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Wednesday, September 7, 2011

A sad article about books

The New York Times ran an article the other day about how sales of mass market paperbacks are dropping sharply.

For years, as a teenager and young adult, virtually all the books I bought were mass market paperbacks, or cheap Science Fiction Book Club editions. Many of my favorite books were grubby little paperbacks. I still have my original ILLUMINATUS! mass market PB's from the 1970s.

Michael Johnson had a particularly good posting about book collecting the other day.

2 comments:

michael said...

Tom: Thanks for the bump!

The check is in the mail. Or at least that's what I usually say.

I have this idea that the organic aspect of book-books (paper from trees) confers some metaphysical quality to the overall experience of reading, but this line, if extrapolated, will make me sound even more hopheaded than usual, so I'l leave it at that.

Anonymous said...

The mass market paperback has been dying for at least 39 years, and The Times just noticed. I miss the days of cheap sex and cheap paperbacks.