Mass Market Paperback (1935 - ?) Part II

In an article for The Atlantic's on-line edition, "The Revenge of the Paperback Book", Steven Heller discusses a "new book series [that] attempts to revitalize the printed word with innovative design." He argues that "[b]efore Kindle and Nook, the mass-market paperback book was the publishing industry’s crown jewel. Convenient and compact, it was the inexpensive alternative to bulky tomes and ripe for avant garde experimentation."

Heller quotes Adam Michaels, the creator of the series,: ”Neglected by publishers in recent years, the mass-market paperback format remains highly desirable for its accessibility, both in terms of portability/usability and its low production and purchase costs.”

This and the recent news about the end of the Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart made me think of the M&S mass market New Canadian Library series which began in January 1958 and ended in January 1978. A modified series began in 1981 and continues. Here are the first and last of the original NCL series.

NCL 1 - January 1958

NCL 1 back

NCL 152 - January 1978

NCL 152 back

Mordecai Richler's Wicked Novel

The Canadian author Mordecai Richler's second to fifth novels had a straight forward paperback publishing history. The first paperback editions of each were either Canadian or British. The Canadian editions were published in McClelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library (NCL) series. The only slightly off element was the sequence:

Son of a Smaller Hero (first edition 1955) - NCL 45 (1966)
A Choice of Enemies (1957) - NCL 136 (1977) [first paperback edition - Panther (UK), 1960]
Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) - NCL 66 (1969) [first paperback edition - Penguin, 1964]
The Incomparable Atuk (1963) - first published in M&S's Canadian Best Seller Library series 7 (1965) then NCL 79 (1971)

Note the number of years before the paperback editions were published. Now of course a year would be the typical period.

Richler's first novel, The Acrobats, had a different paperback history. The first hardcover edition was the British published by Andre Deutsch in 1954. The first American was also published in 1954 by G. P. Putnam. There never has been a Canadian hard cover edition. The British edition was distributed in Canada by Wm. Collins. The last edition during Richler's life was a British paperback in 1970. Richler did not give permission to reprint and the first Canadian edition wasn't published until 2002, the year after he died. Fittingly it was in the NCL series.

In 1955, the American publisher Popular Library gave The Acrobats the classic mid century "tune-up" for paperback editions with a change in title, cover and blurbs. Nothing Canadian on these covers.

The Popular Library cover illustration mirrors the Andre Deutsch version. There's a man and a woman with the man, for some reason, holding paint brushes but not painting. But the characters have switched places from bed to standing. Obviously the change is to get the woman front and centre in the Popular edition (there's no doubt she's more attractive than our odd looking artist on the Deutsch). On the Canadian cover is the painting "Young Canadian". The subject is 29 year old Canadian painter Carl Schaefer.

Andre Deutsch

Popular Library 677

Popular Library 677 back

New Canadian Library

New Canadian Library back

Canadian Best-Seller Library Part I

This blog is subtitled "Canadian Paperbacks of the 40s and early 50s" but books from the 60s and 70s will find a home here from time to time. A couple of recent posts included books from the New Canadian Library series published by McClelland & Stewart from 1958 to 1978. The series was one of a number of series that M&S published to feature Canadian writing. The original NCL series had 152 books. After a three year hiatus the series started up in 1981 and continues to this day. Among the other series that M&S published was the 46 book Canadian Best-Seller Library (CBL) from 1964 to 1968. Three-quarters were non fiction (with iconic Canadian writers such as Pierre Berton, Peter Newman and Farley Mowat).

Some of the fiction were recycled as part of the NCL including one of the two books described here.

The Incomparable Atuk was Mordecai Richler's fifth novel, published in 1963, four years after The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. The American title is Stick Your Neck Out. Unlike any of his previous novels, Atuk is a broad satire on Canadian celebrity and culture. As a recent Richler biography says "Richler exposes all the pettiness and smallness of the cultural scene as he saw it, hanging out to ridicule the pretensions and absurdities patently obvious in the cultural nationalism of the day" (M. G. Vassanji, Mordecai Richler, Toronto: Penguin, 2009, p. 26). M&S published the first paperback edition in 1965 as CBL 7, then again as NCL 79 in 1971.

Leslie McFarlane has almost certainly had more of his books sold than Richler. Under the publishing house name Franklin W. Dixon he wrote 21 of the Hardy Boys adventures. His hockey novel McGonigle Scores! was published as CBL 21 in 1966 as a paperback original.