Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America

by Kenneth C. Davis, Joann Giusto-Davis

Looks at the phenomenon of the paperback revolution and examines the impact and implications of papberbacks on modern American culture in the past and future

Genres: History, Nonfiction

430 pages, Paperback

First published June 18, 1984

About the author

Kenneth C. Davis is the New York Times bestselling author of the Don't Know Much About® series of books and audios for adults and children. Don't Know Much About® History, the first title in the series, became a New York Times bestseller in 1991 and remained on the paperback list for 35 consecutive weeks. It has since been revised several times and now has more than 1.6 million copies in print. The 30th anniversary edition of the book was published with a new preface, "From an Era of Broken Trust to an Era of Broken Democracy."

Davis is, according to Publishers Weekly, "a go-to guy for historical insight and analysis."

AMERICA'S HIDDEN HISTORY also became a New York Times bestseller. A NATION RISING also uses dramatic narratives to tell the "stories your textbooks left out." His book, THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA AT WAR (May 5, 2015) was called "searing" analysis by Publishers Weekly.

Kenneth C. Davis’s success aptly makes the case that Americans don’t hate history, just the dull version they slept through in class. Davis’s approach is to refresh us on the subjects we should have learned in school. He does it by busting myths, setting the record straight, and always remembering that fun is not a four-word letter word.

His IN THE SHADOW OF LIBERTY: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF SLAVERY, FOUR PRESIDENTS, AND FIVE BLACK LIVES looks at the lives of five people enslaved by four of America's most famous Presidents and the role of slavery in American history and the presidency. In May 2018, MORE DEADLY THAN WAR: The Hidden History of the Spanish Flu and the First World War was published.

STRONGMAN: The Rise of Five Dictators and the Fall of Democracy was published by Holt. It was named among the best books of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews and the Washington Post.

In November 2022 GREAT SHORT BOOKS: A Year of Reading--Briefly was published by SCribner. A compendium of 58 great short works Davis read during the pandemic lock down, it is a joyous celebration of reading.

Coming in October 2024 is THE WORLD IN BOOKS: 52 WORKS OF GREAT SHORT NONFICTION. It is an accessible and comprehensive guide to some of the most influential and important works of nonfiction, from the earliest days of writing to contemporary times. Each entry includes information about the writers behind these consequential books and the time in which they lived.

Reviews

[Bill FromPA · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting history of paperback books in the US from 1939 through the then present (c 1982). Like the pioneering publishers he admires, Davis balances business with literary and social considerations in his history, given short biographies of the major figures in the publishing world during the first 20 years and shorter sketches of the best selling authors whose work kept them solvent: Erle Stanley Gardner, Erskine Caldwell, Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming, John O'Hara, Grace Metalious, and Jacqueline Susann. He chronicles the emergence of various publishers, defines their unique individual approaches, and discusses the distinctive publications that resulted. The paperback industry's ups and downs are described: eras of boom and bust, distribution channels, the penetration of various retail outlets and the types of consumers that resulted, and the Congressional hearings of the 1950s that attempted to demonstrate that "25 cent book" was just a euphemism for "pornography".

Davis gives more emphasis to the paperback's ability to connect a mass audience to "what's happening now" - emerging authors, new ideas about behavior and society, current affairs - and pays less attention to its role in dispersing, preserving, and reviving classic works. He tells how the attempt by Penguin Books to establish a US presence failed in the late 1940s - its personnel ultimately split into what became the paperback giants Bantam Books and New American Library - but says nothing about its re-emergence in the 1970s in the US as a publisher that became synonymous with classic literature. In placing this emphasis on the new, Davis discusses at some length various "instant" books - paperbacks produced on tight schedules to take advantage of an audience looking for information about a major news story - beginning with a book commemorating FDR days after his death and continuing through the Warren Commission Report, Vietnam, and Watergate. He also gives credit to anthologies like New World Writing for making new and experimental writing available to a mass audience; these efforts pre-date my own early days as a reader, but, from what I've read about the emergence of new writers in the '50s and '60s, it seems to me that Davis somewhat exaggerates their influence

In tracing the history of paperback publishing from embodying the personal visions of its publishers to becoming a line-item of profit or, more often, loss in the holdings of a diversified corporation, Davis also charts a move from an industry that was capable of both entertaining and challenging a mass audience to one that is reluctant to put much effort or money into anything that doesn't seem a sure-fire money-maker. The last pages lament the fall of the paperback from a force that could "change America" (as Davis claims the books listed below did) to one that caters only to the lowest common denominator, a danger, as the author makes clear, that early publishers were aware of almost from the beginning.

From the appendix: Fifty paperbacks that changed America:
1-5
6-10
11-15
16-20
21-25
26-30
31-35
36-40
41-45
46-50

Honorable Mentions:

[Carl · Rating 1 out of 5]

Interesting but way too dry and padded. I can't stand books that say something in 10 pages that could have much more effectively been said in 1 page.

[Slagle Rock · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an engaging read about the history of the modern mass market paperback book’s rise to popularity in the 20th Century. The action picks up in the 1930s for the most part and runs up unitl the mid 1980s, when this book was copyrighted. The early history worked better for me than did the later sections of the book, which became very detailed with company’s players and titles by the time we get into the 1970s. The documented history was more detailed, I suppose, at that point and consequently a rather large number of names and developments found their way into the latter half of the book in a way that rather obscured the story line; very thorough going but it came at the expense of the narrative.

[Kevin Sutton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learned a lot of stuff that I didn't know and got me interested in reading a few books that I had ignored. Some of the statistics are pretty out of date now but it's still an educational read.

[Du · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice overview. Not written with any pizzazz or oomph, but enjoyable nonetheless. The book covers are fun additions here and there.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting, exhaustive history of paperback publishing in the US in the 20th century. It was published in 1984, so of course it doesn't mention ebooks, but the resistance of publishers to the paperback format and the ways that model unsettled the previous, traditional model of publishing seem to foreshadow a lot of the issues that ebooks are causing publishers now.
And seriously, someone really needs to edit the Goodreads record for this book; the title is Two-Bit Culture : the paperbacking of America.

[Mike Violano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just rediscovered this title on my bookshelf. Great history on the paperbacking of publishing after WWII. Filled with stories and anecdotes on bestsellers, authors, agents and publishers. The movers and shakers behind mass market at that time transformed the industry in a way that ebooks are transforming the publishing industry today. Paper books priced at 25 cents caused a huge growth spurt in reading...and vigorous debate inside publishing about the "proper price" for "quality" literature.