesting to note that the first publisher, Pocket, had the smallest crime/thriller/mystery group (13%), the next, Avon, larger (47%) and the last two, Dell and Popular, nearly 100%.
Bantam is similar with crime/mystery/thriller the highest fiction category at 8 (28%) but after that Bantam looks very different. Non fiction is the largest category with 11 (38%) and the other fiction is a mix - 3 pulp, 1 western, 2 children, 2 collections of poems, 1 anthology and 1 popular.
At 100 pages Bantam fiction was largely limited to collections, short novels or abridgements - quite different from the other publishers who had a total of 5 anthologies or single author collections. The other publishers had, in total, less than half (5) of Bantam's non fiction count (11).
Enough numbers. More on content in future posts. Here are early books from each of the publishers.
Pocket 11 - 1939
Pocket 11 back
Avon 68 - 1945
Avon 68 back
Dell 101 - 1946
Dell 101 back
Popular 17 - 1943
Popular 17 back
